Title: THE DIVIDED DIAL EPISODE 1: Fishing In The Night

Micah Loewinger: Hey, you're listening to the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Micah Loewinger. This week we are so excited to be launching season two of the Divided Dial, our award winning series reported and hosted by Katie Thornton. Season 1, as you may remember, was all about the right word shift of the AM and FM talk radio spectrum. This season Katie dives headfirst into the lesser known world of shortwaves. I'll let Katie take it from here.

David Goren: Zenith Trans-Oceanics.

Speaker 2: This is such a cool radio with the little--

Katie Thornton: Last summer I met up with a journalist and radio fan named David Goren.

David Goren: These were beautiful radios for a fan.

Katie Thornton: I went to his house in Brooklyn, New York, so that we could listen to the radio together. Not any old radio, not AM or FM, nothing you can pick up in your car, but shortwave radio, the little known cousin of AM and FM with fuzzy stations that can reach insanely far distances. David's been listening to shortwave since he was a kid in the '70s when his uncle gave him a radio.

David Goren: I turn it on and it's like the radio leapt out of my hand with the North American service of Radio Moscow.

Katie Thornton: Suddenly, the world was all within reach, available to him right there in this box.

[music]

David Goren: In the seventh grade, I became the expert on the next five year plan in the Soviet Union, the economic plan.

Katie Thornton: Today he's part of the Library of Congress's Radio Preservation Task Force. Together on a sweaty Thursday afternoon last July, we sat down to hear what we could find on the shortwave dial today. Just like when David was a kid, we heard lots of government-run stations like Radio Marti.

David Goren: The US broadcasting news and information to Cuba.

Katie Thornton: Voice of Islamic Republic of Iran.

David Goren: China Radio International broadcasting in Spanish. Let's see, anything else strong.

Radio: The Voice of Italy broadcast in Italian.

Katie Thornton: On other days, David has picked up English language shows from North Korea-

David Goren: They have very strident military stuff.

Katie Thornton: -and news from Cuba.

David Goren: This is Radio Rebelde. Radio Rebel and it goes back to the revolution.

Katie Thornton: On the shortwaves, the global tussle for influence plays out 24/7, but we didn't just hear news and propaganda.

Radio: Well, let's just go up the dance. The topic of Silvers code.

Katie Thornton: There were beeps and bloops, coded messages sent between amateur radio operators, or between government officials who used the shortwaves to send military data or secret instructions.

Radio: Let's see what else we have.

Katie Thornton: Some of what we heard just sounded like normal radio with lots of music and preaching.

Radio: Strong in the Lord and the power of his might against the wiles of the devil. It was hidden just to hide the meaning and the power of the divine name. It is inherent in the name of Yah.

Katie Thornton: That's an End Times Ministry that also preaches that the earth is flat.

David Goren: Which is very interesting because shortwave radio wouldn't propagate in a flat earth, but details, details.

Katie Thornton: In just about an hour of surfing the shortwaves, we heard prayer and propaganda, news and conspiracy theories. So many languages and some really decent jams from all over the globe. I felt like I had been welcomed into a club that was somehow secret and yet right there for anyone to join. I know it's cliche, but there was something magical about tuning into the world, training my ear to listen through the crackle, hearing the distance.

As it turns out, this practice of scanning the dial, finding out what you can hear and from how far away, is a century-old art. It was popular among radio's early adopters. These early distance fiends, as they were known, uncovered something very strange about how radio waves traveled through space, and what broadcasters did with that information, completely altered the trajectory of the 20th century. This is Season 2 of the Divided Dial. I'm your host, Katie Thornton. I've worked in radio since I was a teenager, sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes behind the mic.

In Season 1, I investigated how right-wing talk took over AM and FM radio. In all my years of radio research, I'd never really learned about shortwave radio before. Listen, I'm not going to tell you that shortwave radio is as influential today as the AM and FM talk radio we covered in Season 1. It's not, but I, and I think you, love the medium of radio. This season, we're diving into the often failed promise of a medium that was once ubiquitous, connecting people around the world long before the Internet ever did. Like the internet, shortwave also took a turn for the chaotic.

Over the next four episodes, I'm going to explain how shortwave radio became a propaganda tool for governments at war, and then a propaganda tool for American right wing extremists and cults. We'll explore what a little known battle playing out on the shortwaves right now between radio fanatics and Wall Street can tell us about what happens when we cede control of our public airwaves. That's all coming up on this season of the Divided Dial. Let's get back to the story.

