The story
The beginning
Suomen Yleisradio (Finland's General Radio) was founded in Helsinki on 29 May 1926 following more than a year of planning by a commission formed among public and private entities to bring public broadcasting to Finland. The name Yleisradio was taken from the Finnish Defence Forces, where the term yleisradio meant a radio broadcast that could be heard by everyone. The first programme was broadcast on 9 September 1926 from a studio at Unioninkatu 20 using assets purchased the day before from a radio station operated by Suomen Radioyhdistys (the Finnish Radio Association), an advocacy group that had been promoting radio in Finland since 1923. The initial programme contained brief opening remarks in both Finnish and Swedish, followed by music. Daily scheduled broadcasting began on 1 December 1926 with programming between 12:00–13:00 and 18:00–22:00 (17:00–22:00 on Sundays); two evenings per week were dedicated to Swedish programming, with the rest of the schedule in Finnish. Yleisradio broadcast the first radio church service from Tampere Cathedral on September 12, 1926; it is the oldest program still running on Yleisradio.
Before Yle, radio broadcasts in Finland had been made periodically by entrepreneurial organisations and amateur radio clubs such as Radiola in Helsinki from 23 March 1924 and Tampereen radioyhdistys (the Tampere Radio Association) in April 1924. The radio battalion of the Finnish Defence Forces had also established a medium wave (AM band) radio station in Katajanokka at the former Russian Empire Baltic Fleet officer casino (now Katajanokka Casino) in April 1923. Yle's management initially decided to use this site to transmit programming to the Helsinki region, continuing a practice begun by the Finnish Radio Association. Yle transmitted from here until 1930, when a new transmitter was constructed elsewhere in Helsinki.
Yle's primary source of revenue came from the sales of broadcast receiving licences that had been required to own and operate a radio in Finland since 1919. The licences were issued by the Finnish government, but were sold by retailers, organisations such as the Finnish Radio Association, and individual broadcasters. There was thus limited regulation on the sales side. In order to bring more order to licencing, the Parliament of Finland in 1927 passed a law turning the radio licence into a mandatory annual fee to be collected by the Postal and Telegraph Service on all Finnish households owning a radio. Additionally, parliament directed that a portion of licence fee income go to Yle and also codified into law that Yle was forbidden from airing commercial advertising.
By the end of 1927, Yle had agreements to broadcast programming on locally-owned AM radio stations in five Finnish cities, in addition to the initial station in Helsinki. Nevertheless, because these stations transmitted with low power, Yle's programming could only be heard in limited portions of Finland. The completion of the Lahti longwave transmitter in 1928 improved conditions by making Yle's broadcasts available to most of the country through longwave. By the start of the 1930s, 100,000 households had a receiving licence. Coverage was further improved throughout the 1930s by constructing AM stations in additional cities and making upgrades to existing facilities. In 1933, Yle's headquarters moved to Fabianinkatu 15, where they would stay until 1968, when they moved to Ylen Kesäkatu, and then to Iso Paja in 1993.
From private to public
At the start, Yle was owned by banks, insurance companies, and smaller groups. In total, 59 different entities were shareholders; the Finnish Radio Association owned the most number of shares overall. Wholly private ownership, however, would not last, as the path to nationalising Yle began in early 1929, when Yle declined to air programming commemorating the tenth anniversary of prohibition in Finland, citing a programme policy of political neutrality. Several newspapers and politicians reacted by accusing Yle of bias and being beholden to the commercial institutions that owned it. The Finnish parliament quickly began to discuss the matter.
After five years of debate, the administrative council representing Yle's shareholders agreed in 1934 to transfer a majority of the company's shares to the Finnish government, thereby turning Yle into a state-owned company under the supervision of the Ministry of Public Works and Transport. As majority shareholder, the ministry directed that all licence fee income go to Yle and effectively took over the annual "general meeting" where members of Yle's administrative council were elected. Moreover, Yle became the owner of all local radio stations in Finland; generally, Yle retained the local programming the stations had been airing alongside Yle programming.
