Transnational Radio Monitoring in the Twentieth Century

Radio monitoring is an important feature of broadcasting history and monitoring reports form a treasure trove for historians. This volume offers six case studies that provide new insights on the importance of radio monitoring during the Second World War and the Cold War.

Radio broadcasting is not only about transmission, but also about listening. From the start of the medium’s history, radio organisations institutionalised services to monitor the broadcasts of stations from all over the globe and write daily reports about them. This act of listening provided valuable information about the situation in various parts of the world or insights into the communication strategies of broadcasters. As a result, collections of monitoring reports are bulky, containing countless documents which form a treasure trove for radio historians. At the same time researchers need to be aware that these sources are far from neutral: monitoring services often serve clear geopolitical objectives in context of conflict situations. This volume explores the rich history of radio monitoring during the Second World War and the Cold War. As such it offers original case studies that shed light on previously unknown radio histories. Moreover, all the authors reflect on the use of monitoring reports as a historical source and as such provide methodological guidelines.

This volume will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of media history, war studies, media studies, sociology, and cultural studies. It was originally published in Media History.

Suzanne Bardgett was Head of Research and Academic Partnerships at Imperial War Museums (IWM) from 2010 to 2023, and during 2015-2016 led the AHRC- supported international research network on the BBC Monitoring collection. She now writes books for IWM, and is Series Editor of The Holocaust and its Contexts.

Friederike Kind-Kovács is a senior researcher at the Hannah Arendt Institute at Technische Universität Dresden and a lecturer at Regensburg University. She is a twentieth-century historian with a special interest in the transnational history of Central Europe and especially the history of childhood. She is the author of Budapest’s Children: Humanitarian Relief in the Aftermath of the Great War.

Vincent Kuitenbrouwer is Senior Lecturer of History of International Relations at the University of Amsterdam. He is specialized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial history, and has a special interest in colonial media networks. He currently works on Dutch international radio broadcasting in the late colonial period and the era of decolonization.