[music]

Katie Thornton: Radio broadcasting, as in from one to many, it didn't start on shortwave. It started on AM. Taking off around 1920, and AM was inherently local.

Radio: Daniel Larson and Mrs. Lester Larson, happy birthday.

Katie Thornton: Signals reached up to 50, maybe 75 miles.

Radio: "By the way, down Texas way, your home state, and take a bow, will you now?" "I will." "Girl Taylor up there in Lake Geneva says happy birthday to us. You know it's her birthday, too."

Katie Thornton: At night, those listening at home noticed something strange. As the sun set, more stations emerged from the static. They weren't coming from down the street or the next town over. Sometimes listeners in New York-

Radio: Edison Studios, WAAM, located at one barn.

Katie Thornton: -would hear stations from Chicago. A listener in Kansas might hear an opera or a boxing match from the East Coast.

Radio: [unintelligible 00:06:56]

Katie Thornton After dark, it was like the world cracked open and distant stations faded in and out on ghostly, mysterious winds. Most people had never heard a faraway voice, period. Long distance telephone calls were the costly domain of dignitaries and government officials, and even those were fed across long, scratchy copper lines. A disembodied voice without a wire, without a fee, from hundreds of miles away, that awed and baffled people. Even scientists, some of whom believed that radio perhaps could be used to communicate with the dead. Of course, there was an explanation for these voices in the night.

Radio: Let us follow through the steps and the processes in transmitting or sending radio messages.

Katie Thornton: Here's what was happening. The way AM normally works is that radio waves get shot from the top of a tall tower, which is often on top of a tall hill.

Radio: The radio messages leave the antenna as electromagnetic waves and travels with the speed of light.

Katie Thornton: The waves travel over the ground, basically line of sight from the tower to you. It's called a ground wave, and it's the thing that fades out a few dozen miles from the tower. When you shoot out an AM signal, there's another thing that happens, almost a by-product.

Radio: Radio waves are sent out in all directions.

Katie Thornton: It's called a skywave. The skywave goes up into the atmosphere.

Susan Douglas: The lower layers of the ionosphere, which are about 45 to 75 miles above the Earth's surface, they're like a huge sponge during the day, and they absorb the signals that pass through them.

Katie Thornton: Susan Douglas is a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan. She says that these lower layers of the atmosphere are made up of ions that get all charged up by the sun. In the daylight, those layers are where radio waves go to die.

Susan Douglas: At night, when the sun sets, these layers disappear, and the ones above them, they combine to form a dense layer, and it acts like a mirror to skywaves.

Katie Thornton: At night, these skywaves, the sort of by-product of AM transmission, they keep going until they bounce off this other layer of the ionosphere and they come back down to earth vast distances away.

Radio: When these waves strike the antenna of a receiving zip, this entire process is reversed. We hear sound originating at that very moment, hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

Katie Thornton: That's what these late night AM radio listeners were hearing, a radio wave that had ricocheted off the ionosphere to get to them, and it rocked their world. Long distance channel surfing became a fad called Fishing In The Night, with listeners casting out into the ether and seeing what they could catch.

Susan Douglas: They had a map on the wall with map tacks, and every time they reeled in a station, they would put a map tack on where that broadcast emanated from. Was it Kansas City? Was it Washington, DC? Wherever.,

Katie Thornton: Radio manufacturers ran ads with slogans like, "Concerts from 14 cities in one evening." In newspaper editorials, distressed housewives, and sometimes husbands lamented that their significant other was spending every evening out in their "RadioShack." While AM broadcast listeners burned the midnight oil to marvel at all the faraway stations, there was one group of people who weren't so surprised by radio's ability to go long. They were the amateur radio operators, what you might know as ham radio. Basically, guys who weren't broadcasting, but were tinkering with radio equipment just to chat one-to-one, like long distance walkie talkies.

Back in the days before broadcasting, almost all radio transmission was one-to-one. The radio waves were mostly used by ship captains or the military and the hams who were just having fun. In World War I, the US government got worried about interference on those AM airwaves. They eventually assigned specific frequencies for ships, for the military, and for those meddling amateurs.

Susan Douglas: They were kicked down to the waves that were thought utterly worthless. Shortwaves.