International expansion
In 1937, Yle expanded into international broadcasting by constructing shortwave radio facilities in Helsinki and Lahti for testing purposes and to stake a claim for Finland on internationally allocated frequencies. Reception reports came in from around Europe and as far away as North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The results of the tests convinced Yle to construct a high-power shortwave facility. A site in Pori was selected for this purpose, with construction beginning in 1939. The new facility was to start broadcasting in time for Yle to provide extensive international broadcasts of the planned 1940 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, but the Olympics were cancelled and the outbreak of World War II prevented the facility from being built fully as intended. Nevertheless, shortwave broadcasts from Pori commenced in 1941. Following the war, Yle obtained a powerful new transmitter and constructed an antenna array technically superior to what had originally been planned. An official inauguration of the facility followed in 1948. By the end of 1950, Yle had decommissioned the Helsinki and Lahti facilities and transferred all shortwave broadcasts to Pori, where they remained until 1987, when Yle constructed a new facility in a rural setting west of Pori. Yle then used this site until completely eliminating shortwave broadcasts at the end of 2006.
Second World War
World War II impacted Yle in several ways. The large amount of new equipment Yle had purchased in anticipation of the 1940 Summer Olympics was instead directed for use in wartime programming. In terms of content, Yle temporarily suspended most light entertainment programming and shifted to an emphasis on cultural and informative programming with a serious tone. Entertainment programming that remained was strategically scheduled to compete with Finnish-language programming broadcast by Finland's adversaries. A large portion of Yle's weekly schedule during this time—up to 59% in 1941—contained programming not produced by Yle itself, but by other government entities. This included programming produced by the Finnish Defence Forces for reservists and troops serving on the front lines as well as foreign-language propaganda intended for international audiences produced by the Council of State Information Centre during the Winter War and the State Information Agency during the Continuation War. Following World War II, Yle's schedule returned to generally only airing programming produced by Yle, though foreign-language content contributed by the State Information Agency (followed by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs from 1949) remained on the shortwave service.
Read the full text
The war also affected Yle's infrastructure. The Soviet Union viewed the Lahti longwave station as strategically important to Finland and bombed the transmitter during the Winter War, forcing the station off the air for ten days. Sweden's Radiotjänst aired newscasts in Finnish in the interim. Thereafter, the Soviet Union sporadically jammed the Lahti longwave station, necessitating Yle to undertake a series of countermeasures involving varying the wavelength of the station by small increments. Yle also engaged in jamming of its own in 1942 by attempting to block Finnish reception of radio transmissions from the United Kingdom, which had declared war on Finland in December 1941. During the Continuation War, some Yle radio stations broadcast embedded Morse code signals at five-minute intervals to aid the Finnish Air Force and Luftwaffe with navigation. After Finland ceded territory in the Moscow Peace Treaty, Yle lost its transmitters and associated studios in Vyborg and Sortavala; a replacement facility was built in Lappeenranta. Yle later reactivated stations in Vyborg and Sortavala during the Continuation War, but gave them up in 1944 before the signing of the Moscow Armistice. Shortly before the beginning of the Lapland War, German troops destroyed Yle's station in Rovaniemi. No other stations were directly attacked during World War II, although Yle's transmitter building in Helsinki, headquarters in Helsinki, and station in Oulu suffered damage from nearby bombings.
Lex Jahvetti
In January 1945, Jalmar Voldemar Vakio (né Hjalmar Woldemar Walldén) resigned as Yle's director general, a position he had served in since 1927. Under company rules, the administrative council alone was to decide on his replacement. In this case, however, the decision process took place concurrent to the 1945 Finnish parliamentary election, in which the Finnish People's Democratic League (SKDL) won the second-highest number of votes and seats. The communist wing of the SKDL wanted one of its members installed as director general and, after the party's relative success in the election, was able to get Prime Minister Juho Kusti Paasikivi to lobby for the selection of Hella Wuolijoki. The administrative council ultimately obliged, naming Wuolijoki as Yle's new director general in April 1945. In the position, Wuolijoki then proceeded to discard Yle's neutral programming policy by creating programmes oriented toward communist viewpoints.
