1 February – WKYC-AM in Cleveland (today WTAM) alters its Top 40 format to "Power Radio," a "more music"–style presentation derivative of Drake-Chenuault.
18 March – KMPX program director Tom Donahue turns in his resignation, citing conflicts with station management. Staff at both KMPX and sister station KPPC in Pasadena, angered by the move, start a strike that lasts eight weeks.
15 April – KNX (AM) in Los Angeles, a CBS RadioO&O, switches to an all-news format.
10 May – The government of France issues an order prohibiting the state broadcaster ORTF from televising the May 68 student demonstrations in Paris, but ORTF radio correspondents are allowed to make live reports and the independent Radio Luxembourg sends its own journalists to France and keeps them there despite harassment from the French police.[3] Because of the live broadcasts, news of the rebellion spread from Paris to the rest of France and to media around the world.[4]
15 May – The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency shuts down Radio Americas, a station that had gone on the air in 1960 as part of a campaign against Cuba's leader, Fidel Castro. Originally called "Radio Swan" because its transmitter was located on one of the uninhabited Swan Islands, Honduras, the station "spearheaded anti-Castro rumor campaigns" and even "supplied its listeners with sabotage instructions".[5]
21 May – In San Francisco, Metromedia purchases classical music KSFR, changes the call letters to KSAN, and hires former KMPX program director Tom Donahue to head the new progressive rock/freeform format.
June – ABC Radio hires Allen Shaw from WCFL in Chicago to develop an all-automated rock format for their FM stations, which results in the "Love" format. The stations involved were WABC-FM (now WPLJ) in New York, WLS-FM in Chicago, KGO-FM (now KOSF) in San Francisco, KQV-FM (now WDVE) in Pittsburgh, WXYZ-FM (now WRIF) in Detroit, KXYZ-FM (now KHMX) in Houston, and KABC-FM (now KLOS) in Los Angeles.
5 June – New York SenatorRobert F. Kennedyis assassinated in the Ambassador Hotel shortly after midnight PST (10.00 GMT), following a victory in the California primary election for the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States. Reporter Andrew West of Mutual Broadcasting System radio affiliate KRKD in Los Angeles (now KEIB), intended to capture an exclusive interview with the senator, but instead captured on audio tape the sounds of the immediate aftermath of the shooting (but not the actual shooting itself). With a reel-to-reel tape recorder and attached microphone, West also provided an on-the-spot account of the struggle with assassin Sirhan Sirhan in the hotel's kitchen pantry,[6] which was relayed to the entire Mutual network, and was a watershed moment in news coverage of U.S. presidential campaigns.
10 June – KMET in Los Angeles starts airing four hours of progressive rock in the nighttime, programmed by KSAN's Tom and Raechel Donahue. It eventually goes to a full-time format as "The Mighty MET."
2 August: DZAQ-AM's coverage of the aftermath of the 1968 Casiguran earthquake in the Philippines, relayed on ABS-CBN Corporation's DZAQ-TV, would become the first ever join radio-TV news coverage ever in the country. In recognition of its vital role in the Metro Manila coverage, the corporation would later ask station management to reformat it to a full service news radio station the following month.
28 September – WHK-FM in Cleveland, the last FM station in the Metromedia chain to launch a progressive rock/freeform format, changes its calls to WMMS, derivative of their owner.
1 2 Cox, Jim (2008). This Day in Network Radio: A Daily Calendar of Births, Debuts, Cancellations and Other Events in Broadcasting History. McFarland & Company, Inc. ISBN978-0-7864-3848-8. P. 5.
↑ "Sensorial Techniques of the Self: From the Jouissance of May '68 to the Economy of the Delay", in The Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives, ed. by Daniel J. Sherman, et al. (Indiana University Press, 2013) p. 320
↑ "May 1968 in France: The Rise and Fall of a New Social Movement", by Ingrid Gilcher Holtey, in 1968: The World Transformed (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
↑ Elliston, Jon (1999). Psywar on Cuba. Ocean Press. p.195.
↑ West, Andrew (5 June 1968). "RFK Assassinated". University of Maryland/Library of American Broadcasting. Archived from the original(Audio) on 22 January 2009. Retrieved 19 August 2007.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.