Katie Thornton: Back then, people thought the shortwaves with short wavelengths, picture a really tight squiggly line, just wouldn't go very far. Even Guglielmo Marconi, the father of radio, thought that longer wavelengths would mean longer distances, but the amateurs weren't put off.

Susan Douglas: They began experimenting with them.

Katie Thornton: As it turned out, the shortwaves weren't the short end of the stick.

Susan Douglas: They were getting really far. They were getting stations in Australia, New Zealand, or stations in England and France.

Katie Thornton: For the most part, reception was clearer at night, but it didn't have to be dark to go the distance.

Susan Douglas: Amateurs reported spanning distances as great as 10,000 miles, which was unthinkable. Australia and New Zealand were described in the fall of 1923 as a bedlam of Yankee signals.

Katie Thornton: The amateurs proved something huge. Shortwave could do round the clock what AM could only do at night. It could use the ionosphere as a springboard. This changed the game for AM broadcasters who wanted their station to reach more people. In 1923, Pittsburgh's KDKA, the country's first commercial radio station, they got their station on shortwave and reached as far as South Africa. New shortwave stations started up in Switzerland and Japan and Venezuela. With the scars of World War I still fresh, this burgeoning international medium was a source of hope.

Michele Hilmes: There was a lot of utopian discourse around radio that having allowed people to communicate across all these borders, would there be no more wars?

Katie Thornton: Michele Hilmes is a retired professor of media studies who has written a lot about radio.

Michele Hilmes: It would solve all kinds of problems. Just a huge enthusiasm over the possibilities of shortwave as a medium.

Katie Thornton: Entire magazines were devoted to helping people discover new shows on international radio. Listeners would write to far flung stations and the stations would reply with these beautifully decorated cards branded with the station name, and maybe some imagery that evoked the national culture of wherever they were broadcasting from. They're called QSL cards. It's international code for "I confirm receipt of your transmission." Shortwave listeners around the world amassed collections of these ornate cards, tangible evidence of their part in an ethereal global community.

By the late 1930s, almost all home radio sets had AM and shortwave settings, but the peacenik aspirations for shortwave didn't last.

Michele Hilmes: It was the first time that human beings had had it in their power to be heard around the world, and a lot of governments figured out that this could be a really powerful tool for the common good, but also, of course, for the waging of wars.

Katie Thornton: Lots of the world's governments had taken to the shortwaves by the 1930s, but no nation used them quite like Germany.

Axis Sally: This is Germany calling. We are going to present tonight a radio play entitled Vision of Invasion.

Katie Thornton: Giessen, Germany's state run shortwave service, had spent years building a large following in America and around the world, playing things like orchestral music, but in time, they started pushing out Nazi propaganda, tailored for specific countries in 12 different languages. With its own festering Nazi movement, the US was a key target.

Michele Hilmes: You had people like Axis Sally.

Axis Sally: This is Berlin calling. I'd just like to say that when Berlin calls, it pays to listen.

Katie Thornton: She was an American living in Berlin. She became the first American woman to be convicted of treason after the war, but she was broadcasting into the United States on shortwave.

Axis Sally: Women of America waiting for the one you love, thinking of a husband who is being sacrificed by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Michele Hilmes: You might have heard of a person called Lord Haw-Haw.

Lord Haw-Haw: The great exodus from Brixton is well underway.

Michele Hilmes: He was a British man named William Joyce who was working in Germany, broadcasting on their shortwave service.

Lord Haw-Haw: The rich and affluent are removing themselves and their valuable as fast as they can.

Katie Thornton: There was also a big band called Charlie and His Orchestra run by the German Ministry of Propaganda. They'd take popular big band and swing songs and add or change lyrics to berate Roosevelt or denigrate Jewish people.

Charlie and His Orchestra: All the Jewish family has a brand new heir. He's the joy heaven-sent, and they proudly present Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones. Yes, there is. Yes, there is.

Michele Hilmes: They were trying to persuade Americans that that the Germans had the right side in the war and that it was crazy for them to fight.

Charlie and His Orchestra: Non intervention, how he shows it his decision to send troops along.

Katie Thornton: The US government had banned all editorializing on domestic radio stations during the war, making it illegal for Americans to promote the Nazi cause on the AM airwaves, but the feds didn't have any control over shortwave broadcasts beaming in from Germany. The content was still there for the many Americans who wanted to listen. Journalists at CBS and NBC launched counteroffensives.

