This new radio has apparently come as a boon to several Third World countries, where people who were prevented by the high cost of batteries from owning and using radios are now hooked into the broadcast media for the very first time. They benefit greatly from public-service announcements regarding health and safety. The truth is that radio has not been eclipsed by television and cable and the Internet. In fact, radio is as popular as it has ever been.
Radio is special to people.
This loyalty is largely due to radio's very limitations. That is, it has to speak to us, through either words or music. This is generally not the case with television, where the individual viewer invariably senses that he or she is nothing more than an anonymous, statistically insignificant part of a huge and diverse audience. Few people exploited this quality as well as did Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt is given credit for his ability to use the new medium so effectively, but a case could be made that it was actually the nature of the new medium, its peculiar power and personality, that made Roosevelt so effective on it.