Have you heard On the Media’s Peabody-winning series,The Divided Dial?
It’s awesome and you should, and now you will, if you listen to our podcast. Cause we featured an episode of theirs this week.
It's the story of shortwave radio: the way-less-listened to but way-farther-reaching cousin of AM and FM radio. The medium was once heralded as a utopian, international, and instantaneous mass communication tool — a sort of internet-before-the-internet.
But, like the internet, many people quickly saw the power of this new technology and found ways to harness it. State leaders turned it into a propaganda machine, weaponizing the airwaves to try and shape politics around the world. And as shortwave continued to evolve, like the internet, it became fragmented, easily accessible, and right-wing extremists, conspiracy theorists and cult leaders found homes on the different shortwave frequencies.
And even today - again, like the internet - people with money are looking to buy up this mass-communication tool in the hopes of … making more money.
And this is just the first episode of the second season of The Divided Dial, a limited series fromour colleagues in New York Public Radio over at On The Media.
If you want to hear more, you're in luck. There are so many ways to do so.
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