The Power of Shortwave Radio. And, What Gets Lost with Voice of America?

Speaker 1 We are going to be slimming this agency down, way down. It's going on an Ozempic diet.

Speaker 2 The Trump administration has been gutting the broadcasting service Voice of America. From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.
I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Speaker 3 And I'm Micah Loewinger. But Republicans once wanted VOA to be as big as possible.

Speaker 4 We're as far behind the Soviets and their allies in international broadcasting today as we were in space when they launched Sputnik in 1957.

Speaker 2 Radio Free Europe also risks losing funding. A journalist who spent time in a Russian prison for her work with it grapples with the fallout.

Speaker 6 I'll be talking to the families of our imprisoned journalists these days. What am I gonna tell them that their loved ones are imprisoned for nothing?

Speaker 3 It's all coming up after this.

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Speaker 3 From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Michael Loewinger.

Speaker 2 And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The voice of America is still alive, but just barely.

Speaker 2 This month, Michael Abramowicz, the director of the VOA, was fired after refusing to accept what he called an illegal reassignment to a lower position.

Speaker 2 Abramowicz has been an outspoken critic of the Trump administration's moves to dismantle the government broadcasting service.

Speaker 2 Leading those efforts has been Carrie Lake, the former TV host, now a special advisor to the United States Agency for Global Media, which oversees the service.

Speaker 1 We are going to be slimming this agency down, way down. It's going on an Ozempic diet.
The rot is so bad, it's like having a rotten fish and trying to find a little portion you can eat.

Speaker 1 It's unsalvageable right now.

Speaker 2 It's not the first time the VOA has been explicitly politicized. Ronald Reagan did it back in the 80s.

Speaker 2 But in fact, over the past century, radio has played a vital role in much of the nation's engagements in soft power.

Speaker 2 That story about the role AM radio played throughout the last century is how we launched the second season of The Divided Dial, our award-winning series hosted by reporter Katie Thornton.

Speaker 2 With the VOA back in the news, we thought it was definitely worth a revisit.

Speaker 3 Here's Katie.

Speaker 10 Z with Transoceanics.

Speaker 11 This is such a cool radio with the little...

Speaker 11 Last summer, I met met up with a journalist and radio fan named David Gorin.

Speaker 10 These are like beautiful radio tough for a few years.

Speaker 11 I went to his house in Brooklyn, New York, so that we could listen to the radio together.

Speaker 11 Not any old radio, not AM or FM, nothing you can pick up in your car, but shortwave radio, the little-known cousin of AM and FM, with fuzzy stations that can reach insanely far distances.

Speaker 11 David's been listening to shortwave since he was a kid in the 70s when his uncle gave him a radio.

Speaker 10 And I turned it on, and it's like the radio leapt out of my hand with the North American service of Radio Moscow.

Speaker 11 Suddenly, the world was all within reach, available to him right there in this box.

Speaker 10 In the seventh grade, I became the expert on the next five-year plan in the Soviet Union, the economic plan.

Speaker 11 Today, he's part of the Library of Congress's Radio Preservation Task Force. And together, on a sweaty Thursday afternoon last July,

Speaker 11 we sat down to hear what we could find on the shortwave dial today.

Speaker 11 Just like when David was a kid, we heard lots of government-run stations like Radio Marti,

Speaker 13 the U.S.

Speaker 10 broadcasting news and information to Cuba. Reserve Islamic Republic of Iran, China Radio International, broadcasting in Spanish.
Let's see, anything else strong?

Speaker 15 No, worth of Italy, broadcast in Italian.

Speaker 11 On other days, David has picked up English language shows from North Korea.

Speaker 10 And they have very strident, you know, military stuff.

Speaker 11 And news from Cuba.

Speaker 10 This is Radio Rebelde, Radio Rebel.

Speaker 10 And it goes back to the revolution.

Speaker 11 On the short waves, the global tussle for influence plays out 24-7.

Speaker 11 But we didn't just hear news and propaganda.

Speaker 13 Well, let's just go at the dance.

Speaker 10 We'll talk about some worse good.

Speaker 11 There were beeps and bloops.

Speaker 14 Here we go.

Speaker 11 Coded messages sent between amateur radio operators or between government officials who used the shortwaves to send military data or secret instructions.

Speaker 10 Let's see what else we have.

Speaker 11 And some of what we heard just sounded like normal radio with lots of music

Speaker 11 and preaching.

Speaker 16 Strong in the Lord and the power of his might against the wiles of the devil.

Speaker 17 It was hidden just to hide the meaning and the power of the divine name.

Speaker 11 That's an end times ministry that also preaches that the earth is flat.

Speaker 13 Which is very interesting because

Speaker 10 shortwave radio wouldn't propagate in a flat earth, you know, but

Speaker 13 details, details.

Speaker 11 In just about an hour of surfing the shortwaves, we heard prayer and propaganda, news and conspiracy theories, so many languages, and some really decent jams from all over the globe.

Speaker 11 I felt like I had been welcomed into a club that was somehow secret and yet right there for anyone to join.