Following the 1948 Finnish parliamentary election, a campaign to reform Yle and effectively remove Wuolijoki for her actions was started by Yrjö Kilpeläinen, a member of parliament representing the Social Democratic Party of Finland who himself had hosted a popular talk show on Yle earlier in the 1940s under the pseudonym Jahvetti. His effort led to the passage of a law known as Lex Jahvetti. It gave parliament the sole authority to elect Yle's administrative council and stipulated that the council's composition was to be proportional to the partisan makeup of parliament. The first meeting of an administrative council selected under the new law took place in June 1949. Wuolijoki was immediately dismissed as director general and replaced with economist Einar Sundström, who served until 1964 and returned neutrality to Yle's programming policy.
Post-war growth and development
Driven by Yle providing extensive coverage of the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, the number of households with a radio licence went up by 68,547 that year, the largest increase on record. Also in the 1950s, Yle began building a national network of FM radio stations as a means of mitigating significant interference experienced on the crowded AM band. This network formed the basis of establishing a new service known as Rinnakkaisohjelma (the Parallel Programme). Compared to the original service, which became known as Yleisohjelma (the General Programme), the new service played more music and had a lighter tone. In 1963, the Parallel Programme began airing the light music programme Sävelradio (Melody Radio) for much of the broadcast day, in part to discourage listening to the emergent offshore radio stations at the time. As even more FM stations came online, another service was launched for the Swedish-speaking coastal regions of Finland to provide a consistent, daily schedule of Swedish programming that contrasted with the irregular scheduling of Swedish content in the General Programme. By the end of the 1960s, Yle had enough active transmitters to allow both the Parallel Programme and the General Programme to be heard on FM throughout most of Finland. Meanwhile, the original AM network was initially kept in operation airing either the General Programme or Swedish programming, but over time AM transmitters were gradually eliminated, with the final one turned off by 2007.
In October 1956, Yle made its first television transmission tests. These continued regularly through 1957 and included a broadcast in February of an ice hockey match between Sweden and Finland as well as the first telecast of the Independence Day Reception at the Presidential Palace on 6 December. Regular television broadcasting began 1 January 1958 under the name Suomen Televisio (Finland's Television), which was later renamed Yle TV1. Like with radio, a licence fee was established for all households owning a television set. Television grew rapidly and was available to 90% of Finland's population by the end of 1962. In 1964, Yle acquired the nearly-bankrupt commercial television channel Tesvisio in Helsinki and its related channel Tamvision in Tampere. Both were merged to become Yle's second television channel, now known as Yle TV2. The headquarters for the channel were placed in Tampere after the city's leadership allocated a site near Tohloppi for the construction of appropriate facilities. In 1969, Yle began test broadcasts of colour television using the PAL standard, but due to high cost, colour only became standard in the late 1970s. On 1 May 1977, Tv-uutiset (TV-news) and TV-nytt switched to colour.
Yle had joined the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) as a founding member in 1950, but its involvement was limited to radio until 1960, when it was connected by microwave via Stockholm to Eurovision and began to participate in programme exchange. It participated in the Eurovision Song Contest for the first time in 1961. Yle was also a founding member of the International Radio and Television Organisation (OIRT) in 1946 and participated in the Intervision programme exchange as the only broadcaster that was ever simultaneously a full member of both the OIRT and the EBU. Additionally, Yle became a founding member of Nordvision in 1959.
