The purpose of RFERL is to produce news items that are covertly critical of the enemy. It adds up with other resources to paint a negative image of the enemy.
[1] - https://tass-ru.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x...
[2] - https://www-people-cn.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sch=http&_x_tr_s...
International propaganda behind a language barrier? That doesn't sound right...
They also broadcast from local stations (in their parent countries) in English at high power. I bet you can find Radio Liberty and Voice of America as well. I discovered this accidentally by messing around in websdr:
They arent. The two things that crippled the Eastern Bloc's propaganda efforts was 1) Fear of getting caught lying and losing credibility and therefore not lying 2) Doing propaganda by stating facts in dry, formal language.
The US has perfected the lying, smearing emotional manipulation propaganda early in the Cold War and it still keeps doing it. There isn't one single country that does it like that. So, no, Russia and China arent doing it 'on a much worse level' - they are incompetent. The very fact that you have this 'perception' that its not the country that lied about nonexistent WMDs for almost a decade but 'others' who are doing 'worse propaganda' is a demonstration of how far worse the US propaganda is.
Indeed. The circulation of video tapes in the early to late 80s USSR, US movies et al, seem to have created a major false perception: People thought that Americans lived like how the rich in Manhattan live. Even in the late 2000s, there were Russian journalists (local) who did not believe that there were homeless in New York, for example.
The radio is now based in Prague, it has a long history here and most people were quite happy to hear some real news during the communism. People tuning in risked prison time just to hear something else. I would not say you needed to be overtly critical, it was enough to just bring real news.
The west is in a war-like situation with Russia. Portraying them as stupid, drunk rednecks who ravage trough the environment certainly fits the narrative. Doesn't mean it's not true though.
A large country, the tsar (or the government) is far away, local governors can be bribed ... unless you do something that endangers the entire country/system, you can get away with a lot.
RFERL is US-government funded, and the audience is mainly eastern Europe. Even PBS in the US is not funded by the US government.
Why exclusively fund RFERL for a foreign audience if you do not fund your national public broadcaster?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Libert...
It wasn't repealed, it was amended.
In 2012.
To provide an Arabic/Pashto/Urdu/etc. language source of information for speakers of those languages within the US due to a lack of coverage by domestic US broadcasters. (not "reasons")
For example: You are an Arabic-speaking individual living in the midwest of the US where you were resettled after getting refugee status. There almost no domestically-produced news sources in Arabic.
Al-monitor exists, but they were founded the same year the act was amended, for the same reasons, and unfortunately while many of their articles are written in native language, many others seem to be machine-translated and no matter what the AI/ML hypelords think, that ain't it boss.
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An unnamed Pentagon official who was concerned about the 2012 law version stated: "It removes the protection for Americans. It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false."[39] The monthly magazine The Atlantic echoed those concerns by pointing out to two USA Today journalists who became target of a smear and propaganda campaign after they reported that the U.S. military "information operations" program spent millions of U.S. dollars in marketing campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq criticized as ineffective and poorly monitored.[36][42] As it turned out, Camille Chidiac, who executed the marketing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, admitted to be a part of the smear and propaganda campaign against the USA Today reporters.[43]
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It's the same sort of stuff as when the exact same government administration also passed a law enabling the indefinite detention of American citizens without trial (that also remains to this day), again because reasons. [2] Incidentally it was passed in the exact same completely undemocratic way both times - by shoving it into a must-pass defense authorization bill. It's a suggestive pattern of behavior that's quite telling, especially given where we've ended up at today.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization...
Because the US media market is quite saturated and developed (or at least was when any of this was made into law) compared to countries where media is actively supressed.
Quality news reporting is lacking. Investigative journalism is almost dead. The mainstream media is on a war footing. There have been 0 interviews with J Mearsheimer on mainstream US media.
There's also Radio Free Asia, Current Time TV (in Russian), Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Televisión Martí (targeting Cuba) and of course, Voice of America, all under USAGM (Agency for Global Media).
From https://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/3/who_is_provoking_the_u...:
"RAY McGOVERN: Well, a couple of things. You know, it really depends more on who seizes control of these uprisings. If you look at Bahrain, you know, if you look at Syria—even Egypt, to an extent—these were initially popular uprisings. The question is: Who took them over? Who spurred them? Who provoked them even more for their own particular strategic interests? And it’s very clear what’s happened to the Ukraine. It used to be the CIA doing these things. I know that for a fact. OK, now it’s the National Endowment for Democracy, a hundred million bucks, 62 projects in the Ukraine. So, again, you don’t have to be a paranoid Russian to suggest that, you know, they’re really trying to do what they—do in the Ukraine what they’ve done in the rest of Eastern Europe and elsewhere."