Institutions, states, and international broadcasting

This chapter examines the role of states in funding, influencing, and controlling international broadcasting, and the relationships which developed between states and broadcasting institutions in different parts of the wireless world. It argues that we should not draw a false dichotomy between ‘independent’ and ‘state controlled’ international broadcasting. In reality, all broadcasters operated under some degree of state influence. The difference was one of degrees, and the focus for historians should be upon the varied mechanisms used by civil servants to control and direct international broadcasting institutions, overtly or covertly. The chapter focuses on state mechanisms for controlling international broadcasting in Nazi Germany, the USSR, Britain, and the US, and in colonial and post-colonial states in the Global South. Case studies examine British colonial broadcasting in the 1940s and Radio Free Europe after 1989.