OPINION AND ANALYSIS Cold War Radio Museum By Ted Lipien Note: The article has been updated to include information that Heda Margolius Kovály had worked in the 1970s as a freelance reporter for the Voice of America Czechoslovak Service under a radio name Kaca Kralova. A declassified CIA report from 1953 featured a claim by a still unidentified Slovak source…
August 1, 2015 marked the 71 anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Uprising, a 63-day unsuccessful operation by the Polish resistance Home Army (Polish: Armia Krajowa) to liberate Warsaw from Nazi Germany. About 16,000 Polish fighters were killed and between 150,000 and 200,000 Polish civilians died, mostly from mass executions. After the Home Army capitulation in Warsaw, the Germans…
In a paper published by the Public Diplomacy Council, Alan L. Heil Jr., a former deputy director of VOA, the author of Voice of America: A History, argues for a multi-platform U.S. international broadcasting that in addition to new media takes advantage of both radio and television. In his paper LANDSCAPE OF INTERNATIONAL BROADCASTING VOA and the BBC at a…
Русская служба Би-би-си существенно сократит количество радиопрограмм The Russian Service of the BBC, which provides news and information to Russian-speaking audiences not only in Russia but also in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Ukraine and the Baltic States, will end its on-air radio broadcasts as part of a budget cutting move. The BBC announcement was made shortly after the violent suppression…
Thirty-one years ago this week, on 7 September 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian émigré journalist who wrote for Radio Free Europe, BBC and Deutsche Welle, was assaulted in broad daylight on London’s Waterloo Bridge. Markov’s murder happened during the Cold War, but in more recent years the murder of Anna Politkovskaya and of numerous other journalists in Russia, as well…
Thirty-one years ago this week, on 7 September 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian émigré journalist who wrote for Radio Free Europe, BBC and Deutsche Welle, was assaulted in broad daylight on London’s Waterloo Bridge. Markov’s murder happened during the Cold War, but in more recent years the murder of Anna Politkovskaya and of numerous other journalists in Russia, as well…
Miro Dobrovodsky passed away on July 23, 2009. FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog Commentary by Ted Lipien, March 25, 2009, San Francisco — Miro Dobrovodsky, one of the best journalists who came to the U.S. from Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War to escape media censorship in their native countries, sent me an email pointing out that the process of silencing the Voice of America…
FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog, March 16, 2009, San Francisco — BBC has recently made some reductions in its Russian-language radio broadcasts, but unlike the Voice of America (VOA), the British public broadcaster did not completely eliminate radio programs to Russia. The termination of VOA radio to Russia, which occurred last July, just 12 days before Russia invaded Georgia,…
FreeMediaOnline.org and Free Media Online Blog November 5, 2008, San Francisco — The worldwide press freedom organization, Reporters Without Borders, has sent a letter to President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev appealing to him to intervene after the National Broadcasting Council announced it planned to take three foreign radios stations off the FM band by 2009. They are the BBC, Radio Free…
FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog The Federalist Commentary, October 16, 2008, San Francisco — “May you live in interesting times.” No one knows with certainty if this proverb is a famous Chinese curse or not. However, one can certainly accept the fact that these times are indeed interesting…meaning troubled…in many spheres including economics and international broadcasting. While the fine points…
FreeMediaOnline.org and Free Media Online Blog October 8, 2008, San Francisco — Unlike the Voice of America (VOA), which had eliminated radio broadcasts to Russia shortly before the Russian invasion of Georgia, the BBC has decided to continue producing Russian-language radio programs while also expanding its Internet and video production. FreeMediaOnline.org has obtained the details of the new British broadcasting strategy for Russia, which was announced by…
FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog September 24, 2008, San Francisco — A U.S. broadcaster is denied access to a radio frequency in the Russian capital. The censor in this case is not the Kremlin, as one might expect, but the U.S. government agency which manages U.S. taxpayer-funded international broadcasts. The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) is preventing the Voice of America (VOA) from using…
FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog Commentary by Ted Lipien, September 22, 2008, San Francisco — The Broadcasting Board of Governors staff led by the BBG executive director Jeff Trimble touts its new program delivery strategy for the Voice of America in Russia as a “New Media” solution using the Internet. Their hidden objective, however, has been to eliminate VOA Russian radio not only from the still available…
FreeMediaOnline.org, August 24, 2008, San Francisco — The Tickle File, ftm’s (www.followthemedia.com) daily column of media news, asks about the absence on the airwaves of BBG Georgian and VOA Russian. FTM reported that “VOA has just dumped its Russian language broadcast service (great timing but it still has a Russian language web site).” The BBC still has the Russian language radio…