Radio

            For a long time, before the technological advent of television, radio was the best way for the American public to get their news. Now that most news is on television, or even the internet, fewer and fewer people rely on radio shows to find out what’s going on in their town or state or country. Most people now listen to the radio for music while they drive, but there are still a good number of insightful radio-based talk shows out there on the air. Hearing a story on a radio show is still vastly different from seeing one on a television show, and even more different still from reading a story on the internet.

            When you read a news article on the internet, it’s pretty isolated and impersonal. You’re alone when you read the story, it isn’t directly told to you by someone else, and it doesn’t necessarily have much of a good chance to stick in your mind afterward since usually you’re off clicking another link almost immediately. There are also numerous distractions from the story you’re reading, in the form of ads. Sites have to host ads from outside sources to pay for their website, and they also often advertise other affiliated sites and other articles within the same site. So while you’re reading about that woman who drove drunk, listened to her GPS too carefully, and drove into the sand trap at the local golf course, you’re also seeing an advertisement for Snickers bars, a middle-aged man telling you to shop at Home Depot, and six sidebar links to six other articles about politics, the latest football game, and Disney buying Lucasfilm. It’s difficult to be focused on that initial article, even if you sincerely care about the woman in the sand trap. In most cases, there are too many impersonal distractions for internet news to be very emotionally impacting.

            Television has similar issues, though not quite to the same degree as internet. There are advertisements, but they’re cordoned off into their own time slot. The ads don’t get aired alongside the news stories, but often they’re more colorful and attention-grabbing than the news show itself, so they still serve as more of a distraction than anything. Someone is as likely to remember the latest Geico commercial as they are to remember the pictures of a car driven through the bushes and into a sand trap. Advertisements aside, television is also fairly impersonal in the way it portrays its stories. A viewer will get a thirty-second or one-minute clip about the woman in the sand trap; they’ll mention the town she lives in, the town the golf course is in, the fact that she’s in custody for driving under the influence but more or less unharmed, show a couple pictures of cars and maybe some people putting on that golf course, and then move on to the next story. You don’t really feel anything much in particular for the woman in the sand trap. There’s just not enough time for you to let the story sink in and consider what it means before they’re on to the next information tidbit.

            With radio, though, news seems a lot more personal. Their ads, like television, are also cordoned off from the rest of the show, but usually don’t grab as much more of your attention, as is the case for TV. Radio ads are actually pretty easy to tune out for the most part. You get used to listening to the talk show host speaking in a conversational, moderated tone, so when the ads come along with some voice actor talking really fast about a car dealership right down the road, you can basically just put him on ignore and wait for the host to get back on the air. Ads are usually a good opportunity to think about the last story you just heard because they don’t demand all of your attention like television ads seem to do. Radio also spends more time telling a story than the television news shows do. Instead of talking for only a minute about that woman in the sand trap, they spend five or ten minutes on her story. The listener gets more involved in the event and can more easily imagine it happening to them or someone they know. Because they’re not distracted with images of the aftermath of the event, they can better imagine the event actually happening. It becomes easy to understand how embarrassed she must be now, and how chagrined the golf course owner must feel. Instead of seeing a fairly attractive person sitting at a desk talking about this story in a distant monotone, you only hear someone’s voice speaking personably to you. You imagine it happening to someone you don’t like and you laugh, or you imagine it happening to yourself and you don’t. Radio has the ability to be more personal because of the lack of distraction, and the presence of the type of sensory input that allows the listener to imagine what it all means in reference to himself or herself. It’s just like storytelling always has been for people since before written language.

            And because of this vast difference in medium, the same story can have completely different tones depending on where it’s broadcast. A couple of days ago, Mitt Romney gave his final GOP talk scheduled to happen before the election takes place. Many of the issues that were considered during the primaries weren’t addressed in his final radio talk; he avoided mentioning abortions and birth control. He mainly spent his air time bashing the economy and Obama and telling people to vote for him instead. The internet article gave a brief run-down of what Romney talked about, television coverage would have probably done about the same, and a radio show would probably have dwelled upon the ramifications of it for a few minutes and maybe taken some call-ins from listeners and made a discussion about it. So while radio can’t really broadcast as much news as television or internet, it seems that the news that comes from radio has more of a human quality to it. I definitely think that radio news and talk shows are a valuable form of communication that should be preserved in our culture.

The internet article on the radio broadcast: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2012/11/03/Romney-delivers-last-pre-election-GOP-talk/UPI-26751351978705/

Additional Sources:

Bettina Fabos, Christopher R. Martin, and Richard Campbell. Media & Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication, 8th Edition. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2012. Print.