Speaker 11 And I know it's cliché, but there was something magical about tuning into the world, training my ear to listen through the crackle, hearing the distance.

Speaker 11 As it turns out, this practice of scanning the dial, finding out what you can hear and from how far away, is a century-old art. It was popular among radio's early adopters.

Speaker 11 These early distance fiends, as they were known, uncovered something very strange about how radio waves traveled through space.

Speaker 11 And what broadcasters did with that information completely altered the trajectory of the 20th century.

Speaker 11 This is season two of The Divided Dial. I'm your host, Katie Thornton.
I've worked in radio since I was a teenager, sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes behind the mic.

Speaker 11 In season one, I investigated how right-wing talk took over AMN FM radio. But in all my years of radio research, I'd never really learned about shortwave radio before.

Speaker 11 And listen, I'm not going to tell you that shortwave radio is as influential today as the AMN FM talk radio we covered in season one. It's not.
But I, and I think you, love the medium of radio.

Speaker 11 So this season, we're diving into the often failed promise of a medium that was once ubiquitous, connecting people around the world long before the internet ever did.

Speaker 11 But like the internet, shortwave also took a turn for the chaotic. Over the next four episodes, I'm going to explain how shortwave radio became a propaganda tool for governments at war.

Speaker 11 and then a propaganda tool for American right-wing extremists and cults.

Speaker 11 And we'll explore what a little-known battle playing out on the shortwaves right now between radio fanatics and Wall Street can tell us about what happens when we cede control of our public airwaves.

Speaker 11 That's all coming up on this season of the Divided Dial.

Speaker 11 But let's get back to the story.

Speaker 11 Radio broadcasting, as in from one to many, it didn't start on shortwave. It started on AM, taking off around 1920, and AM was inherently local.

Speaker 11 Signals reached up to 50, maybe 75 miles.

Speaker 16 By the way, downtakes way, your home state can take a bow, you know.

Speaker 14 I will.

Speaker 11 But at night, those listening at home noticed something strange.

Speaker 11 As the sun set, more stations emerged from the static.

Speaker 11 And they weren't coming from down the street or the next town over sometimes listeners in New York Edison studio

Speaker 11 located at one one would hear stations from Chicago

Speaker 11 a listener in Kansas might hear an opera or a boxing match from the East Coast

Speaker 11 after dark it was like the world cracked open and distant stations faded in and out on ghostly mysterious winds

Speaker 11 Most people had never heard a faraway voice, period.

Speaker 11 Long-distance telephone calls were the costly domain of dignitaries and government officials, and even those were fed across long, scratchy copper lines.

Speaker 11 A disembodied voice, without a wire, without a fee, from hundreds of miles away, that awed and baffled people.

Speaker 11 Even scientists, some of whom believed that radio, perhaps, could be used to communicate with the dead.

Speaker 11 But of course, there was an explanation for these voices in the night.

Speaker 20 Let us follow through the steps and the processes in transmitting or sending radio messages.

Speaker 11 Here's what was happening. The way AM normally works is that radio waves get shot from the top of a tall tower, which is often on top of a tall hill.

Speaker 20 The radio messages leave the antenna as electromagnetic waves and travel with the speed of light.

Speaker 11 The waves travel over the ground, basically line of sight, from the tower to you. It's called a ground wave, and it's the thing that fades out a few dozen miles from the tower.

Speaker 11 But when you shoot out an AM signal, there's another thing that happens, almost a byproduct.

Speaker 20 Radio waves are set up in all directions.

Speaker 11 It's called a sky wave, and the sky wave goes up into the atmosphere.

Speaker 21 The lower layers of the ionosphere, which are about 45 to 75 miles above the Earth's surface, they're like a huge sponge during the day and they absorb the signals that pass through them.

Speaker 11 Susan Douglas is a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan. She says that these lower layers of the atmosphere are made up of ions that get all charged up by the sun.

Speaker 11 And in the daylight, those layers are where radio waves go to die.

Speaker 21 But at night, when the sun sets, these layers disappear, and the ones above them combine to form a dense layer, and it acts like a mirror to sky waves.

Speaker 11 At night, these sky waves, the sort of byproduct of AM transmission, they keep going until they bounce off this other layer of the ionosphere and they come back down to Earth vast distances away.

Speaker 20 When these waves strike the antenna of a receiving set, this entire process is reversed.

Speaker 20 We hear sound originating at that very moment, hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

Speaker 11 That's what these late night AM radio listeners were hearing. A radio wave that had ricocheted off the ionosphere to get to them.

Speaker 11 And it rocked their world. Long-distance channel surfing became a fad called fishing in the night, with listeners casting out into the ether and seeing what they could catch.

Speaker 21 They had a map on the wall with map tacks, and every time they reeled in a station, they would put a map tag on where that broadcast emanated from. Was it Kansas City?

Speaker 21 Was it Washington, D.C., wherever?

Speaker 11 Radio manufacturers ran ads with slogans like, concerts from 14 cities in one evening.

