Red Tape
Description
In socialist Eastern Europe, radio simultaneously produced state power and created the conditions for it to be challenged. As the dominant form of media in Czechoslovakia from 1945 until 1969, radio constituted a site of negotiation between Communist officials, broadcast journalists, and audiences. Listeners' feedback, captured in thousands of pieces of fan mail, shows how a non-democratic society established, stabilized, and reproduced itself. In Red Tape, historian Rosamund Johnston explores the dynamic between radio reporters and the listeners who liked and trusted them while recognizing that they produced both propaganda and entertainment.
Red Tape rethinks Stalinism in Czechoslovakia-one of the states in which it was at its staunchest for longest-by showing how, even then, meaningful, multi-directional communication occurred between audiences and state-controlled media. It finds de-Stalinization's first traces not in secret speeches never intended for the ears of "ordinary" listeners, but instead in earlier, changing forms of radio address. And it traces the origins of the Prague Spring's discursive climate to the censored and monitored environment of the newsroom, long before the seismic year of 1968. Bringing together European history, media studies, cultural history, and sound studies, Red Tape shows how Czechs and Slovaks used radio technologies and institutions to negotiate questions of citizenship and rights.
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Content
- Cover
- Title page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1. The Radio Revolution
- 2. "The Brain Becomes a Phonograph Playing a Disc over Which It Has No Control" Show Trials and Stalinist Radio
- 3. When Travelogues Became News The Africa Reporting of Frantisek Foit, Jirí Hanzelka, and Miroslav Zikmund, 1947-1952
- 4. De-Stalinization Disturbs Listening
- 5. Listening in on the Neighbors The Reception of German and Austrian Radioin Cold War Czechoslovakia
- 6. Spring in the Air? Czechoslovak Radio's Foreign Correspondents, 1958-1968
- 7. All Together Now? Czechoslovak Radio during the Prague Springand Warsaw Pact Invasion in 1968
- Conclusion: From Socialist Media to Social Media
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Back Cover
