INTRODUCTION

Radio as a contemporary public medium tends to be considered primarily in terms of its industrial and cultural arrangements. We may identify five broad types of radio broadcasting: public service broadcasting, commercial radio, state radio, community (or micro) radio, and pirate radio. The first of these, perhaps best known in the West through long-established services such as the BBC, is predicated on providing services that, whilst funded largely by government, are independent of direct state control and are ideally free from commercial imperatives. The ideal of public service broadcasting, in the classic Reithian formulation, is to educate, inform and entertain, aims which are legally enshrined. By contrast, the commercial sector is under no such legal and social obligations; instead its aim is the maximisation of profit through the maximisation of audiences and the generation of advertising revenues. Radio under the direct control of the state is largely unknown in the West and tends to be associated with dirigiste regimes (whether secular or religious) which seek to standardise and limit content and formats to produce programmes that function as essentialised, arguably propagandist, attempts at national social control through the delimiting of debate and discussion. By contrast, community or micro radio operates at a hyper-local level, often as a result of the low power of transmitters, broadcasting (or better, ‘narrowcasting’) to specific, local geographic communities (whether cultural or social), determined by location or the interests of communities or both.