Radio Wars: Broadcasting in the Cold War

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

Linda Risso is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Reading. Her research interests focus on the history of European integration and of the Cold War. She is currently finalising her monograph on Propaganda and Intelligence during the Cold War: The NATO Information Service for Routledge. Correspondence to: Dr Linda Risso, Department of History, School of Humanities, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AA, UK. [email protected]. The articles gathered in this special issue were presented, among others, at a one-day conference on ‘War of the Ether: Radio broadcasting during the Cold War’, which took place at the University of Reading in December 2010. The conference and this publication have been supported by the Leverhulme Trust through its Major Research Programme at the University of Reading on ‘The Liberal Way of War’.

 1 Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).

 2 A. Ross Johnson and R. Eugene Parta (eds.), Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Budapest: Central European Press, 2010), p. 345.

 3 Among the most recent contributions are: Johnson and Parta, Cold War Broadcasting; Richard H. Cummings, Radio Free Europe's “Crusade for Freedom”: Allying Americans Behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950–1960 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010); R. Eugene Parta, Discovering the Hidden Listener: An Assessment of Radio Liberty and Western Broadcasting to the USSR During the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2007); A. Ross Johnson, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010).

 4 See for example, Robert W. Pirsein, The Voice of America. An history of the international broadcasting activities of the United States government 1940–1962 (New York: Arno Press, 1979); Holly Cowan Shulman, The Voice of America. Propaganda and democracy, 1941–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); David F. Krugler, The Voice of America and the domestic propaganda battle, 1945–1953 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000); Alan L. Heil, Voice of America. A history (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Simona Tobia, “Advertising America: VOA and Italy”, in Europe Americanized? Popular Reception of Western Cold War Propaganda. Special issue of Cold War History 11, n 1 (2011): 27–47.

 5 Laura M. Calkins, “Patrolling the Ether: US-UK Open Source Intelligence Cooperation and the BBC's emergence as an Intelligence Agency, 1939–1948” Intelligence and National Security 26, no.1 (2011): 1–22; Michael S. Goodman, “British intelligence and the British Broadcasting Corporation. A snapshot of a happy marriage” in Robert Dover and Michael Goodman (eds.), Spinning Intelligence. Why the media needs Intelligence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009): 117–132; James R. Vaughan, “A certain idea of Britain: British cultural diplomacy in the Middle East, 1945–57” Contemporary British History 19, no.1 (2005): 151–168; Marie Gillespie, Alban Webb, and Gerd Baumann (eds.), BBC World Service 1932–2007: Cultural Exchange and Public Diplomacy, Special Issue of Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 28, n. 4 (2008); Alban Webb, “Auntie Goes to War Again: The BBC External Services, the Foreign Office and the early Cold War”, Media History, 12, n. 2 (2006): 117–132; Marie Gillespie, Hugh Mackay, and Alban Webb, “Designs & devices: towards a genealogy of audience research methods at the BBC World Service, 1932–2011”. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 8, n. 1 (2011): 1–20. James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: The Press, Broadcasting and Internet in Britain (London: Routledge, 2003).

 6 See for example, Charlotte Lepri, “De l'usage des médias à des fins de propagande pendant la guerre froide”, Revue internationale et stratégique, 2 n. 78 (2010): 111–118; Christian Brochand, Histoire Générale de la Radio et de la Télévision en France, 3 volumes (Paris: la Documentation Française, 1994–2006); Hervé Glevarec (ed.), Histoire de la radio: Ouvrez grand vos oreilles! (Paris: Musée des arts et métiers / Silvana Editoriale, 2011).

 7 Christoph Classen, “Between political coercion and popular expectations: Contemporary history in the radio of the early German Democratic Republic” in Sylvia Paletschek (ed.), Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 89–102; Stephen Lovell, “How Russia Learned to Listen: Radio and the Making of Soviet Culture”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12 n. 3 (2011): 591–615; Christoph Classen and Klaus Arnold (eds.), Zwischen Pop und Propaganda: Radio in der DDR (Berlin: Ch.Links, 2004). Klaus Arnold, Kalter Krieg im Äther. Der Deutschlandsender und die Westpropaganda der DDR (Münster/Hamburg/London: Lit 2002);

 8 The literature on the history of the Cultural Cold War is very rich. Among the most important contributions in English are: Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St Martin's Press, 1997); Gary D. Rawnsley, Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999), Scott Lucas, Freedom's War: The US Crusade Against the Soviet Union, 1945–56 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 2000); David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam (eds.), The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945–1960 (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003); Kenneth A. Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). David Ellwod, The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). The Cultural Cold War is of course also discussed in the recent Cambridge History of the Cold War edited by Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, 3 volumes (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2010); the chapters by Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht (“Culture in the Cold War”, vol. 1, pp. 398–419) and by Nicholas J. Cull (“Reading, viewing and tuning in to the Cold War”, vol. 2, pp. 438–459) are particularly relevant for this special issue.

 9 For a summary of the debate on Americanization and Westernisation, see Holger Nehering, “‘Westernisation’: A New Paradigm for Interpreting West European History in a Cold War Context” Cold War History 4, n. 2 (2004): 175–191; Volker R. Berghahn, “The Debate on ‘Americanization’ among economic and cultural historians” Cold War History 10, n. 1 (2010): 107–130; Jessica C.E. Gienow-Hecht, “Cultural Transfer”; in Michael J. Hogan and Tom Patterson (eds.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 257–78; Europe Americanized? Popular Reception of Western Cold War Propaganda. Special issue of Cold War History, edited by Simona Tobia, 11, n. 1 (2011). Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999). Ellwood, The Shock of America.

10 Hixson, Parting the Curtain. Among the most influential works by Victoria De Grazia are: The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkley: University of California Press, 1996); How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1920–1945 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1992); Irresistible Empire (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2005).

11 A similar point has been argued by Giles Scott-Smith in his review of “Special Issue: ‘Europe Americanized?’” Cold War History 11, n. 1 (2011): 1–83, published in H-Diplo, Roundtable Review, 13, n. 4 (2011).

12 Graham Mytton, “Audience research at the BBC External Services during the Cold War: A view from the inside,” Cold War History 11, n. 1 (2011): 53.

13 See for example, Peter Romijn, Giles Scott-Smith and Joes Segal (eds.), Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War East and West (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012); Tobias Hochscherf, Christoph Laucht and Andrew Plowman (eds.), Divided, But Not Disconnected: German Experiences of the Cold War (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2011); Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M. Payk, and Thomas Lindenberger (eds.), Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2012).