Susan Douglas: The networks had what were called shortwave listening posts in New York.

Katie Thornton: Susan Douglas again.

Susan Douglas: They had people who were fluent in foreign languages, monitoring international shortwave broadcasts.

Katie Thornton: Then they turned their findings into entertainment, like the hit CBS radio series hosted by a popular detective novelist named Rex Stout. It was called Our Secret Weapon.

Rex Stout: The truth is a weapon that isn't secret in our country, but it's a big secret to the people who live in Germany, Japan and Italy. Our enemies don't have this weapon. They don't dare let their people know the truth.

Katie Thornton: Every week, radio sleuth Stout debunked enemy shortwave propaganda.

Rex Stout: First, a broadcast to the official German News Agency on August 2nd.

Radio: The meeting between Churchill and Stalin was very excited and hysterical. It assumed a dramatic--

Rex Stout: On August 8th, being that England.

Radio: This morning, Churchill shook hands with Stalin at the Kremlin.

Rex Stout: As we now know, Churchill actually arrived in Moscow on August 12th. You can't beat that for a scoop.

[music]

Katie Thornton: The rest of the allies were also busy fighting Germany's shortwave radio propaganda. It was during World War II that the BBC ramped up what would come to be known as the World Service on shortwave.

BBC Radio: This is London calling in the overseas service of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Katie Thornton: They broadcast news to the world with just a bit of pro-ally spin.

BBC Radio: The Danes have already had a taste of what German protection means. A better word for it would be plunder, for the Germans are seizing goods and property at will.

Katie Thornton: In early 1942, the US followed suit. The federal government debuted its shortwave radio service, the Voice of America, with an in-language broadcast to Germany.

Voice of America Radio: "This is a voice speaking from America." "Our voices are coming to you from New York, across the Atlantic Ocean to London, from where there are--"

Katie Thornton: The Voice of America started as a government-run radio show and they partnered with networks like NBC and CBS to get it out worldwide. NBC and CBS were already broadcasting overseas via shortwave. Shortwave quickly proved so central to the war effort that the US government did something unprecedented. They nationalized all the roughly one dozen shortwave stations broadcasting from US soil, filling the international airwaves with approved broadcasts.

Voice of America Radio: Daily at this time we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good or bad, we shall tell you the truth.

Katie Thornton: For the most part, they did that, a bit selectively. Michele Hilmes.

Michele Hilmes: They were walking a fine line between willful propaganda and putting a good spin on things.

Katie Thornton: As the US sent more troops into battle, it used shortwave to boost morale.

Susan Douglas: They began to transmit entertainment programming via shortwave to the troops.

Katie Thornton: Susan Douglas again.

Susan Douglas: This was so important during holidays like Christmas and New Year's, when there you are, freezing and alone and scared.

Michele Hilmes: They had programs that would allow troops to speak to people back at home. "Oh, here's mailbag. We have letters from soldiers," and they would read them aloud.

Voice of America Radio: "Dear Mother, tonight I'm very lonely. I've never written that before and maybe it's a shock to you. Then again, maybe you've read between the lines and have known it all along."

Michele Hilmes: There was a very popular program called GI Jive with Jill.

[MUSIC - Johnny Mercer: G.I. Jive]

GI Jill: Hi, you fellas. This is GI Jill with GI Jive.

Susan Douglas: The World Series.

Voice of America Radio: 1942 World Series broadcast.

Susan Douglas: You got to have the World Series.

Voice of America Radio: Yankees right front five to nothing has become--

Michele Hilmes: The Voice of America was very highly respected and many people think that it did a great deal to help us win the war.

Katie Thornton: By the end of the Second World War, the Voice of America blanketed much of the world. It ran in about languages. They were about to get lots of company on the airwaves because in the Cold War the shortwaves exploded. That's coming up after the break. This is the Divided Dial from On the Media.

[music]

Katie Thornton: This is On the Media. I'm Katie Thornton, host of OTM's Divided Dial series. We're right in the middle of Episode 1 of our second season. Before the break, we heard about how groups like the VOA dominated the shortwaves at the end of World War II. During the Cold War, shortwave would become so much more.

Radio: "Radio PK." "This is Tehran, Radio Iran." "The Australian Forces Radio." "[unintelligible 00:22:06]." "You are tuned to the North American Service of Radio Moscow.

