FOCUS ON PUBLIC DIPLOMACY
CHANNELING THE COLD WAR:
U.S. OVERSEAS BROADCASTING
he democratic revolutions
that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 came to a stunning and
violent end on Christmas Day in Romania with the execution of President Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena.
One of the first to learn was Gerd Kallhardt, a translator of
the dictator’s speeches for Munich-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. As the broadcasts streamed in from
Bucharest, Kallhardt and a colleague tried to come to grips
with the news. “We looked at each other and said: ‘What
happens now? Communism is dead. There is no more
use for the radio,’” Kallhardt recalled several years later.
That sentiment reverberated more loudly at the end of
1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. A triumphal
period for the U.S.-funded stations like RFE/RL and the
Voice of America soon gave way to uncertainty and what
looked like the death knell for a number of language services. Barely one year after the Soviet disintegration, the
U.S. government moved to cut RFE/RL’s roughly $220
million budget by two-thirds. By the end of the decade,
overall funding for international broadcasting had dropped
T
THE NEED FOR A CLEAR MISSION IS AS APPLICABLE
TODAY IN REACHING MUSLIMS AROUND THE WORLD
AS IT WAS WITH SOVIET-BLOC AUDIENCES.
BY ROBERT MCMAHON
Robert McMahon is editor of CFR.org, the Web site of the
Council on Foreign Relations. He worked for Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty from 1992 to 2005 in a range of senior editorial jobs, including terms as director of central
news and United Nations correspondent.
significantly, and the Clinton administration and Congress agreed on broader
cutbacks to the U.S. public
diplomacy apparatus.
Yet two decades after the
Berlin Wall came down,
RFE/RL is thriving in a
sparkling new headquarters in the Czech capital of
Prague, broadcasting around
the clock to new “target”
countries such as Iran and Afghanistan. Another post–Cold
War entity, Radio Free Asia, was set up in the late 1990s
according to RFE/RL’s “surrogate” model and broadcasts to
nine authoritarian states, including China. Prompted by
surging interest in reaching Muslim audiences after the
9/11 attacks, Congress approved the creation of Arabic-lan-guage satellite television station Alhurra and substantially
increased funding for initiatives like television broadcasts
to Iran and radio transmissions to tribal areas of Pakistan.
Doug Ross
Expanded funding for Persian-language television
(VOA’s Persian News Network) and radio (RFE/RL’s
Radio Farda) was credited by a number of media experts
with placing U.S. broadcasters in the forefront of international media efforts to inform Iranians when mass protests
