Katie Thornton
Appearances
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
The U.S. 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. So the content was still there for the many Americans who wanted to listen. Journalists at CBS and NBC launched counteroffensives.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
And 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
Every week, radio sleuth Stout debunked enemy shortwave propaganda.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
David's been listening to shortwave since he was a kid in the 70s, when his uncle gave him a radio.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
They broadcast news to the world with just a bit of pro-Ally spin.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
And 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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. But shortwave quickly proved so central to the war effort that the U.S. government did something unprecedented. They nationalized all the roughly one dozen shortwave stations broadcasting from U.S.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
soil, filling the international airwaves with approved broadcasts.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
And for the most part, they did that, if a bit selectively. Michelle Hilmes.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
As the U.S. sent more troops into battle, it used shortwave to boost morale.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
Suddenly, the world was all within reach, available to him right there in this box.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
By the end of the Second World War, the voice of America blanketed much of the world. It ran in about 40 languages. But they were about to get lots of company on the airwaves. Because in the Cold War, the short waves exploded. That's coming up after the break. This is the Divided Dial from On the Media.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
This is On the Media. I'm Katie Thornton, host of OTM's Divided Dial series. We're right in the middle of episode one 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. But during the Cold War, shortwave would become so much more.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
Today, he's part of the Library of Congress' Radio Preservation Task Force. And 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
The VOA, the BBC, the Soviet Union, China, Egypt, Iran, Argentina, and 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 New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
But the global superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, were two of the most dominant voices on shortwave. And 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
With news, propaganda, and human interest stories, it offered a Soviet alternative to the BBC and the VOA.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
Debuting in 1950, Radio Free Europe was a flame-throwing anti-communist shortwave network.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
It was portrayed as grassroots, run by emigres 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. Staff at Radio Free Europe launched weather balloons into the Eastern Bloc and airdropped over 300 million leaflets, instructing listeners on how to tune in.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
The Soviet Union did not like any of this. They spent tons of money trying to drown out Western broadcasts. They'd flood the short waves 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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. But these U.S.-run shortwave stations weren't just beaming out journalism.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
In the 1950s and 60s, music, especially jazz, was a key component in the U.S. government's shortwave campaign.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
Vice of Islamic Republic of Iran.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
And on the short waves, Radio Moscow and others were ready to exploit this contradiction.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
In the early 1960s, Cuba's government-run service, Radio Havana, regularly beamed this show, Radio Free Dixie, up to the United States.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
Radio Free Dixie was hosted by U.S. Black power activist Robert F. Williams. He was on the lam in Cuba fleeing drummed up charges that were later dropped. And he broadcast a perspective that couldn't be found in the mainstream U.S. media.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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 U.S., Governments saw winning people over on shortwave as a key path to winning the Cold War. So even after the CIA's secretive role at Radio Free Europe was revealed in the early 70s, not much changed.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
The voice of Italy, broadcast in Italian. On other days, David has picked up English language shows from North Korea.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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 Motley Crue to listeners around the world. By the early 1980s, the U.S.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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. You know, season one of The Divided Dial. But on international radio, on shortwave, the great deregulator had no qualms about spending taxpayer dollars.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
He poured public money into the VOA and Radio Free Europe.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
And news from Cuba.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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. But after long internal debates, they decided to keep the rebellious racket going on the short waves.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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 U.S. 's best advertisement. Sure, that idea hadn't always been perfectly executed, but Reagan opted instead for more heavy-handed anti-communist propaganda. Reagan's VOA ran explicit editorials on behalf of the administration.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
Many longtime leaders resigned, replaced by more amenable colleagues, including Richard W. Carlson, father of right-wing bloviator Tucker Carlson. And it was Reagan who launched a costly new shortwave service targeting Cuba with hardline anti-communist messages.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
While public broadcasting floundered at home, government-subsidized propaganda and bad hair metal reverberated on shortwave from the U.S. 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
On the short waves, the global tussle for influence plays out 24-7. But we didn't just hear news and propaganda. There were beeps and bloops. Coded messages sent between amateur radio operators or between government officials who used the short waves to send military data or secret instructions. And some of what we heard just sounded like normal radio with lots of music. And preaching.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
On this medium that seemed almost tailor-made for propaganda, there was vacancy, airtime for rent. And in the U.S., a particular group of people was ready to snatch it up.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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 U.S. 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
Jennifer Munson is our technical director. Fact-checking by Graham Haisha. This series was made possible with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
That's an end times ministry that also preaches that the earth is flat.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
In just about an hour of surfing the short waves, 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
And 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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 two of The Divided Dial. I'm your host, Katie Thornton.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
I've worked in radio since I was a teenager, sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes behind the mic. In season one, I investigated how right-wing talk took over AM and FM radio. But in all my years of radio research, I'd never really learned about shortwave radio before.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
And 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 one. It's not. But I, and I think you, love the medium of radio. So 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
But 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
And 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. But let's get back to the story. Radio broadcasting, as in from one to many, it didn't start on shortwave.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
It started on AM, taking off around 1920. And AM was inherently local.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
Signals reached up to 50, maybe 75 miles.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
But at night, those listening at home noticed something strange. As the sun set, more stations emerged from the static. And they weren't coming from down the street or the next town over.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
...would hear stations from Chicago.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
A listener in Kansas might hear an opera or a boxing match from the East Coast. After dark, it was like the world cracked open and distance stations faded in and out on ghostly, mysterious winds. Most people had never heard a faraway voice, period.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
But, of course, there was an explanation for these voices in the night.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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. But when you shoot out an AM signal, there's another thing that happens, almost a byproduct.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
It's called a sky wave, and the sky wave goes up into the atmosphere.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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. And in the daylight, those layers are where radio waves go to die.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
At night, these sky waves, the sort of byproduct 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
Radio manufacturers ran ads with slogans like, In newspaper editorials, distressed housewives and sometimes husbands lamented that their significant other was spending every evening out in their radio shack. But 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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 New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
The radio waves were mostly used by ship captains or the military and the hams, who were just having fun. But in World War I, the U.S. government got worried about interference on those AM airwaves. So they eventually assigned specific frequencies for ships, for the military, and for those meddling amateurs.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
Back then, people thought the short waves 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. They began experimenting with them. And as it turned out, the short waves weren't the short end of the stick.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
For the most part, reception was clearer at night, but it didn't have to be dark to go the distance.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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. And 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
New shortwave stations started up in Switzerland and Japan and Venezuela. And with the scars of World War I still fresh, this burgeoning international medium was a source of hope.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
Michelle Helms is a retired professor of media studies who has written a lot about radio.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
Last summer, I met up with a journalist and radio fan named David Gorin. 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
Lots of the world's governments had taken to the shortwaves by the 1930s. But no nation used them quite like Germany.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
Zeeson, 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. And with its own festering Nazi movement, the U.S. was a key target. You had people like Axis Sally...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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.