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This book shows how radio played a key role in an emerging form of policing during the turbulent years of the Depression. Until this time popular culture had characterized the gangster as hero, but radio crime dramas worked against this attitude and were ultimately successful in making heroes out of law enforcement officers. Through close analysis of radio programming of the era and the production of true crime docudramas, this book argues that radio was a significant site for overhauling the dismal public image of policing. However, it was not simply the elevation of the perception of police that was at stake. Using radio, reformers sought to control the symbolic terrain through which citizens encountered the police, and it became a medium to promote a positive meaning and purpose for policing. For example, Battles connects the apprehension of criminals by a dragnet with the idea of using the radio network to both publicize this activity and make it popular with citizens.

Founded as a counterweight to the Communist broadcasters in East Germany, Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) became one of the most successful public information operations conducted against the Soviet Bloc. This book examines the Berlin-based organization's history and influence on the political worldview of the people—and government—on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The book draws on broadcast transcripts, internal memoranda, listener letters, and surveys by the U.S. Information Agency to profile RIAS. Its mission: to undermine the German Democratic Republic (GDR) with propaganda that, ironically, gained in potency by obeying the rules of objective journalism. Throughout, the book examines the friction inherent in such a contradictory project and propaganda's role in shaping political culture. It also portrays how RIAS's primarily German staff influenced its outlook and how the organization both competed against its rivals in the GDR and pushed communist officials to alter their methods in order to keep listeners. From the occupation of Berlin through the airlift to the construction of the Berlin Wall, this book offers an absorbing view of how public diplomacy played out at a flashpoint of East–West tension.

Jack Benny became one of the most influential entertainers of the 20^th century - by being the top radio comedian, when the comics ruled radio, and radio was the most powerful and pervasive mass medium in the US. In 23 years of weekly radio broadcasts, by aiming all the insults at himself, Benny created Jack, the self-deprecating “Fall Guy” character. He indelibly shaped American humor as a space to enjoy the equal opportunities of easy camaraderie with his cast mates, and equal ego deflation. Benny was the master of comic timing, knowing just when to use silence to create suspense or to have a character leap into the dialogue to puncture Jack’s pretentions. Jack Benny was also a canny entrepreneur, becoming one of the pioneering “showrunners” combining producer, writer and performer into one job. His modern style of radio humor eschewed stale jokes in favor informal repartee with comic hecklers like his valet Rochester (played by Eddie Anderson) and Mary Livingstone his offstage wife. These quirky characters bouncing off each other in humorous situations created the situation comedy. In this career study, we learn how Jack Benny found ingenious ways to sell his sponsors’ products in comic commercials beloved by listeners, and how he dealt with the challenges of race relations, rigid gender ideals and an insurgent new media industry (TV). Jack Benny created classic comedy for a rapidly changing American culture, providing laughter that buoyed radio listeners from 1932’s depths of the Great Depression, through World War II to the mid-1950s.

This groundbreaking book is the first full-length study of British horror radio from the pioneering days of recording and broadcasting right through to the digital audio cultures of our own time. The book offers an historical, critical and theoretical exploration of horror radio and audio performance examining key areas such as writing, narrative, adaptation, performance practice and reception throughout the history of that most unjustly neglected of popular art forms: radio drama and “spoken word” auditory cultures. The volume draws on extensive archival research as well as insightful interviews with significant writers and actors. The book offers detailed analysis of major radio series such as Appointment with Fear, The Man in Black, The Price of Fear and Fear on Four as well as one-off horror plays, comedy-horror and experimental uses of binaural and digital technology in producing uncanny audio.

The Berlin Olympics, August 14, 1936. German rowers, dominant at the Games, line up against America's top eight-oared crew. Hundreds of millions of listeners worldwide wait by their radios. Leni Riefenstahl prepares her cameramen. Grantland Rice looks past the 75,000 spectators crowding the riverbank. Above it all, the Nazi leadership, flush with the propaganda triumph the Olympics have given their New Germany, await a crowning victory they can broadcast to the world. The Berlin Games matched cutting-edge communication technology with compelling sports narrative to draw the blueprint for all future sports broadcasting. A global audience—the largest cohort of humanity ever assembled—enjoyed the spectacle via radio. This still-novel medium offered a “liveness,” a thrilling immediacy no other technology had ever matched. This book's account moves from the era's technological innovations to the human drama of how the race changed the lives of nine young men. As the book shows, the origins of global sports broadcasting can be found in this single, forgotten contest. In those origins we see the ways the presentation, consumption, and uses of sport changed forever.

Claude Sullivan was a brilliant young man whose athletic career and studies were cut short by a near-fatal case of osteomyelitis while he was in high school. Claude found a niche in broadcasting. With his wife, Alyce, he took several jobs and moved around, before beginning full-time broadcasting of University of Kentucky sports in 1947. Claude broadcast many of the most memorable UK football and basketball squads of alltime in the next two decades, building relationships with coaches Paul “Bear” Bryant and Adolph Rupp. Claude also broadcast horse racing and later in his career Major League Baseball as the voice of the Cincinnati Reds. On a personal level, Claude was a mentor to many young broadcasters and a devoted husband and father. His interest in international travel manifested itself in several grand episodes that provided career highlights. Claude was also a business leader in broadcasting—creating an early sports radio network, running his broadcasts through his own company, and embracing early mobile technology. Claude developed cancer by 1966, and despite initial success in treatment, his condition deteriorated until his death in 1967. The impact of his work is still felt throughout sports broadcasting in Kentucky and the nation. Many of his broadcasts are preserved in the Claude Sullivan Collection in the University of Kentucky Archives, and between the highlights of those broadcasts, Claude’s own private documents, and the vast library from his career that he left behind, the inside story of a great Kentucky broadcaster now emerges.