Wednesday 1 April 2009

Radio-Free Europe & Radio Liberty

Radio-Free Europe & Radio Liberty

Radio Free Europe & Radio Liberty is an independent international broadcast organization that provides uncensored news, information, and analysis to countries where free media is often limited or banned, and they reach 25 million listeners and readers in 20 countries. Radio Free Europe was created and grew in its early years through the efforts of the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), an organization that was formed in New York City in 1949 as a response to the growing number of refugees, many of them intellectuals, fleeing Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe.

It was developed out of a belief that the Cold War would eventually be fought by political rather than military means, and American policymakers such as George Kennan and John Foster Dulles acknowledged that the Cold War was essentially a war of ideas. The United States, acting through the CIA, funded a long list of projects to counter the Communist appeal among intellectuals in Europe and the developing world, and in late 1950, Radio-Free Europe began to assemble a full-fledged foreign broadcast staff, becoming more than a "mouthpiece for exiles". Teams of journalists were hired for each language service and an elaborate system of intelligence gathering provided up-to-date broadcast material. Most of this material came from a network of well-connected émigrés and interviews with travelers and defectors and Radio-Free Europe played a critical role in Cold War era Eastern Europe. Its listenership increased substantially following the failed Berlin riots of 1953 and the highly publicized defection of Józef Swiatlo. Its Hungarian service's coverage of Poland's Poznan riots in 1956 served as an inspiration for the Hungarian revolution. At the time, Radio-Free Europe was accused of precipitating the revolution by giving its Hungarian listeners false hope of Western military assistance. Broadcasts were often banned in Eastern Europe and Communist authorities used sophisticated jamming techniques to prevent citizens from listening to them. Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and Russian reformer Grigory Yavlinsky would later recall secretly listening to the broadcasts despite the heavy jamming. Communist governments also sent agents to infiltrate Radio-Free Europe’s headquarters. Some of these agents remained on staff for extended periods of time, but the communist government authorities discouraged their agents from interfering with broadcast activity, fearing that this could arouse suspicions and detract from their original purpose of gathering information on the radios' activities. In 1965-71 an agent of the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa successfully infiltrated the station with an operative, Capt. Andrzej Czechowicz. According to former Voice of America Polish service director Ted Lipien, "Czechowicz is perhaps the most well known communist-era Polish spy who was still an active agent while working at Radio-Free Europe in the late 1960s. Technically, he was not a journalist, and was a historian by training, and he worked in the RFE’s media analysis service in Munich. After more than five years, Czechowicz returned to Poland in 1971 and participated in propaganda programs aimed at embarrassing Radio Free Europe and the United States government” None of these intimidation tactics changed the radios’ message, making them largely unsuccessful.

The CIA stopped funding Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in 1972. In 1974 they came under the control of an organization called the Board for International Broadcasting (BIB). The BIB was designed to receive appropriations from Congress, give them to radio managements, and oversee the appropriation of funds. Funding for RFE/RL increased during the Reagan Administration. President Reagan, was a fervent opponent of Communism, and urged the radios to be more critical of the Communist regimes.

During the Gorbachev Administration, the radios worked hand in hand with Glasnost and benefited significantly from the administration's new openness. Gorbachev stopped the practice of jamming and the radios could for the first time freely interview dissident politicians or officials without sentencing their interviewees to several years in a gulag. By 1990 Radio Liberty had become the most listened-to Western radio station broadcasting to the Soviet Union Its coverage of the 1991 August coup enriched sparse domestic coverage of the event and drew in a wide audience from throughout the region The broadcasts allowed Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to stay in touch with the Russian people during this turbulent period. Boris Yeltsin later expressed his gratitude through a presidential decree allowing Radio Liberty to open a permanent bureau in Moscow.

Radio-Free Europe currently serves as a surrogate free press in regions where uncensored information is often difficult to find. Although it maintains bureaus in 19 countries, authoritarian governments often slow down the radios' activities through a variety of tactics often involving technicalities such as fire or health inspections. Radio-Free Europe is often the first to cover key events in these countries and ironically, their governments often receive valuable information through these broadcasts. It maintains a network of 750 freelancers who often risk their lives to broadcast balanced and reliable information to their listeners and readers. Radio-Free Europe continues to struggle with authoritarian regimes for permission to broadcast freely within their countries.

Starting on the 1st of January 2009, Azerbaijan imposed a ban on all foreign media in the country, including Radio-Free Europe and Kyrgyzstan has also suspended broadcasts of Radio Azattyk, Radio-Free Europe's Kyrgyz language service, requesting that the government be able to pre-approve its programming. Other states such as Belarus, Iran, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan also prohibit re-broadcasting to local stations, making programming difficult for average listeners to access.

With the spread of the internet, there are ample opportunities for people in countries that have authorities governments to not only hear 'free' broadcasts by tuning into KryKey Personal Web Radio, but also setting up their own and reporting from them these countries.

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