Speaker 11 In newspaper editorials, distressed housewives and sometimes husbands lamented that their significant other was spending every evening out in their radio shack.

Speaker 11 But while AM broadcast listeners burned the midnight oil to marvel at all the faraway stations, there was one group of people who weren't so surprised by radio's ability to go long.

Speaker 11 They were the amateur radio operators, what you might know as ham radio.

Speaker 11 Basically, guys who weren't broadcasting, but were tinkering with radio equipment just to chat, one-to-one, like long-distance walkie-talkies.

Speaker 11 Back in the days before broadcasting, almost all radio transmission was one-to-one. The radio waves were mostly used by ship captains or the military, and the hams, who were just having fun.

Speaker 11 But in World War I, the U.S.

Speaker 11 government got worried about interference on those AM airwaves, so they eventually assigned specific frequencies for ships, for the military, and for those meddling amateurs.

Speaker 21 They were kicked down to the waves that were thought utterly worthless, short waves.

Speaker 11 Back then, people thought the short waves with short wavelengths, picture a really tight, squiggly line, just wouldn't go very far.

Speaker 11 Even Guglielmo Marconi, the father of radio, thought that longer wavelengths would mean longer distances. But the amateurs weren't put off.

Speaker 21 They began experimenting with them.

Speaker 11 And as it turned out, the short waves weren't the short end of the stick.

Speaker 21 They were getting really far. They were getting stations in Australia, New Zealand, or stations in England and France.

Speaker 11 For the most part, reception was clearer at night, but it didn't have to be dark to go the distance.

Speaker 21 Amateurs reported spanning distances as great as 10,000 miles, which was unthinkable. Australia and New Zealand were described in the fall of 1923 as a bedlam of Yankee signals.

Speaker 11 The amateurs proved something huge. Shortwave could do round the clock what AM could only do at night.
It could use the ionosphere as a springboard.

Speaker 11 And this changed the game for AM broadcasters who wanted their station to reach more people.

Speaker 11 In 1923, Pittsburgh's KDKA, the country's first commercial radio station, they got their station on shortwave and reached as far as South Africa.

Speaker 11 New shortwave stations started up in Switzerland and Japan and Venezuela. And with the scars of World War I still fresh, this burgeoning international medium was a source of hope.

Speaker 22 There was a lot of utopian discourse around radio that, you know, having allowed people to communicate across all these borders, you know, would there be no more wars?

Speaker 11 Michelle Hilms is a retired professor of media studies who has written a lot about radio.

Speaker 22 It would, you know, solve all kinds of problems. Just a huge enthusiasm over the possibilities of shortwave as a medium.

Speaker 11 Entire magazines were devoted to helping people discover new shows on international radio.

Speaker 11 Listeners would write to far-flung stations, and the stations would reply with these beautifully decorated cards branded with the station name and maybe some imagery that evoked the national culture of wherever they were broadcasting from.

Speaker 11 They're called QSL cards. It's international code for: I confirm receipt of your transmission.

Speaker 11 Shortwave listeners around the world amassed collections of these ornate cards, tangible evidence of their part in an ethereal global community.

Speaker 11 By the late 1930s, almost all home radio sets had AM and shortwave settings.

Speaker 11 But the peacenik aspirations for shortwave didn't last.

Speaker 3 Coming up, the shortwaves go to war.

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Speaker 3 this is on the media. I'm Michael Loewinger.

Speaker 2 And I'm Brooke Gladstone, and we're back with the second part of this episode of the Divided Dial that we first aired in May.

Speaker 2 We pick up at the moment that the shortwaves went from utopian dreamscape to weapon of war. Here's Katie Thornton.

Speaker 11 Lots of the world's governments had taken to the shortwaves by the 1930s, but no nation used them quite like Germany.

Speaker 26 This is Germany Coin who are going to convene tonight a radio play entitled Visions of Invasion.

Speaker 11 Zeesen, Germany's state-run shortwave service, had spent years building a large following in America and around the world, playing things like orchestral music.

Speaker 11 But in time, they started pushing out Nazi propaganda, tailored for specific countries in 12 different languages. And with its own festering Nazi movement, the U.S.
was a key target.

Speaker 22 You had people like Axis Sally.

Speaker 14 This is the moon colour.

Speaker 27 And I just have to say that when the women call, it pays to look for you.

Speaker 22 She was an American living in Berlin. She became the first American woman to be convicted of treason.
After the war, that she was broadcasting into the United States on shortwave.

Speaker 14 Women of America waiting for the one you love,

Speaker 27 thinking of a husband who had been sacrificed by Franklin D.

Speaker 14 Roosevelt.

Speaker 22 You might have heard of a person called Lord Haw Hall.

Speaker 28 The great atheist from Britain is well underway.

Speaker 22 He was a British man named William Joyce who was working in Germany broadcasting on their shortwave service.

Speaker 28 The rich and affluent are removing themselves and their valuables as fast as they can.

Speaker 11 There was also a big band called Charlie and his Orchestra, run by the German Ministry of Propaganda.

