section_path: History/Radio and television
section_name: Radio and television
paragraph_text: Radio and television
  
  The British Broadcasting Company began transmitting radio news from London in 1922, dependent entirely, by law, on the British news agencies. BBC radio marketed itself as a news by and for social elites, and hired only broadcasters who spoke with upper-class accents. The BBC gained importance in the May 1926 general strike, during which newspapers were closed and the radio served as the only source of news for an uncertain public. (To the displeasure of many listeners, the BBC took an unambiguously pro-government stance against the strikers).
  
  In the US, RCA's Radio Group established its radio network, NBC, in 1926. The Paley family founded CBS soon after. These two networks, which supplied news broadcasts to subsidiaries and affiliates, dominated the airwaves throughout the period of radio's hegemony as a news source. Radio broadcasters in the United States negotiated a similar arrangement with the press in 1933, when they agreed to use only news from the Press–Radio Bureau and eschew advertising; this agreement soon collapsed and radio stations began reporting their own news (with advertising). As in Britain, American news radio avoided "controversial" topics as per norms established by the National Association of Broadcasters. By 1939, 58% of Americans surveyed by Fortune considered radio news more accurate than newspapers, and 70% chose radio as their main news source. Radio expanded rapidly across the continent, from 30 stations in 1920 to a thousand in the 1930s. This operation was financed mostly with advertising and public relations money.
  
  The Soviet Union began a major international broadcasting operation in 1929, with stations in German, English and French. The Nazi Party made use of the radio in its rise to power in Germany, with much of its propaganda focused on attacking the Soviet Bolsheviks. The British and Italian foreign radio services competed for influence in North Africa. All four of these broadcast services grew increasingly vitriolic as the European nations prepared for war.
  
  The war provided an opportunity to expand radio and take advantage of its new potential. The BBC reported on Allied invasion of Normandy on 8:00 a.m. of the morning it took place, and including a clip from German radio coverage of the same event. Listeners followed along with developments throughout the day. The U.S. set up its Office of War Information which by 1942 sent programming across South America, the Middle East, and East Asia. Radio Luxembourg, a centrally located high-power station on the continent, was seized by Germany, and then by the United States —which created fake news programs appearing as though they were created by Germany. Targeting American troops in the Pacific, the Japanese government broadcast the " Zero Hour " program, which included news from the U.S. to make the soldiers homesick. But by the end of the war, Britain had the largest radio network in the world, broadcasting internationally in 43 different languages. Its scope would eventually be surpassed (by 1955) by the worldwide Voice of America programs, produced by the United States Information Agency.
  
  In Britain and the United States, television news watching rose dramatically in the 1950s and by the 1960s supplanted radio as the public's primary source of news. In the U.S., television was run by the same networks which owned radio: CBS, NBC, and an NBC spin-off called ABC. Edward R. Murrow, who first entered the public ear as a war reporter in London, made the big leap to television to become an iconic newsman on CBS (and later the director of the United States Information Agency).
  
  Ted Turner 's creation of the Cable News Network (CNN) in 1980 inaugurated a new era of 24-hour satellite news broadcasting. In 1991, the BBC introduced a competitor, BBC World Service Television. Rupert Murdoch's Australian News Corporation entered the picture with Fox News Channel in the US, Sky News in Britain, and STAR TV in Asia. Combining this new apparatus with the use of embedded reporters, the United States waged the 1991–1992 Gulf War with the assistance of nonstop media coverage. CNN's specialty is the crisis, to which the network is prepared to shift its total attention if so chosen. CNN news was transmitted via Intelsat communications satellites. CNN, said an executive, would bring a "town crier to the global village".
  
  In 1996, the Qatar-owned broadcaster Al Jazeera emerged as a powerful alternative to the Western media, capitalizing in part on anger in the Arab & Muslim world regarding biased coverage of the Gulf War. Al Jazeera hired many news workers conveniently laid off by BBC Arabic Television, which closed in April 1996. It used Arabsat to broadcast.