The Media during the Cold War | 157Compared to radio, the spread of television worldwide proceeded more
sluggishly. Given the high transmission costs and the prices of the sets them-
selves, the wealth gap obviously played a crucial role; but cultural and political
factors were also important. Television grew to be a mass medium in the home-
lands of democracy and popular culture. First it spread in the economically
powerful United States, which is why it was now internationally regarded as a
sign of American modernity. In 1952, when the European Continent was still
running test programmes, American television was already serving 18 million
viewers. As they had done with radio, many U.S. networks invested in Latin
American stations that emerged as early as 1950. In several Latin America
countries, up to 80 per cent of television programmes initially came from the
United States as a medium of transnational advertising (Sinclair 1999: 13f.).
At the beginning of the 1950s, Great Britain was the only European
country where television had obtained a foothold. By 1953 more than half
of all adult Britons could watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The
beginning of the Television Age in the rest of the world depended largely on
economic power and cultural self-image. In Central Europe and Japan, tele-
vision grew step by step during the 1950s and became a mass medium after
1960; in the Mediterranean region this did not occur until a decade later. It
spread more slowly in France because there was more resentment against the
‘American medium’, and in Israel it was because of objections from Orthodox
Jews that the first programme, an educational one, was not aired until 1966.
The spread of television was less uniform still in non-democratic countries. In
Socialistic countries as well as in democratic ones, it was related to economic
strength and previous media density, which explains why the number of tele-
vision viewers in the GDR had already equalled that in the German Federal
Republic during the 1960s. In economically weak Greece it was only in 1966
that the military dictatorship introduced propagandistic programming. Televi-
sion broadcasting began a year earlier in Franco’s Spain, but since a television
set cost about three-quarters of the average annual income, its purchase could
often be financed only by working abroad.
In industrialised countries, television ownership around 1960 did not nec-
essarily depend upon a person’s degree of wealth. Despite the high costs of sets
and television fees, nearly all income groups were quite equally represented.
In 1963, 53 per cent of German working-class households owned a television
(a disproportionately high number), whilst among white-collar workers, civil
servants and especially farmers it was less common. This can be explained by
the negative attitudes of German conservatives and the well-educated bour-
geoisie towards television.
Once more contrasts were very great in the case of Africa. In some coun-
tries television was introduced in the 1960s but in others it was not until the
1980s (Botswana, Somalia and Namibia) and even then it was limited to a few