The Repo years
After Einar Sundström stepped down in 1964, Yle's administrative council selected former print journalist Eino S. Repo to be the next director general. Whereas previous directors general served indefinitely, new rules put in place right before this selection moved the position to a five-year term under a political mandate, renewable at the administrative council's discretion. Repo was within the inner circle of President Urho Kekkonen and was therefore backed by the Agrarian League, led by Kekkonen. Under Repo's leadership, the size of Yle increased significantly, going from 600 employees at the start of his term to 3,400 at the end. This increase was tied to a general growth in revenue at the time due to increased ownership of television sets, including of colour sets, which from 1969 were assessed a higher licence fee than black-and-white ones.
Yle's growth under Repo was consequential. For one, Yle began producing its own radio newscasts in 1965, ending the monopoly the Finnish News Agency (STT) had on radio newscast production up to that point (Yle began producing its own television newscasts in 1959). Next, Repo went on to transform the type of programming Yle aired, especially on television, where the amount of mass-appeal entertainment programming was decreased to make way for artistic and informational programming designed to "stimulate thought" around "new ways of seeing reality" and educate audiences to Finland's heritage and culture. Underlying what was called an "informational broadcasting policy" was Repo's pluralistic belief in providing a neutral platform for the expression of all views on a subject, even views considered radical.
Repo's time as director general ended in 1969 after the administrative council opted not to renew his term. He was, however, appointed to a deputy position in charge of radio, a role he served in until 1974. His tenure as director general was controversial, with Yle earning the pejorative nickname "Reporadio" due to his programming policy, for which he was accused of favouring leftist student radicalism and young left-leaning reporters with programmes critical of capitalism that demanded reforms to bring Finland closer to the Soviet Union. In response, parliament soon reduced the power of Yle's director general and passed a law prescribing criminal penalties for the "abuse of broadcasting responsibility". Nevertheless, the size of Yle did not decrease after Repo's term and his programming strategies continued to shape Yle's journalistic work culture into the late 1980s.
Strengthening regional and minority-language services
Although Yle had aired regional radio programming ever since taking over local stations in 1934, such programming was disorganized and inconsistent from one region to another. Several reforms carried out beginning in the late 1960s attempted to change this. In 1968, regional radio newscasts were introduced across 16 regional divisions. Regional content was further bolstered in the 1970s through the addition of current affairs programming and documentaries. By 1975, Yle began introducing regional radio services operating on their own frequencies separate from the General and Parallel Programmes. Such services, though, only carried regional programming for part of the day, typically in the morning. By the 1980s, regional studios began getting equipped to contribute content to Yle's national television programmes as well.
Services in minority languages were also strengthened during the 1970s. In 1978, the Swedish-language radio service became a full-service network resembling the General Programme, but with content fully in Swedish. Previously, only part of the Swedish service's schedule actually broadcast programming in Swedish; Finnish-language programming aired during gaps. Programming in the Sámi languages was improved in 1973 when Yle opened a studio in Inari and established a Sámi-speaking editorial position there. Yle had been airing content in the Sámi languages since 1948, but in limited quantities broadcast initially from Oulu, then from Rovaniemi beginning in 1960. The distance of both cities to the Sámi homeland of Finland made reception of the programming difficult for its intended audience. The situation was alleviated by moving production to Inari and later establishing a separate FM network—now known as Yle Sámi Radio—in northernmost Lapland for Sámi programming.
The monopoly comes to an end
In radio, Yle was a de facto monopoly from the time of nationalisation until 1985, when local radio stations were permitted, and maintained a national monopoly until 1995, when commercial national radio networks were allowed. In television, Yle had a monopoly on transmission infrastructure and broadcast licences—but not programming—from 1964 until 1986, when the television channel Kolmoskanava launched as a joint venture between Yle, Nokia, and the commercial broadcaster MTV (Oy Mainos-TV-Reklam Ab), which had existed since 1957. Previously, MTV programming aired exclusively on Yle's television channels under an arrangement whereby MTV purchased airtime from Yle, mostly in prime time. This setup reduced the burden of the licence fee alone in funding Yle's operations and accounted for over 20% of Yle's annual revenue by the late 1980s.
From Wikipedia’s article on Yle, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5