It was another year of depressing news as international broadcasting on shortwave continues to downsize, and is not always replaced by services on other platforms.
Prasar Bharati - parent organization of All India Radio - said it was considering pulling the plug on its External Services Division. The station admitted that some of its language services receive practically no listener mail. So far, all the services are still on the air, but the future doesn’t look promising.
The Voice of America announced the end of regular programmes in Bulgarian, Estonian, Czech, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak and Slovenian, along with many broadcast feeds to affiliate stations in Central and South-eastern Europe. It also made substantial cuts to its English output. This led to a petition being sent to members of Congress signed by more than 460 VOA employees - nearly half the workforce. The petition accused the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) of "dismantling the nation’s radio beacon" and called on Congress to investigate the Board. It accused the BBG of launching new services in the Middle East with no editorial accountability at the expense of VOA programmes serving the same areas, and cutting back on broadcasts to Eastern Europe and in English around the world.
Radio Romania International stopped broadcasting in Hungarian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Greek and Portuguese, but re-launched its services in other languages, which it said “is a result of the end of the Cold War, and the ongoing reunification of Europe.”
Swiss Radio International finally disappeared completely from shortwave, and has been replaced by the swissinfo Web site.
Radio Slovakia International is another station whose demise was announced, but like so many other international broadcasters it received a temporary reprieve until the end of 2004. But as I write this, the situation from 1 January 2005 is still unclear.
There are also reports of unease at Egypt’s Radio Cairo, where a lot of foreign language services are said to be under threat, though the station has not yet announced any details.
In a year when we received mostly bad news about international broadcasting one of the smallest stations, Radio New Zealand International, bucked the trend. It was announced that the NZ Government is to provide NZ$2.64 million capital in 2005 – 2006 for a new digital shortwave transmitter. An additional NZ$421,000 will be provided next year and in subsequent years to cover operating costs.
In what must be the year’s strangest international broadcasting story, Germany's Deutsche Welle celebrated the 10th anniversary of its Web site by adding pages in a new language - Klingon. The Klingon reports on the Deutsche Welle website are supposed to underline the station's philosophy of multicultural, intergalactic openness. "We should celebrate our 10-year presence in the online universe with a cross-border language," DW director Erik Bettermann said. "This should help users from other galaxies get an impression of Germany."
Several regional public broadcasters announced staff and programming cuts as details emerged of their financial plight. There was more bad news for Dutch public broadcasters when the European Commission said it suspected that the Dutch government had spent 110 million euros too much on public broadcasting since 1992, and said that it planned to hold an investigation.
Commercial broadcaster Radio Veronica received a lot of publicity when it launched Operation Iraqi Sunrise, a week of live breakfast shows broadcast from Dutch military base Camp Smitty at Al Samawah in Iraq. Presenter Adam Curry was forced to delay his departure due to what he called a “media circus” at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. There were security concerns, and questions were even asked in parliament, but the broadcasts went ahead without major problems, and were even praised by the Dutch Defence Minister.
Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) finally re-started in the Netherlands, but only the public broadcasters are committed to it. The major commercial stations say that the cost of the new FM licences that came into effect in mid-2003 means they cannot afford to invest in DAB at the present time. Last year’s redistribution of radio frequencies also hit government coffers. Minister of Economic Affairs Laurens Jan Brinkhorst told parliament in March that the exercise had cost the government 55 million euro - and that could rise to 75 million euro as more of the consequences work their way through the system. The extra costs arise from the construction of booster transmitters to solve the reception problems of public broadcasters, legal advice and possible damages still to be incurred from ongoing procedures involving unsuccessful licence applicants, and the cost of hiring experts to deal with the various problems that arose.
For Sky Radio, which dominated the commercial radio market here for many years, 2004 was a bad year. Ending 2003 with its highest ever audience, the continuous music station lost about a quarter of its listeners during 2004, and has been replaced in the number one position by Radio 538.
