Radio and Media
The 1940s were a decade of tension and transition. Millions of American soldiers left for World War II, and with them went men and women journalists – most notably the "Murrow boys." Edward R. Murrow, made famous by World War II, began a transition from radio to television.It was the golden age of comic books. While print media were enjoying success, the war thwarted expansion of broadcast media, especially the new technology of television. The Federal Communication Commission forbade the creation of new radio and television stations during the war years.The 1940s also saw the death of the beloved Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the fall of both Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany. From the embers of the Second World War came the "Cold War" a simmering competition for world dominance between the democratic, capitalist United States and totalitarian, communist Soviet Union.
Wire services, newspapers and broadcast organizations sent correspondents to Europe and Asia to report on international developments during World War II. Unlike previous wars, this war was broadcast daily to a listening audience back in the U.S.
The radio played an important role and helped to radically change how people received news and entertainment. The "Murrow Boys" broadcasts from Europe brought the war closer to Americans back home in the states. CBS set a news standard that followed its journalists into television and lasted for decades. The 1940s were the last decade in which radio was dominant. Television had become a viable technology in the late 1930s, but technical delays and the war both stopped widespread introduction until the late 1940s. After the war, the broadcast networks poured large amounts of money into television. Television began a media revolution in the late 1940s, transforming America, and opening the nation to whole new world of visual communication. |
In the 1940s, television started, stopped, started again and then took off. In the process, the new medium turned on the lives of rural residents connecting them to the rest of the world even more than newspapers or radio.
The first practical TV sets were demonstrated and sold to the public at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. The sets were very expensive and New York City had the only broadcast station. When World War II started, all commercial production of television equipment was banned. Production of the cathode ray tubes that produced the pictures was redirected to radar and other high tech war uses. |