말이 씨가 된다

Words become seeds.

[Milestone: Radio/TV Penetration 1/]

January 19th, 1950

"The voice of the Chairman must be in every living-space" was the call that came down from Ho Jong-suk, the head of the Propaganda Department of the People's Committee. While this could and had been done effectively with posters and leaflets and things in the past, it was only with the coming of self-sufficiency to Korea that the true revolution in propagating the message of the party had come.

Radios were the most important part of this new push. As part of the new Five Products program, the successor to the previous Four Products program, radios were planned to be built by advanced manufacturing facilities around Pyongyang. In the meantime, large numbers of civilian radios were brought in from abroad, with distribution on the basis of household members: the largest households received radios first, and, indeed, these became known as the "new meal" - the new tradition of gathering around the radio to listen to the chairman's speeches, which began to be broadcast live in fervent, hours-long programs containing music, history, and news.

And as part of this expansion, Ho Jong-suk, in cooperation with head of industry Ri Mun-hwan, expanded the rate of construction of new radio towers. Soon every major city would have a tower - and soon, it would be very easy to receive the Korean Central Broadcasting Station's transmissions throughout the peninsula.