Speaker 11 They'd take popular big band and swing songs and add or change lyrics to berate Roosevelt or denigrate Jewish people.

Speaker 16 The Jewish family has a brand new heir. He's their joy, heaven sent, and they proudly present Mr.
Franklin D.

Speaker 14 Roosevelt Jones yesterday.

Speaker 22 They were trying to persuade Americans that the Germans had the right side in the war and that it was crazy for them to fight.

Speaker 16 Non-intervention, how he shows it.

Speaker 26 His decision to send troops along.

Speaker 11 The U.S. government had banned all editorializing on domestic radio stations during the war, making it illegal for Americans to promote the Nazi cause on the AM airwaves.

Speaker 11 But the feds didn't have any control over shortwave broadcasts beaming in from Germany. So the content was still there for the many Americans who wanted to listen.

Speaker 11 Journalists at CBS and NBC launched counter-offensives.

Speaker 21 The networks had what were called shortwave listening posts in New York.

Speaker 11 Susan Douglas again.

Speaker 21 And they had people who were fluent in foreign languages, monitoring international shortwave broadcasts.

Speaker 11 And then they turned their findings into entertainment, like the hits CBS radio series hosted by a popular detective novelist named Rex Stout. It was called Our Secret Weapon.

Speaker 29 The truth is a weapon that isn't secret in our country, but it's a big secret to the people who live in Germany, Japan, and Italy. Our enemies don't have this weapon.

Speaker 29 They don't dare let their people know the truth.

Speaker 11 Every week, Radio Sleuth Stout debunked enemy shortwave propaganda.

Speaker 29 First, a broadcast of the official German news agency on August 2nd.

Speaker 30 The meeting between Churchill and Stalin was very excited and hysterical.

Speaker 26 It assumed a dramatic.

Speaker 29 On August 8th, beamed at England.

Speaker 30 This morning, Churchill shook hands with Stalin at the Kremlin.

Speaker 29 As we now know, Churchill actually arrived in Moscow on August 12th. You can't beat that for a scoop.

Speaker 11 The rest of the Allies were also busy fighting Germany's shortwave radio propaganda. It was during World War II that the BBC ramped up what would come to be known as the World Service on shortwave.

Speaker 31 This is London calling in the overseas service of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Speaker 11 They broadcast news to the world with just a bit of pro-Ally spin.

Speaker 31 The Danes have already had a taste of what German protection means. A better word word for it would be plunder, for the Germans are seizing goods and property at will.

Speaker 11 And in early 1942, the U.S. followed suit.
The federal government debuted its shortwave radio service, The Voice of America, with an in-language broadcast to Germany.

Speaker 26 This is a voice speaking from America.

Speaker 32 Our voices are coming to you from New York, across the Atlantic Ocean to London.

Speaker 11 The Voice of America started as a government-run radio show, and they partnered with networks like NBC and CBS to get it out worldwide. NBC and CBS were already broadcasting overseas via shortwave.

Speaker 11 But shortwave quickly proved so central to the war effort that the U.S. government did something unprecedented.
They nationalized all the roughly one dozen shortwave stations broadcasting from U.S.

Speaker 11 soil, filling the international airwaves with approved broadcasts.

Speaker 32 Daily, at this time, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good or bad.
We shall tell you the truth.

Speaker 11 And for the most part, they did that, if a bit selectively. Michelle Hilms.

Speaker 22 They were walking a fine line between willful propaganda and sort of putting a good spin on things.

Speaker 11 As the U.S. sent more troops into battle, it used shortwave to boost morale.

Speaker 21 They began to transmit entertainment programming via short wave to the troops.

Speaker 11 Susan Douglas again.

Speaker 21 And this was so important during holidays like Christmas and New Year's when there you are freezing and alone and scared.

Speaker 22 They had programs that would allow troops to speak to people back at home, you know, oh here's mailbag and we have letters from soldiers and they would read them aloud.

Speaker 22 Dear mother, tonight I'm very lonely.

Speaker 26 I've never written that before, and maybe it's a shock to you.

Speaker 22 And then again, maybe you've read between the lines lines and have known it all along there was a very popular program called GI Jive with Jill

Speaker 27 here's Jill and the GI Jive hi you fellas this is GI Jill with GI Jive you know the World Series 1942 World Series broadcast you gotta have the World Series

Speaker 22 Yankees riding from five to nothing the voice of America was very highly respected and many people think that it you know did a great deal to help us win the war by the end of the second world war the Voice of America blanketed much of the world.

Speaker 11 It ran in about 40 languages. But during the Cold War, shortwave would become so much more.

Speaker 10 This is Tehran Radio Iran.

Speaker 4 The Australian Forces Radio.

Speaker 11 The VOA, the BBC, the Soviet Union, China, Egypt, Iran, Argentina, and so many others were on shortwave, broadcasting their national identity to the world in stories and song.

Speaker 11 They were joined by newly decolonized nations like Libya and Ghana, whose leaders saw the shortwaves as a way to promote their independence and to fuel an international anti-colonial movement.