On 1 July, Radio 10 Gold started using the high power mediumwave transmitter at Flevo on 1008 kHz, thus providing not only national coverage in the Netherlands but also beyond. The station’s celebratory mood was abruptly changed six weeks later when its popular Programme Director and presenter Tom Mulder suffered a brain haemorrhage. He is currently undergoing therapy and hopes to be back at work in the course of 2005. But there was also some good news for Tom. He won this year's 'Oeuvre' special prize as part of the Marconi Awards at the National Broadcasting Congress. It is equivalent to a lifetime achievement award.
Also in August, one of the main mediumwave transmitter masts at Lopik was removed with explosives, following the signing of a covenant in which transmitter operator Nozema agreed to limit the total power of transmissions from the site to avoid interference in nearby homes. Only Arrow Rock on 675 is now broadcast regularly from Lopik, with a 40kW reserve transmitter for Radio 747 allowed under the covenant agreement.
In Hungary, the National Radio and Television Commission had to launch an investigation after a drunken radio presenter caused outrage by remarking that he would “exterminate all Christians.” As a result of his indiscretion, the station – Tilos Radio – was banned from broadcasting for 30 days.
2004 got off to a terrible start for the BBC, when the Chairman and Director-General were forced to resign as a result of a bitter dispute with the Government over comments made about its report about WMD in Iraq, a document used to justify the invasion last year. The situation turned to tragedy with the suicide of arms expert Dr David Kelly whose comments to BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan had sparked the row.
At the end of the year, the BBC was back in the headlines when the new Director-General, Mark Thompson, outlined ‘a new vision for programmes and content focused on 'excellence', plus radical plans for funding the ideas and transforming the BBC into a simpler, more agile and creative digital broadcaster.” That was the first sentence of the press release, but the second is the one that grabbed the headlines: “An initial 2,900 jobs could go and extra resources to invest in programmes will also be released through new ways of working, productivity gains, new technology and efficiencies, as well as overhead cuts.”
One of the more bizarre stories that we covered was the news that the International Telecommunication Union has decided to keep the 160-year-old Morse Code in line with current trends. It now has a new character to denote the "@" symbol used in e-mail addresses.
Irish public broadcaster RTÉ launched its longwave service of RTÉ Radio 1 on St. Patrick's Day, 17 March 2004. The transmissions on 252 kHz are intended primarily for listeners in the UK.
In the UK, the BBC surprised everybody by becoming an offshore broadcaster for a week – Pirate BBC Essex took over the mediumwave frequencies of BBC Radio Essex to broadcast special programmes marking the 40th anniversary of the start of Radio Caroline.
Another offshore broadcaster, the Superstation, operated on FM in the Orkney Islands on a 3-month Restricted Service Licence from the radio ship MV Communicator. Indeed, in the first few days the service was so restricted that hardly anyone could hear it. The operators of the station pronounced it a success, but immediately put the ship up for sale at $25,000, which includes the mast but no radio equipment. Would suit someone who owns a very large bath.
A new radio station focusing on the Middle East launched on mediumwave in France. Ciel AM, which has been operating on the Internet since 2002, broadcasts on 981 kHz in Paris and on 1161 kHz in Strasbourg and Toulouse.
In October, shock-jock Howard Stern, one of the most popular US radio personalities, said that he will broadcast his show on Sirius Satellite Radio beginning in 2006, after being dropped earlier this year from several stations that objected to his often off-colour humour. This is all part of what has been called “Nipplegate”. At half time during a live broadcast of the Superbowl, US singer Janet Jackson showed a bare breast for several seconds, leading to what the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said was a deluge of complaints. In December, it was revealed that virtually all of them were from members of one organisation – the Parents Television Council. But it started a major clampdown by the FCC on any radio or TV programming it deemed “indecent”, with large fines for any network or station that transgresses the new rules.
Hate Radio made an unwelcome return to the headlines when International press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said that the state media in Ivory Coast have become the exclusive mouthpiece of the government and its allies, and are being used to promote street demonstrations. RSF said that with few exceptions, the reports carried on Radio Côte d'Ivoire (RCI) and RadioTélévision Ivoirienne (RTI) have strayed completely from journalism into propaganda. Interspersed with nationalistic songs, phone-in contributions and interviews, RCI presenters flatter the "patriotism" of their listeners.
