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This article explores the British and West German public service radio's abilities to reflect on and to address the specific needs and expectations of migrant groups in their programmes between the 1960s and 1980s. Mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion alike can be investigated here. Empirically, it is based on comparisons of radio broadcasts on and for different immigrant communities, produced by BBC Radio Leicester on/for the post-war Asian migrants in England and by West German public service broadcasting on/for 'Gastarbeiter' (foreign workers) as well as for 'Spätaussiedler' (German repatriates from East Europe). Radio is studied as an agent of identity management and citizenship education. Not only did radio talk about migrants and migration to introduce these topics and the newcomers to the local population. It also offered airtime to selected migrant communities to cater for their needs and interests as well as to facilitate their difficulties of adjusting to an unfamiliar environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New evidence requires us to revise our understanding of the birth of British broadcasting in 1922. The Post Office deployed misleading ideas about the development of commercial broadcasting in America and cemented the case for public funding and a ban on advertising. However, the idea for a single broadcaster came not from the Postmaster General but from the Marconi Company at a key meeting in May 1922 for which a transcript has emerged. It shows that ideas about public service broadcasting predate John Reith's arrival by several months. This meeting laid the foundations of broadcasting in Britain, envisaging a single broadcaster operating at arms-length from government, providing a 'public service' with national content shared between regional stations, funded by a licence fee. We can identify the exact moment the BBC was conceived. It was not the Post Office that proposed the BBC, but Godfrey Isaacs, the managing director of Marconi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Television played a critical political role in post-war cultures and was a site of imperial rivalries and cold war strategies. This article traces the history of the Australian Broadcasting Commission's (ABC) involvement in the British controlled television news agency that became known as Visnews. The agency, officially named the British Commonwealth International Newsfilm Agency (BCINA) was established to counter the power of American news agencies in the international trade in television news images that emerged after the Second World War. The ABC, through its newly established office in Singapore, undertook to manage the distribution of news from Asia. In doing so it became critical to the success of BCINA/Visnews. At the same time the international news agency provided a transnational space that allowed for the projection of nation internationally and that influenced the way in which the ABC implemented national policies for domestic news services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper will consider the transnationality of television activities carried out under the umbrella of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) between the 1950s and the 1970s. Two examples, which represent important services of the EBU, will be compared: Eurovision and the EBU Screening Sessions. Both coordinated the exchange and selling of television programmes throughout Europe. Both resulted in a large number of transnational events and experiences as they enabled people to watch the same programmes or at least the same images simultaneously or temporally delayed. Nevertheless, this paper will argue that the EBU's television activities did not result in the creation of transnationality. While the images remained transnational, the sound was cast into a national mould, and cultural factors such as mentality, humour, interests and language impeded the creation of transnationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]