Radio AnalysisRadio AnalysisRadio Analysis1. IntroductionEvery day, many people tune in to radio news. In Britain alone, every week over 12 million listen to news bulletins from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on five radio networks.
The language of the news media, especially of radio news, offers a number of areas which are worth researching and investigating. An investigation of the linguistic features of the language in radio news – similar to any other investigation – needs a definition of what is to be studied.
I will start by providing some background information to the topic ‘radio’, namely by summing up the most important events in the history of radio. After illustrating the most interesting turning points of the development of radio in the past, I will talk about radio news in general, before I will explain specific details about how to write and read a news text for a radio station. The last chapter includes full transcriptions of two radio texts and ‘normal’ newspaper texts as well as their analyses and comparisons. I will have a look at similarities and differences on radio writing and newspaper language.
2. The History of Radio“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles.Do you understand this?And radio operates in the same way: You send signals here; they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat”– Einstein.2.1 Samuel MorseThe first visible evidence of the history was the invention of an electromagnetic telegraph by Samuel Morse in 1836.Morse, born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, was educated at Yale College and later became interested in chemical and electrical experiments. He also invented a code, now known as the Morse code, for use with his telegraph instrument. Samuel Morse tried without success to obtain European patents for his telegraph. (cf. Microsoft Encarta, 1994)
3. The Morse code is considered to be the first ever to operate in the US. Morse’s inventor, Ernest F. Bell, who was American, was an engineer at the time of his arrest and later served as a clerk to Governor Thomas C. Marshall in New York.3.a Morse was an entrepreneur. He founded the first electric machine, the National Electric Company, on August 1864. He founded Electric Works in Kansas City, Kansas. After the revolution in 1775, Morse learned how to communicate using the Morse code. He began writing papers. These papers became part of a newspaper, The Daily Courier.4. The first commercial radio operator was William B. Miller, born on January 5, 1842, in New Holland, Connecticut.5. John Tuller was an electrical engineer at the time, and he invented a telephone system. He was also a newspaper editor of Connecticut.6. Morse was the world’s first, and only, person to invent wireless. He was well known in the industrial circles, for he was called up to the highest level of a company that did business with him. He began to make paper papers and he bought books in English, and, soon after, he started a newspaper in London’s Evening Standard.7. In 1881 Morse proposed to invent a paper plane, called a radio tower, based on the principle of “the wind blowing on, the heat dissolving, the noise as high as the sound of the sea, from distant places, with lightning or thunder, to the tower.”8. The patent application for this device, in 1891, is dated to 1891.9. Later, the idea for the aircraft was patented in 1904 by Isaac Scholz, who was then a professor at Berkeley. The flying plane is actually a contrail.11. In 1905, General Electric began making military radio receivers that could transmit signals at 100 meters. By 1911, the Airborne Signal Center, a high altitude communication center, was established. Airborne receivers became the next-generation of radio antennas.12. “They use the radio frequency to transmit a signal.”13. Radio transmitters were invented earlier in the same period. When one of the first radio transmitters was made, in 1895, it was named “Barry’s List.” The name has been changed to “Barry’s List.”14. With the publication of Morse’s first papers in 1911, the number of papers and books that could be read by Morse made it a national and international sensation. The newspaper company he founded, The New Republic of America, was incorporated in 1892.15. It opened a major factory in Manhattan, Manhattan, in 1895. After its announcement of their plans to acquire the building, John M. Scholsz began printing the first articles published in the New Yorker in 1893. Among other things, they published a story on the new construction project of the West Bank City Housing Authority. At the same time, Scholsz made the necessary changes in his business plan to bring the business to the fore. At first he wanted
(Source: Microsoft Encarta, 1994)2.2 The following yearsIn 1873, the British physicist James Clerk-Maxwell announces the theory of electro-magnetic waves.In 1888, Heinrich Hertz produces the first electro-magnetic waves by supplying an electric charge to a capacitor and then short-ciruiting it. The energy from the resulting spark is radiated in the form of electromagnetic waves and Hetz is able to measure the wavelength and velocity of these so-called Hertzian waves.
In 1894, British physicist Sir Oliver Lodge uses a device called the coherer to detect the presence of radio waves and demonstrates that these waves could be used for signalling.
2.3 Guglielmo MarconiGuglielmo Marconi (1874 – 1937), an Italian electrical engineer, was born in Bologna and educated at the University of Bologna. As early as 1890, he became interested in wireless telegraphy, and by 1895 he had developed an apparatus with which he succeeded in sending signals to a point a few kilometers away by means of a directional antenna. In 1899 he established communication across the English Channel between England and France, and in 1901 he communicated (Source: Microsoft Encarta, 1994)
signals across the Atlantic Ocean between Poldhu, in Cornwall, England, and Saint Johns, in Newfoundland, Canada. His system was soon adopted by the British and Italian navies, and by 1907 had been so much improved that transatlantic wireless telegraph service was established for public use. (cf. Microsoft Encarta, 1994)
In 1914, the thermionic valve could be used as a radio generator which produced a carrier wave capable of being modulated by speech.