AT the outset, it is important we begin today’s column of thoughts by acknowledging our own status within the wider media eco-sphere. We aren’t terribly important – we’re a community radio station comprising of radio enthusiasts, hobbyists, music lovers and people who love where we live. It is a privilege to do what we do, and to broadcast to the world and our mothers – well, actually just our mothers. But you get the idea.

We’re not world defining, the world wouldn’t end because NCB Radio no longer existed, although our own little worlds would probably be a lot duller, and more families annoyed as our team sit around the dinner table commentating on the music being played.

But if you look through the annals of history since the invention of broadcasting through radio waves, the art form that is radio has always played its own role in world conflict, for both good and bad.

Radio, like most consumed media, including TV and print has the ability to light a beacon of hope in parts of the world darkened by oppression and evil, be the connector for movements or tell the truth when one is presented with misinformation.

It is also true that in the hands of the wrong people, it can also be a tool for lethal mass communication, none more demonstrated as the years leading up to and including World War II.

The Nazis, for example, used radio to devastating effect to both brainwash their own population by the constant playing of propaganda in communal areas and at home with residents only allowed to buy sets that received Nazi radio channels.

There were also the notorious pro-Nazi British war traitors such as Lord Haw Haw, who were used by the Nazis to broadcast propaganda to British audiences.

It was in response to this that the Allies set up or re-purposed radio stations, including the BBC World Service to counter the diet of propaganda being fed to those in the Axis powers, particularly Germany, in a bid to tell the truth to the lies.

You could argue that it was broadcasting propaganda in return, but it was also the case that for some people, hearing what was happening beyond the Nazi newsreel was the flame that lit the fires of resistance and offered hope to the those avoiding persecution.

After World War II, these stations were then used to counter information in the Cold War, playing a role in the aforementioned fire of resistance that brought down the Soviet Union.

One of those stations, Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe was set up in 1949, as a propaganda tool in that Cold War, seeking to spread the values of democracy, but these days is used to counter misinformation in brutal, oppressive dictatorships such as those seen in Iran, Belarus and Afghanistan.

While one could make an argument against state funded radio abroad, the above mentioned radio station has had its funding cut by the US government which owned it.

Leading to one question – who benefits if not the perpetrators of oppression?