Recent Media History Research

My other work continues in the international history of media structures and political-economy.

One theme involves the growth of commercial broadcasting via cross-border radio stations from the 1930s to the 1960s. This resulted in the 2017 publication of Commercial Temptation: Commercial Cross-border Radio and the Comparative Transformation of Public Service Broadcasting in Britain, South Africa and India. Ipresented a related paper at the 2018 International Communication Association conference, Crossed Signals: The British Labour Government and Cross-Border Commercial Radio after World War II.

I also explore how the British and American states, and their private and quasi-official partners, used subsidies as well as education and aid to extend influence into the newly independent countries of Africa in the 1960s. My most recent work is the 2019 Crash Course: The International Press Institute and Journalism Training in Anglophone Africa, 1963-1975. I’d looked more directly at state and corporate action in the 2016 The Scramble for African Media: The British Government, Reuters, and Thomson in the 1960s.

Author: Dr. John Jenks

I am a professor of Communication at Dominican University, and research the post-1945 history of propaganda and journalism.

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