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Sat 06 Mar, 2010
JASON WALSH attempts to separate the news from the propaganda on the international airwaves – and finds it impossible
IMAGINE THERE was a communications medium that spanned virtually the entire globe and was virtually impossible to censor. Now imagine that, unlike the internet, it couldn't be switched-off by the powers that be and didn't require expensive equipment or monthly subscription fees to access. That would be a powerful voice for democracy, wouldn't it?
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Well, such a mehavdium does exist and in the sense that it is a force democracy it is at least a forum for free speech. It's called short wave radio. However, as with all media, some voices speak louder than others – and in this case the loudest are those with government backing, both overt and covert.
Short wave isn't like other forms of radio, either technically or in terms of its content. For a start, it's an unregulated Wild West of broadcasting where signals clash and merge, the loudest voice often blasting in over the one you were trying to listen to. It is also able to blankeet vast swathes of the entire globe with a single signal. Even relatively low-powered signals are easily able to reach across national boundaries.
On the other hand, it can be tricky to listen to. Atmospheric conditions and time of day have a huge impact on signal fidelity and while a really strong short wave signal is about as good as a medium wave AM station, most listeners' experience is significantly worse. Stations move up and down the dial in attempts to take advantage of the physics: higher frequencies are better during daylight hours, lower ones at night.
The main difference, though, and it is mostly as a result of all of the above, is that there are virtually no commercial radio stations on short wave. Instead there is a mix of international broadcasters such as the BBC World Service, Radio France International, Radio Canada International and the Voice of America, all manner of strange electronic noises including encrypted diplomatic and spy communications, fax transmissions of weather images, computer data, morse code operators and 'ham' radio users chattering to one-another.
There is also a lot of propaganda.
Like most people with a more than passing interest in international broadcasting, I have a military connection. In my case it was not me personally, but a relative who found himself, during the era of the Cold War, listening to Soviet radio communications as part of his job. Having to listen to the banal chatter and outright weirdness – according to one BBC report the Soviet radio officers occasionally broke into English in order to literally 'say hello to their English [language] listeners' – did not put him off radio, in fact it made him love it and he in turn inculcated this love of radio in me.
Most 'radioheads', for want of a better word, are interested in amateur radio; two way communications using morse code, voice and, increasingly, data packets over the airwaves. Me, though, I preferred broadcast radio. And why bother with Dublin's 98 when you can listen to Capital Radio from Dubai?
In fact, as late as the 1990s Irish pirate stations Radio Dublin and DLR (Dún Laoghaire Local Radio) broadcast internationally on short wave, mostly for the hell of it rather than in an attempt to gain a foreign audience. Likewise, Radio Luxembourg was primarily on medium wave and satellite but it also had a short wave signal that blasted euro-pop to anyone in America who wanted to listen, something that it had no commercial reason to do whatsoever.
More usually, though, international broadcasting and conflict are inseparable. In fact, arguably it only ever existed for political reasons in the first place. The BBC World Service, the best-known international broadcaster, was founded as the BBC Empire Service, after all. The BBC's studied impartiality is something more journalistic institutions should consider emulating but at the end of the day, it really is still the voice of British establishment – if not always the voice of the government of the day.
The main conflict that filled the short wave bands was the Cold War and with its end many of the old stations have been switched off. The Chinese have taken-up some of the slack, pushing the positive propaganda of China Radio International in English at anyone willing to listen. It's not a bad listen, actually, and certainly less overtly political than one might expect.
There is also the question of technology. The fades, pops, crackles and occasionally desperately low-fidelity of short wave radio can't compete with satellite television and the internet. When governments really want to slug it out for international recognition they do it on television: France 24 vs BBC World vs Russia Today.
Today the short wave bands are home to all manner of weirdness: religious broadcasters like the infamous Brother Stair, who was convicted of assault and battery, preaching hellfire and asking for money – God really does have a hard time balancing the books – and American far-right nutjobs selling gold on the basis that the world economy is about to collapse altogether.