Katie Thornton: The VOA, the BBC, the Soviet Union, China, Egypt, Iran, Argentina, and so so many others were on shortwave, broadcasting their national identity to the world in stories and song. They were joined by newly-decolonized nations like Libya and Ghana, whose leaders saw the shortwaves as a way to promote their independence and to fuel an international anti-colonial movement. The global superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union were two of the most dominant voices on shortwave.

Shortwave became one of the most ferocious battlegrounds of the Cold War. At bat for the Soviet Union was Radio Moscow. Founded in 1929, the USSR's government run network broadcast in over 70 languages, with news, propaganda, and human interest stories. It offered a Soviet alternative to the BBC and the VOA.

Radio Moscow: America hit a new high in crime, and according to FBI reports to the president, nearly half of the criminals were young people. The causes of this menacing situation are well known. The pornographic pictures distributed among adolescents and the exhibitions of abstract paintings and statues that say nothing to either the heart or the mind.

Katie Thornton: The BBC and the VOA were expanding too, sending more and more coverage over the Iron Curtain, but the United States government wanted to reach people in Eastern Europe with messages that weren't so obviously propaganda as the literal Voice of America, so they lied.

Radio Free Europe: Radio Free Europe gets through with the truth every day.

Katie Thornton: Debuting in 1950, Radio Free Europe was a flame throwing anti-communist shortwave network.

Radio Free Europe: Into the closed communist countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania go the facts, the people are not allowed to hear the truth. The truth that helps them hold onto the will and the drive.

Katie Thornton: It was portrayed as grassroots, run by émigrés and exiles, and it did employ those folks, but secretly, it was funded by the CIA, which was busy meddling in global politics and supporting pro-capitalist coups during these Cold War years.

Radio Svobodna: [unintelligible 00:24:22]

Katie Thornton: Staff at Radio Free Europe launched weather balloons into the Eastern bloc and airdropped over million leaflets instructing listeners on how to tune in.

Radio Free Europe: Radio Free Europe calling Czechoslovakia.

Katie Thornton: The Soviet Union did not like any of this. They spent tons of money trying to drown out Western broadcasts. They'd flood the shortwaves with ear splitting noises that listeners recalled sounding like a buzzsaw or a machine gun. Sometimes the battle went beyond the airwaves, like when a Czechoslovakian double agent poisoned the salt shakers at Radio Free Europe's Munich office. That plot was foiled before any of the 1,200-plus employees sat down for lunch. Years later, a Radio Free Europe journalist died after allegedly being stabbed with a poison tipped umbrella. These US run shortwave stations weren't just beaming out journalism.

Willis Conover: Willis Conover speaking. This is the Voice of America Jazz Hour.

[music]

Willis Conover: The music of jazz parallels the freedom that we have in America. Something that not every country has.

Katie Thornton: In the 1950s and '60s, music, especially jazz, was a key component in the US government's shortwave campaign.

Voice of America Radio: This is the Voice of America.

Katie Thornton: The federal government ran a jazz ambassador program that sent musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington on tours around the world. They focused on countries that the Soviet Union was also hoping to win over. All the while, though, many of these very same musicians faced racism and segregation at home, and on the shortwaves, Radio Moscow and others were ready to exploit this contradiction.

Radio Havana: The revolutionary people of Cuba sympathize with all people who struggle for social justice.

Katie Thornton: In the early 1960s, Cuba's government run service, Radio Havana regularly beamed this show, Radio Free Dixie, up to the United States.

Radio Havana: It is in this spirit that we proudly allocate the following hour in an act of solidarity, peace, and friendship with our oppressed North American brothers. Radio Free Dixie invites you to listen to the Free Voice of the South.

Katie Thornton: Radio Free Dixie was hosted by US Black power activist Robert F. Williams. He was on the lamb in Cuba fleeing drummed up charges that were later dropped. He broadcast a perspective that couldn't be found in the mainstream US media.

Robert F. Williams: One negro goes to the White House as a member of the president's cabinet, while another is gunned down like a wild dog for using a white folks toilet. It should be more than clear to us that if we are ever going to be free, we must liberate ourselves.

Katie Thornton: Outlets like Radio Moscow and Radio Havana want followers around the world with their mix of propaganda and just factual reporting on civil rights abuses in the US. Governments saw winning people over on shortwave as a key path to winning the Cold War. Even after the CIA's secretive role at Radio Free Europe was revealed in the early '70s, not much changed. In fact, Congress increased its budget and they kept pumping out news and tunes. Increasingly, they played the defiant and, "Oh," so American sound of rock music, which was heavily censored in the USSR and Eastern bloc.

