Reciprocity and radio: The winners are ...

By Alan L. Heil Jr.

“Radio is a supple and durable technology that has outlived quite a few predictions of its demise.”  That statement by John Staudenmaier, editor of the Journal of Technology and Culture, rings true even in this new century of digital social media and the advent of a staggering variety of delivery platforms beyond traditional radio and TV.

Particularly since the end of the Cold War, government funded international broadcasters have been compelled by fiscal constraints and shifting audiences to pursue new media at the expense of the old.  They also have sought to extend their radio reach via national networks or local stations on FM and AM in other countries, in addition to traditional long-distance shortwave transmissions.  This has happened in Africa, the Arab world, Afghanistan, Indonesia, the Balkans, and some former Soviet republics.

More than 150 countries are signatories to the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights which asserts that everyone “has the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”  But in societies where information is heavily censored, or where accurate, objective news is still denied to citizens by authoritarian regimes, such relays are prohibited.

Not so in the United States.  It’s open season here for stations funded by the Kremlin or the Chinese Communist Party.  On June 9, Radio Russia launched live radio programming in two principal U.S. media markets, Washington, DC, (1390 AM) and New York City (1430 AM).  Moscow’s official international broadcast station also opened a production center of 15 reporters in the nation’s capital, and now reaches American audiences in English via mobile links in 16 states.

China Radio International also broadcasts in English in the U.S., with radio relays in Washington (1120 AM), Philadelphia (1540 AM), and Galveston, Texas (1540 AM).  The Peoples’ Republic official news agency has a giant billboard in Times Square, New York, headlining events in China and the world and Chinese Central Television (CCTV) has its largest overseas bureau in Washington.  This is ironic, because a post World War II ban prohibiting VOA and other U.S. government media from distributing programs in America means VOA cannot be heard here.

Read the whole story from PDC

(Source : The Public Diplomacy Council, USA)