There is a reason for this: as the major broadcasters such as the BBC retreat from shortwave into local FM broadcasting, the internet and other media, short wave has become more and more accessible to anyone who knows it's there. Short wave transmitters are cheap to buy and easy to use. Even easier still is brokerage: buy time on an existing transmitter, including some of the massive, high-powered set-ups that the likes of the BBC once used to span the globe.
Everyone knows politics and propaganda go together like the proverbial horse and carriage, but what do you do if you find yourself in opposition to a regime that won't let you disseminate your propaganda? Since the dawn of the radio age the answer has always been: go somewhere else and blast your information – and disinformation – in.
During the Falkands war the BBC did its usual job of broadcasting the news as impartially as it ever does. This did not please Britain's military who attempted to take over the BBC's transmitters that targeted the region, something that in turn displeased the powers-that-be at the BBC. When the Ministry of Defence finally got its Argentine propaganda station on the air it was famously useless, playing music that was at least thirty years out of date and such crude and clumsy propaganda that no-one in their right mind would take it seriously.
Today things are a little bit different – for the most part. Bizarre signals still emanate from regimes such as North Korea and even the Voice of America continues to have trouble figuring out whether it's a journalistic or government entreprise, but most political stations are much more sophisticated.
The best known propaganda services are Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, two US government-backed stations that formerly targeted Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War saw the opposing stations such as Radio Berlin International and Radio Moscow transform themselves into more traditional international stations – Radio Berlin merged into the respected Deutsche Welle (German Wave) and Radio Moscow is now the Voice of Russia – but Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty kept on keeping on. The twin stations simply moved their focus, and their signals, farther eastward in order to, as the American government would see it, spread liberty and democracy.
It's not just the dead hand of American power at work, though. Other conflicts and disputes have thrown-up other kinds of stations, run by opposition groups and governments in exile.
Zimbabwe, for instance, receives not only the Voice of America's Studio Nine but also the London-based SW Radio Africa.
In 2005, writing for a radio publication, I attempted to trace the funding of SW Radio Africa in order to decide if it was what is known as a 'clandestine station', an anti-government broadcasted funded by powerful forces, or a more legitimate journalistic service in exile, what we might call 'opposition radio'.
The station's operator, Gerry Jackson, maintained that her station was very much the latter – and, indeed, Jackson herself has a background as a journalist and broadcaster in Zimbabwe.
'I don't think it's 'clandestine',' she told me, back in 2005. 'We are Zimbabwean – nothing we do is secret. We exist to help the democratic process in Zimbabwe where there has been a concerted attack on the media'.
That Zimbabwe's media has been under attack from the regime is beyond dispute but Jackson appeared to me to be overly defensive on the question of who funded the station.
'We get our funding from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and foundations – we don't name them because talking about it allows the Zimbabwean government to hit us with a hammer. The important point is that we have complete editorial control, and this is the point where nobody believes me, but it's true: nobody tells us what to say'.
In fact, it is more than likely to be the case that nobody does tell the station what to say – the fact that it opposes Mugabe is enough.
Another question is, precisely what is a non-governmental organisation? If, during the Cold War, US intelligence agenies funded the likes of the Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader and Encounter – and allegedly has connections to the Paris Review to this day – is it not likely they are also targeting areas rather more volatile than western Europe?
One NGO in particular, the US-based National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is an obvious cat's paw for US government interests.
How sinister one finds the issue of funding is a matter of opinion. Is NED funding better than CIA or MI6? What about the Open Society Institute, founded by billionaire George Soros, the famed 'liberal' who almost destroyed the British pound sterling by precipitating the 'Black Wednesday' financial crisis in 1992 – one of the reasons that Britain remains outside the Eurozone to this day. Soros is not a government official but his money talks nonetheless.
Also speaking to me in 2005, US-based intelligence analyst Nick Grace said that, increasingly, foundations, trusts and NGOs were used to distribute money that originates in government coffers.
