A SMALL STEP FOR WOMEN, A LEAP FOR THE NATION.

NAPOLEON spoke of the press as "the seventh great power". Its significance became politically visible with the beginning of the French Revolution, and maintained its position for the entirety of the 19th century. The century's politics were largely determined by the press.

- KAJAL BASU

One can hardly imagine or explain the major historical events between 1800 and 1900 without considering the powerful influence of journalism. Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister in the Hitler regime, 1938 In August 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor, Goebbels inaugurated the 10th International Radio Show in Berlin with a speech titled 'The Radio as the Eighth Great Power'. Very neatly, he separated the pressNapoleon's "seventh great power"-from the radio. They were, in his eyes, two different journalisms, so to speak: the press being print, shackled by the reach of industrial machinery such as printing presses and distributive facilities such as roads and trucks, and radio, travelling through unstoppable air, hampered by nothing at all.

That very year, German citizens were deluged with a range of cheap bakelite radio sets under the rather clipped rubric of Volksempfänger, or the people's receiver. Available on instalments, these ubiquitous radios pushed Goebbels' cause for a medium that would be "an intermediary between the government and the nation".