Speaker 11 But the global superpowers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, were two of the most dominant voices on shortwave.
And shortwave became one of the most ferocious battlegrounds of the Cold War.

Speaker 11 At bat for the Soviet Union was Radio Moscow. Founded in 1929, the USSR's government-run network broadcast in over 70 languages.

Speaker 11 With news, propaganda, and human interest stories, it offered a Soviet alternative to the BBC and the VOA.

Speaker 15 America hit a new high in crime, and according to FBI reports to the president, nearly half of the criminals were young people. The causes of this menacing situation are well known.

Speaker 15 The pornographic pictures distributed among adolescents and the exhibitions of abstract paintings and statues that say nothing to either the heart or the mind.

Speaker 11 The BBC and the VOA were expanding too, sending more and more coverage over the Iron Curtain.

Speaker 11 But the United States government wanted to reach people in Eastern Europe with messages that weren't so obviously propaganda as the literal voice of America. So they lied.

Speaker 33 Radio Free Europe gets through with the truth every day.

Speaker 11 Debuting in 1950, Radio Free Europe was a flame-throwing anti-communist shortwave network.

Speaker 33 Into the closed communist countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania go the facts the people are not allowed to hear. The truth.

Speaker 33 The truth that helps them hold on to the will and the drive.

Speaker 11 It was portrayed as grassroots, run by émigrés and exiles, and it did employ those folks.

Speaker 11 But secretly, it was funded by the CIA, which was busy meddling in global politics and supporting pro-capitalist coups during these Cold War years.

Speaker 11 Staff at Radio Free Europe launched weather balloons into the Eastern Bloc and airdropped over 300 million leaflets instructing listeners on how to tune in.

Speaker 11 The Soviet Union did not like any of this. They spent tons of money trying to drown out Western broadcasts.

Speaker 11 They'd flood the shortwaves with ear-splitting noises that listeners recalled sounding like a buzzsaw or a machine gun.

Speaker 11 Sometimes the battle went beyond the airwaves, like when a Czechoslovakian double agent poisoned the salt shakers at Radio Free Europe's Munich office.

Speaker 11 That plot was foiled before any of the 1,200-plus employees sat down for lunch. Years later, a Radio Free Europe journalist died after allegedly being stabbed with a poison-tipped umbrella.

Speaker 11 But these U.S.-run shortwave stations weren't just beaming out journalism.

Speaker 26 Willis Conover speaking, this is the Voice of America Jazz Hour.

Speaker 26 The music

Speaker 17 of jazz parallels the freedom that we have in America, something that not every country has.

Speaker 11 In the 1950s and 60s, music, especially jazz, was a key component in the U.S. government's shortwave campaign.

Speaker 9 This is the vice

Speaker 13 of America.

Speaker 11 The federal government ran a jazz ambassador program that sent musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington on tours around the world.

Speaker 11 They focused on countries that the Soviet Union was also hoping to win over.

Speaker 11 All the while, though, many of these very same musicians faced racism and segregation at home. And on the shortwaves, Radio Moscow and others were ready to exploit this contradiction.

Speaker 34 The revolutionary people of Cuba sympathize with all people who struggle for social justice.

Speaker 11 In the early 1960s, Cuba's government-run service, Radio Havana, regularly beamed this show, Radio Free Dixie, up to the United States.

Speaker 34 It is in this spirit that we proudly allocate the following hour in an act of solidarity, peace, and friendship with our oppressed North American brothers.

Speaker 34 Radio Free Dixie invites you to listen to the Free Voice of the South.

Speaker 11 Radio Free Dixie was hosted by U.S. black power activist Robert F.
Williams.

Speaker 11 He was on the lamb in Cuba fleeing drummed up charges that were later dropped. And he broadcast a perspective that couldn't be found in the mainstream U.S.
media.

Speaker 35 One Negro goes to the White House as a member of the president's cabinet, while another is gunned down like a wild dog for using a white folks toilet.

Speaker 35 It should be more than clear to us that if we are ever going to be free, we must liberate ourselves.

Speaker 11 Outlets like Radio Moscow and Radio Havana won followers around the world with their mix of propaganda and just factual reporting on civil rights abuses in the U.S.

Speaker 11 Governments saw winning people over on shortwave as a key path to winning the Cold War. So even after the CIA's secretive role at Radio Free Europe was revealed in the early 70s, not much changed.

Speaker 11 In fact, Congress increased its budget, and they kept pumping out news and tunes.

Speaker 11 Increasingly, they played the defiant and oh-so-American sound of rock music, which was heavily censored in the USSR and Eastern Bloc.

Speaker 11 On the U.S.'s government-run, taxpayer-funded shortwave stations, they broadcast groups like Metallica and Motley Crew to listeners around the world.

Speaker 11 By the early 1980s, the U.S. government's shortwave stations reached an estimated 80 million people each week.
It took tons of manpower, and it was a huge infrastructure project, too.

Speaker 11 The government had miles upon miles of fields filled with antennas.

