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I In nt tr ro od du uc ct ti io on n This is a book about radio and the relatively new subject of radio studies. In fact, it is the first book to have the words 'radio studies' in its title. Radio itself has been the subject of research and writing since it was invented at the beginning of the last century. Much of that published work concerns the technical dimension of radio, but there is also a significant body of work on, for example, radio history, on the nature of speech on radio, on radio drama and so on. This body of writing is fairly puny in comparison with the literature on film and television but it is important nonetheless. Turning to the slightly more introspective aspect of this book, the consideration of radio studies itself, the published literature is almost non-existent. Very few writers have turned their attention to the nature of this subdivision of media or communication studies and I hope that what follows will help take a step in that direction. There are many reasons why radio has been neglected in media studies, at least in British academic life. Media studies was principally the creation of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University under their director, Stuart Hall. As Scannell explains, 'work in the centre explored the press, radio and television, but the last of this trio received most attention, because it had become, in the 1960s, the most popular everyday source of entertainment and political information and debate for most British people' (2007: 199). Some of the most influential research carried out in the centre was on television, for example the study of the television programme, Nationwide and the detailed analysis of one edition of the current affairs programme, Panorama (Scannell, 2007: 212). Hall's colleagues and students went on to dominate media studies in the UK, but as scholars of visual media and especially television, little wonder radio was temporarily neglected. The state of radio studies in America appears to be a lot healthier and I discuss below some of the American influences on this book. There is a tradition of studying American radio which goes back to the prewar era; a good example is the work of the Princeton Office of Radio Research which published Hadley Cantril's study of Orson Welles's famous broadcast, War of the Worlds and its remarkable public reception. It used to be the case that books about radio would begin with a rather apologetic justification for writing about the 'neglected' medium.
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