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Western democracy is currently under attack by a resurgent Russia,
weaponizing new technologies and social media. How to respond?
During the Cold War, the West fought off similar Soviet propaganda
assaults with shortwave radio broadcasts. Founded in 1949, the
US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcast uncensored
information to the Soviet republics in their own languages. About
one-third of Soviet urban adults listened to Western radio. The
broadcasts played a key role in ending the Cold War and eroding the
communist empire. R. Eugene Parta was for many years the director
of Soviet Area Audience Research at RFE/RL, charged among others
with gathering listener feedback. In this book he relates a
remarkable Cold War operation to assess the impact of Western radio
broadcasts on Soviet listeners by using a novel survey research
approach. Given the impossibility of interviewing Soviet citizens
in their own country, it pioneered audacious interview methods in
order to fly under the radar and talk to Soviets traveling abroad,
ultimately creating a database of 51,000 interviews which offered
unparalleled insights into the media habits and mindset of the
Soviet public. By recounting how the "impossible" mission was
carried out, Under the Radar also shows how the lessons of the past
can help counter the threat from a once and current adversary.
The book examines the role of Western broadcasting to the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, with a focus on Radio
Free Europe and Radio Liberty. It includes chapters by radio
veterans and by scholars who have conducted research on the subject
in once-secret Soviet bloc archives and in Western records. It also
contains a selection of translated documents from formerly secret
Soviet and East European archives, most of them published here for
the first time.
A pariah during the Cold War, Radio Liberty was ultimately accepted
as a legitimate participant on the Russian media scene by the
authorities themselves. How did it happen that Radio Liberty-once
the most vilified of Western broadcasters in the Soviet Union-had
amassed such a vast audience that it was able to experience its
finest hour defending the same democratic forces that it had
nurtured over almost four decades of broadcasting?Based on more
than 50,000 interviews conducted with Soviet citizens traveling
outside the USSR during the period 1972-1990, this book attempts to
answer the question from the listeners' perspective: How many
listeners were there? Who were they? Why did they listen? How did
they listen? What did the broadcasts mean to them? Did they make a
difference? The author addresses audience size and listening trends
over time, the position Western radio occupied in the Soviet media
environment, listeners' demographic traits and attitudes, the
evolution of the image of different Western broadcasters, and
listeners' programming preferences. Through six brief case studies,
he also looks at the role of Western radio in various crisis
situations. The book concludes with some observations about the
ultimate impact of Western radio and Radio Liberty-what they
actually meant to their listeners and how their influence may have
inspired or reinforced other tendencies at work in the USSR as it
moved toward a freer society.
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