RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

separating the result of broadcasting from communicator and communication process . On the other hand , new electronic technology of communication reguired a completely different strategy of organizing and controlling the mar Ket than the previous nonelectronic media, because distribution of messages was separated from distribution of all the other commodities . Тће integrity of new communication technology reguired investments mainly in the nation- and worldwide distribution systems (transmitters , receivers) to constitute a new mar Ket for a new form of communication products - programs, advertising time , the audiences . 3. In the thirties , Critical Тћеогу discovered the "use value" of radio for radical needs of auđiences, but almost at the same time the state tooK over the radio . In his "TalK of the Function of Radio" written in 19 30, Brecht rediscoveređ the constitutional role of the media for the new public and believed that precisely radio ought to perform this function instead of imitating already existing institutions . According to Brecht ( 1983; 169), "radio shoulđ be converted from a distribution system to a communication system. Radio could be the most wonderful public communication system imaginable , a gigantic system of channels - could be , that is, if it were capable not only of transmitting but of receiving , of maKing the listener not only hear but also speaK , not of isolating him but of connecting him." As the press was the fundamental nucleus for the bourgeois public , radio could and shoulđ become a means for articulating the needs and interests of social classes alienateđ from economic and political power in inđustrial society by transforming the reports of rulers into answers to the guestions of the ruled . However , Brecht did not believe that the utopia of a radio in the interest of community could be materializeđ in the existing social system. On the contrary , he wrote , "we must destroy the social basis of the apparatus anđ guestion their use in the interest of the few . These proposals cannot be achieved in this social system - can be achieved in another; yet they are merely a natural conseguence of technological development and of the propagation and formation of that other social system.". 4 . However, and contrary to 'natural' expectations as those expressed by Brecht, rađio never achieved the critical role which has been played by the press in the past. From the early thirties to the late fifties, radio developed much more its authoritarian than emancipatory potentials . For fifty years , radio became the most powerful instrument of propaganda. Williams (1976: 10) even believes that, actually, this is not a specific of rađio because "all the new means of commumcation have been abuseđ , for political control (as in propaganda) or