Speaker 11 But one man didn't think that was enough.

Speaker 4 We're as far behind the Soviets and their allies in international broadcasting today as we were in space when they launched Sputnik in 1957.

Speaker 11 On the home front, Ronald Reagan had vetoed public broadcasting budgets and overseen a massive deregulation of the airwaves that allowed for big businesses and conservative and religious broadcasters to dominate AM and FM radio.

Speaker 11 You know, season one of the divided dial.

Speaker 11 But on international radio, on shortwave, the great deregulator had no qualms about spending taxpayer dollars. He poured public money into into the VOA and Radio Free Europe.

Speaker 4 I'm pleased to call on Director Wick and Minister Filelli to sign this agreement, an important step towards strengthening the signal of the voice of America.

Speaker 11 Reagan's administrators wrung their hands over what to do about rock music. Lots of them didn't believe it represented the best of Western culture.

Speaker 11 But after long internal debates, they decided to keep the rebellious racket going on the shortwaves.

Speaker 11 Meanwhile, on the journalism side, Reagan led a shake-up by sidestepping one of the Voice of America's long-held tenets, the idea that a free press is the U.S.'s best advertisement.

Speaker 11 Sure, that idea hadn't always been perfectly executed, but Reagan opted instead for more heavy-handed anti-communist propaganda. Reagan's VOA ran explicit editorials on behalf of the administration.

Speaker 11 Many longtime leaders resigned, replaced by more amenable colleagues, including Richard W. Carlson, father of right-wing bloviator Tucker Carlson.

Speaker 11 And it was Reagan who launched a costly new shortwave service targeting Cuba with hardline anti-communist messages.

Speaker 4 Today, I'm appealing to the Congress, help us get the truth through. Support our proposal for a new radio station, Radio Marti, for broadcasting to Cuba.

Speaker 11 While public broadcasting floundered at home, government-subsidized propaganda and bad hair metal reverberated on Shortwave from the U.S. to the world.

Speaker 11 In its first seven decades of life, Shortwave transformed from an idealistic experiment in global cooperation into a hardened government tool of information warfare.

Speaker 11 And then, in the late 1980s, much of the medium's reason for being crumbled.

Speaker 36 In the last weeks and months, we've seen one Communist Party after the other released in Europe knocked off its perch by the people.

Speaker 11 The Cold War was over.

Speaker 11 On this medium that seemed almost tailor-made for propaganda, there was vacancy, airtime for rent. And in the U.S., a particular group of people was ready to snatch it up.

Speaker 37 You must form your militia unit. Pay no heed to the federal government, which is a counterfeit enemy, foreign government.

Speaker 38 Are you a white woman such as myself who is sick of being harassed and tormented? Call Aryan Nation for a whiter, brighter America.

Speaker 39 We don't want to have to kill you. We hope to not have to kill you, but we can kill you.
And if need be, we will kill you.

Speaker 33 Well, what are a few lives in the grand scheme of liberty?

Speaker 2 The airways became a haven for right-wing hate speech, and in the early 90s, Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City put the spotlight on the growing militia movement on shortwave radio.

Speaker 2 For that story and for the rest of season two and indeed season one, search for the divided dial in your podcast app of choice. This is On the Media.

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Speaker 10 I

Speaker 10 am

Speaker 2 This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Speaker 3 And I'm Micah Loewinger. In March, on a day dubbed Bloody Saturday, journalists at Radio Free Asia learned their work may soon be coming to an end.

Speaker 40 We were sent a grant termination letter, effectively cutting off all of our funding.

Speaker 3 Bae Fong, president of Radio Free Asia, or RFA. A few months later, the organization cut nearly 300 jobs.

Speaker 3 RFA had been producing boots on the ground reporting for 30 years in countries where few, if any, independent media outlets remain.

Speaker 3 In 2017, reporters for the RFA Uyghur service, the world's only independent Uyghur language outlet, were the first to uncover clues of the now infamous detention camps in Xinjiang in northwest China.

Speaker 40 One of our reporters found this out because he was calling around and just amazed at how many people were saying their relatives had been rounded up.

Speaker 40 He broke the story and then that was picked up by all sorts of different media.

Speaker 3 And by members of Congress. And it goes on talking about ethnic Uyghurs held in political re-education camps.
I'm going to put quotes around that because they're not re-education camps.

Speaker 3 They're concentration camps. For their trenchant work, some RFA journalists have paid a steep price.
I received a call from our neighbor's daughter, Golchera Hoja, a Uyghur American reporter at RFA.

Speaker 6 told me

Speaker 6 all my relatives arrested because of me, my work.

Speaker 3 Four other Uyghur service reporters have had close family members arrested and possibly sent to detention camps.

Speaker 3 And in 2021, in nearby Myanmar, after a violent military coup sparked a long, bloody civil war, several journalists from RFA's Burmese service were forced to leave, but a few stayed behind.

Speaker 40 They report without using their names.

Speaker 3 Be Fong.

Speaker 40 And they are able to get such stories as a villager found a cell phone that belonged to a junta soldier.

