Cold War radio and the Hungarian Uprising, 1956

Conspiracy Theories as a Russian Public Diplomacy Tool: The Case of Russia Today (RT)

“…The Cold War terrain provided multiple chances for the two opposing ideological blocs to master their public diplomacy instruments. The British and American governments have been long-term players in this field, promoting their cultures through such mediators as the BBC World Service and the US Information Agency (Cull, 2009; Webb, 2012; 2014). Soviet public diplomacy actively promoted the communist ideology through a number of international news agencies, such as TASS ( Telegrafnoe agentstvo Sovetskogo Soiuza ) and APN ( Agentstsvo pechati Novosti ) (Shultz and Godson, 1984).…”

The Spirit of Radio: Hungary 1956, Radio Free Europe, and the Shadow Public Sphere

“…In the 1950s, the struggle for hearts and minds was waged on the airwaves: broadcasts by Radio Free Europe (RFE), Voice of America (VOA), Radio In the American Sector (RIAS) and Armed Forces Network (AFN) augmented the foreign policy and cloak-and-dagger skullduggery of both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Most histories of American broadcasting to the Eastern Bloc (many of them written by former employees of American broadcasting organizations) implicitly assume that American stations simply "broadcast freedom," and that Eastern European listeners thereby readily absorbed the evanescent values of liberty, civil society, and democracy (see, e.g., Urban 1997, Puddington 2000, Heil 2003; for more nuanced approaches, see Hixson 1996, Pittaway 2003, Webb 2013. Radio Free Europe was unique among these foreign voices, inasmuch as its architects intended that it serve American foreign policy objectives by taking on the role of "surrogate national stations" for Eastern Bloc countries.…”