ABSTRACT
T he ubiquity of radio and its widespread use as a secondary mediumtend to encourage a less critical approach to its underlying messagesthan is the case with other media. As Anne Karpf observes, ‘Radio is a medium that can be taken neat: as a source of education, information and entertainment rather than as a creator of a distinct ideology’ (1980: 42). However, despite its ephemeral nature and lack of visual representations radio contributes to what Denis McQuail calls our definition of social reality: ‘the place where the changing culture and values of societies and groups are constructed, stored and most visibly expressed’ (1994: 1). This is done both by the voices that are heard in the media (literally in the case of radio) and the way the audience is portrayed.