Speaker 40 And on the cell phone were selfies and videos that he had taken of him and his comrades committing war crimes.

Speaker 3 Using that cell phone footage, RFA reported in 2022 that 29 Burmese citizens were murdered by military junta soldiers in a small village.

Speaker 3 Meanwhile, Russian state television is celebrating cuts to Radio Free Europe/slash Radio Liberty. But for now, the service is still running.

Speaker 3 In July, a judge ordered Trump officials to restore funding to Radio Free Europe, although a new budget has yet to be finalized.

Speaker 3 In recent years, the Putin regime has targeted Radio Free Europe journalists, including Al Su Kermasheva, who spent nine months last year in a Russian detention center.

Speaker 3 Today, she's she's a press freedom advocate, but for more than 20 years, she worked for Radio Free Europe/slash Radio Liberty's Tatar Bashkir service as a reporter, editor, and radio host covering the stories of ethnic minorities in Russia and broadcasting in her native language of Tatar.

Speaker 6 Tatars were one of the ethnic groups which had never had an independent media or schools or any institutions to develop the language, to develop the statehood, to develop ethnic identity.

Speaker 3 When I spoke to Al Su in March, she told me that when she first joined the service, things were going so well that her boss in Prague, where she's based, told her that RFE was planning to pull out of the region.

Speaker 6 This is how RFE operates. We have a history of shutting down the services whenever the press is self-sustaining in the country where we broadcast, we report the service, the department shuts down.

Speaker 6 So there were beautiful times 20 plus years ago. This is how it started.

Speaker 3 And then what was the turn? When did it become such an essential service?

Speaker 6 When Putin came to power, he started putting more pressure on journalists, on independent media. We slowly lost

Speaker 6 frequencies, FM frequencies, then they shut down the radio. The Russian authorities later designated RFE as a foreign agent in Russia.

Speaker 6 And later, the recent development, this happened when I was in prison, the Russian authorities designated RFE as an undesirable organization, which makes working for us a criminal offense in Russia.

Speaker 3 I want to talk about

Speaker 3 what happened in May of 2023 when you were detained by Russian authorities. You were on a trip back to Kazan to care for your elderly mother.

Speaker 6 The investigation was launched on the charges I hadn't registered my American passport.

Speaker 6 The investigation took five months.

Speaker 3 You were on house arrest for five months?

Speaker 6 Yes. And I paid my fine, which was not more than $100.

Speaker 6 And I was about to pick up my passports from the investigator and leave when they arrested me. And this time, it was a real arrest, and they sent me to the detention center.

Speaker 3 What was going through your mind?

Speaker 6 October 18th, I was cooking lunch at home, texting with my husband about school break later in October, which I was planning to be at home in Prague with my children already.

Speaker 6 Suddenly, I heard noise at the door, and I saw from the little eye in the door that they were showing me some paper that they they need to take me away for investigation.

Speaker 6 Then I was taken to the investigative committee and charged with not registering as a foreign agent. That was absolutely a fake accusation.

Speaker 6 It didn't have any evidence against me, but this is how it works: that they still put me to prison. Later, that accusation was dropped, and they built up new charges against me,

Speaker 6 which was based on the

Speaker 6 book that I co-edited at RFERL. The book is called Saying No to War, and it's a collection of 40 stories of 40 people in Russia who oppose the war.

Speaker 6 The final charge I was charged with was that I was spreading fake information about Russian military.

Speaker 3 And so you spent nine months in detention before the trial?

Speaker 6 Yes, nine and a half months, 288 days, 40 Fridays. I love Fridays and I calculated my life in prison by Fridays.

Speaker 3 What was life like during that time?

Speaker 6 In prison, you can't control anything. You can't control your sleep.
You can't control your food intake. You can't control...

Speaker 6 basically nothing, but at least your breath or your thought. That was very important.
I set set the routine to read.

Speaker 6 And, you know, as there was a lack of books, I didn't have enough books. I was reading ingredients on the food packages.
I was learning the amount of sugar in each product.

Speaker 6 I know it sounds insane right now, but this is how I made my brain work.

Speaker 6 And this is how I try to control my thoughts so I don't be depressed. Actually, nobody is depressed in prison.
It's something beyond depression. It's everything

Speaker 6 around you deprives you of dignity. So I set my routine of exercise, reading, trying to maintain a healthy diet.

Speaker 3 You received a press freedom award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. And in your speech, you alluded to this image that stuck with me where

Speaker 3 There was snow and you were in a courtyard and you started to build a little house out of the snow?

Speaker 6 It was the first snow, and there was a very small courtyard, and we couldn't walk. I don't remember how many of us were several prisoners.

Speaker 6 And I suddenly, without even thinking, I started building a lighthouse. Accidentally, I found in my pocket a candy wrapper, which was yellow and red, which I put on top.

Speaker 6 And I was looking at that lighthouse for a very long time,

Speaker 6 thinking that, oh my gosh, this is the light I feel from my friends and family from the free world. There was this big campaign around the world to write to political prisoners in Russia.