On the US's government run taxpayer funded shortwave stations, they broadcast groups like Metallica and Mötley Crüe to listeners around the world.

[music]

Katie Thornton: By the early 1980s, the US government's shortwave stations reached an estimated 80 million people each week. It took tons of manpower, and it was a huge infrastructure project too. The government had miles upon miles of fields filled with antennas, but one man didn't think that was enough.

Ronald Reagan: We're as far behind the Soviets and their allies in international broadcasting today as we were in space when they launched Sputnik in 1957.

Katie Thornton: On the home front, Ronald Reagan had vetoed public broadcasting budgets and overseen a massive deregulation of the airwaves that allowed for big businesses and conservative and religious broadcasters to dominate AM and FM radio. Season 1 of the Divided Dial. On international radio, on shortwave, the great deregulator had no qualms about spending taxpayer dollars. He poured public money into the VOA and Radio Free Europe.

Ronald Reagan: I'm pleased to call on Director Wick and Minister [unintelligible 00:29:27] to sign this agreement, an important step towards strengthening the signal of the Voice of America.

Katie Thornton: Reagan's administrators wrung their hands over what to do about rock music. Lots of them didn't believe it represented the best of Western culture. After long internal debates, they decided to keep the rebellious racket going on the shortwaves. Meanwhile, on the journalism side, Reagan led a shakeup by sidestepping one of the Voice of America's long held tenets, the idea that a free press is the US's best advertisement. Sure, that idea hadn't always been perfectly executed. Reagan opted instead for more heavy-handed anti-communist propaganda.

Reagan's VOA ran explicit editorials on behalf of the administration. Many longtime leaders resigned, replaced by more amenable colleagues, including Richard W. Carlson, father of right wing bloviator, Tucker Carlson. It was Reagan who launched a costly new shortwave service targeting Cuba with hardline anti-communist messages.

Ronald Reagan: Today I'm appealing to the Congress, help us get the truth through, to support our proposal for a new radio station, Radio Marti, for broadcasting to Cuba.

Katie Thornton: While public broadcasting floundered at home, government subsidized propaganda and bad hair metal reverberated on shortwave, from the US to the world. In its first seven decades of life, shortwave transformed from an idealistic experiment in global cooperation into a hardened government tool of information warfare, and then in the late 1980s, much of the medium's reason for being crumbled.

Rex Stout: In Eastern Europe, which the Soviets had held by force since World War II, Mikhail Gorbachev said that Moscow would no longer interfere.

Radio: "Serious fighting begins in the early morning, a staccato of machine gun bursts punctuated by cannon fire." "In the last weeks and months, we've seen one Communist Party after the other in Eastern Europe, knocked off its perch by the people."

Katie Thornton: The Cold War was over. On this medium that seemed almost tailor-made for propaganda, there was vacancy, airtime for rent, and in the US, a particular group of people was ready to snatch it up.

Radio: "You must form your militia unit. Pay no heed to the federal government, which is a counterfeit enemy, foreign government." "Are you a white woman such as myself who is sick of being harassed and tormented? Call Aryan nations for a whiter, brighter America." "We don't want to have to kill you. We hope to not have to kill you. But we can kill you. And if need be, we will kill you. Well, what are a few lives in the grand scheme of liberty?" "I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today." "These stations and the programs grew and they took over. They dominated." "What is associated in the public's mind was shortwave. It's no longer the BBC World Service. Now it's the guys who helped Timothy McVeigh bomb a federal building."

Katie Thornton: Next time on the Divided Dial, it's the shortwave story you've never heard. The private citizens who took over a fringe medium with a fringe message and used it to build a movement that fundamentally changed mainstream US Politics. The Divided Dial is written and reported by me, Katie Thornton, and edited by OTM's executive producer, Katya Rogers. Music and sound design is by Jared Paul. Jennifer Munson is our technical director. Fact checking by Graham Haysha. This series was made possible with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Thanks for listening to the first episode of the new season of the Divided Dial. The next remaining episodes are going to air over the next three weeks, so tune in for more tales from the shortwaves. In the meantime, follow OTM on Bluesky, TikTok, and Instagram, where we've been posting some video clips of the interviews that you hear on the show. Just search "On the Media." I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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