'In the old days we knew the CIA and MI6 were behind stations,' he said. 'Now the web [of funding] has gotten muddled with all the NGOs getting involved it's like chaos theory has been applied. You've got the Open Society Institute, the International Bar Association and so on. Then you have stations like the Democratic Voice of Burma, supported by a Norwegian organisation to the tune of one million dollars.'
(I attempted to contact Grace for more up to date analysis but he has not responded to my calls or e-mails.)
Unelected and self-appointed NGOs, foreign governments, rich plutocrats? It's enough to make a conspiracy theorist of the sanest person. As usual, though, the truth is rather more prosaic: major world powers such as the United States take an interest in what goes on in other countries, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly and broadcasting is part of the arsenal.
Are stations like SW Radio Africa sinister? Or are they a natural response to crackdowns on press freedom at home? Who pays the piper makes for an interesting story but it often obscures as much as it illuminates. SW Radio Africa is perfectly frank about its opposition to Mugabe and, as such, is nothing to be concerned about. Listeners can take its news and views on board and apply their own judgement, just as we all do when reading a newspaper.
Rather easier to track down was media analyst Jonathan Marks, a former employee of Dutch international broadcaster Radio Netherlands. He says a greater problem is making station that have to be based abroad relevant to local audiences.
'Its effectiveness depends on how well it understands the needs of the people it's trying to reach. Mouthpieces for whomever is paying aren't effective. I think that's happened to some of the programmes going into Zimbabwe,' he said, noting the Voice of America's efforts in particular.
Even more open stations such as SW Radio Africa face the problem of constant repetition rendering them irrelevant to people's lives.
'The story of Mugabe and the Movement for Democratic Change has come to a standstill. People don't want to listen to a continuous death and disaster show,' he said.
In terms of the true clandestine stations, they are currently beaming their shadowy signals are less frozen disputes: "There has been a shift, they've moved house and directed stuff at Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran. It's a shift east," said Marks.
Iran, for the record, fights back with a London-based satellite television station in English called Press TV. Press TV claims it is not propaganda – just like everyone else in the business of saturating foreign countries with information claim not to be propaganda – a strange characteristic all of these broadcasters share. After all, why not admit they take sides? No-one ever mistook Britain's Daily Telegraph for a Labour Party-supporting newspaper and no-one thinks any the less of it for its tough Tory stance. Organisational bias and the mercurial demands of proprietors are only one of the factors under which journalists chafe daily.
Marks points to Burma as an example of extraordinary work being done under immense pressure: 'The Democratic Voice of Burma, based in Oslo – the people who work for that station [in Burma] risk their lives every day. Most of what we saw coming out of Burma was done by their reporters.'
Another problem that will be familiar to journalists is the question of whether or not anyone is paying attention. Short wave radios are in decline and, frankly, most people have little idea of what 'short wave radio' even means. The audience has gone elsewhere.
'Short wave radios are disappearing in many countries and if you're not used to using one you probably don't even know these broadcasts exist,' said Marks. 'The clandestines do not have access to the FM bands in those countries.'
Medium wave radio can cover relatively large distances, but it requires massive power and even it is in decline in favour of FM, satellite and, of course, the internet.
'People are trying to get a signal in Tehran at the minute, either using a transmitter in the UAE or the Russian Black Sea coast. That will cost several hundred pounds an hour just to keep it running,' said Marks, adding that even if it succeeds, few may care: 'Media consumption patterns have changed and the Iranian population is younger and more savvy than people think.'
Still, pure propaganda or balanced news, disinformation or the real truth, one thing is for sure: there will always be people who will look for ways to get ideas into other countries.
JASON WALSH is a journalist based in Ireland and the editor of forth.
source: http://forth.ie/index.php/content/weekend_article/clandestine_not_confidential/20100306/
Via Yimber Gaviria, Colombia
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