Speaker 6 The best letters I got were from

Speaker 6 people I didn't know. Say one Russian woman from one of the European cities.

Speaker 6 sent me a postcard saying, Aulsu, it's Christmas time. It's beautiful here.

Speaker 6 My friends are celebrating, but I took this time and I'm sitting in the next room where it's quiet to write to you while everybody is eating.

Speaker 6 Those words will stay with me forever. They meant so much to me in that dark prison cell.

Speaker 3 Last July, you were brought to a courtroom for a secret trial in Kazan.

Speaker 3 On that same day, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was tried in another Russian city. He was sentenced to 16 years.

Speaker 3 You received six and a half years for, as you said, spreading false information. What happened after the sentence?

Speaker 6 I was taken and brought to a prison in Moscow. That's the notorious prison called Lefortova, former KGB prison.

Speaker 6 I was kept there from Monday until Thursday, and on Thursday, the actual exchange happened.

Speaker 4 Evan Gershkovich, Alsru Kermasheva, and Paul Whelan landed in Maryland late last night.

Speaker 6 It was a moment I was dreaming of for many, many months. I couldn't cry in prison.

Speaker 6 I'm a person who

Speaker 6 holds emotions when it's hard. But since I was released, I think I've cried all my tears.

Speaker 3 What were your initial feelings when you got the news that President Donald Trump had signed an executive order cutting off all funding to the U.S.

Speaker 3 Agency for Global Media, which is the entity that funds Radio for Europe/slash Radio Liberty.

Speaker 6 Well, I thought about two things.

Speaker 6 First,

Speaker 6 millions of people

Speaker 6 will stop reading and watching our reporting.

Speaker 6 Russian and Chinese propaganda will fill in that empty space very quickly, very efficiently, because those countries are spending more money on soft power and on propaganda media than the United States.

Speaker 6 And the second thing, I'll be talking to the families of our imprisoned journalists these days. What am I going to tell them that their loved ones are imprisoned for nothing?

Speaker 6 This were my thoughts immediately when I heard the news.

Speaker 3 You said you don't know what to tell the family members of Radio Free Europe journalists who are in prison for their reporting. But I mean, for you,

Speaker 3 you spent nine nine months for reporting that you did on behalf of this U.S.-funded news organization, and then an American president is accusing it of spreading, quote, radical propaganda, which was essentially the same charge that you got from that Russian secret court.

Speaker 3 How are you feeling about the work that you paid a sacrifice for?

Speaker 6 Thank you for your words. You just took them out of my mouth, and you said that exactly how I would put it.

Speaker 6 Because

Speaker 6 if we talk about cost to taxpayers, we are the most efficient example of soft power that America can have. Our effectiveness is proven by America's enemies to silence us.

Speaker 6 These days, propaganda media organizations in Russia and Iran are celebrating. And we are not out of business yet.
They're celebrating the rumors.

Speaker 6 I mean, they've been trying to end our operations for years, for decades, and now suddenly our government is giving them this gift. It's like an own goal, you know.

Speaker 3 To your point, Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russia Today, was on one of Russia's state TV channels when she said,

Speaker 3 today is a celebration for my colleagues at rt sputnik

Speaker 3 and other outlets because trump suddenly announced he's closing rfe slash rl and voice of america

Speaker 3 they are closed now this is an awesome decision by

Speaker 3 trump to which the host of the show vladimir salovyov responded

Speaker 3 i'm addressing independent journalists die animals you are lying vile disgusting traitors to the motherland Die in a ditch.

Speaker 3 Do you want to respond to that?

Speaker 6 No, I don't want to respond to that. I don't respond to things like that.
I saw that statement, too.

Speaker 6 I mean,

Speaker 6 yeah.

Speaker 3 It was interesting to hear you use the term American soft power as part of the mission of Radio for Europe.

Speaker 3 How important to you was it that the work, in addition to being journalism, was about advancing American soft power.

Speaker 6 When I was doing that job, I didn't think about it. I wasn't thinking about promoting anything.
I wasn't thinking about being a soft power for somebody. This is what I was doing.

Speaker 6 I was giving a voice to my people so they could take informed decisions for themselves. Journalism, open objective journalism, doesn't exist in certain countries with autocracies.

Speaker 6 People don't know that a media organization can be just reporting for the sake of reporting.

Speaker 6 Those regimes are sure that every media organization should work for somebody's purpose, the ideology or politics or political parties or something.

Speaker 6 But we were bringing those values of freedom of speech to our audiences.

Speaker 6 Really, not much will change immediately if Radio Free Europe stops, But in a long-term effect, it will be such a disaster and it will be so difficult to start that over again, that experience that have been built for years, for 75 years.

Speaker 3 Alsu Kermasheva is a journalist and press freedom advocate for Radio Free Europe slash Radio Liberty. Alsu, thank you very much.

Speaker 6 Thank you, Monka, for having me.

Speaker 3 That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candice Wong.

Speaker 2 Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer.
On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Speaker 3 And I'm Micah Loewinger.