Book review: Radio Happy Isles: Media and Politics at Play in the Pacific

Seward, Robert (1999) Radio Happy Isles: Media and Politics at Play in the Pacific, University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu. 236 pp. ISBN 0-8248 2014-2 Reviewed by Richard Phillipps Now he lives in Tokyo and New York,but readers of Radio Happy Isles get the impression that Robert Seward would rather be doing what he did when he researched this book: meandering across the Pacific, listening to local radio wherever he went. He recorded broadcasts, sat in newsrooms, met the people who ran the stations and those who listened. These are the island stations where personal paid messages (like classifieds in newspapers) are often the main revenue stream, where one person might run the whole station, where local talk and music might be much greater a percentage of airtime than stations in Australia or New Zealand - simply because imported content that costs money can't be afforded.