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CBQ REVIEW ESSAY (Part One): Overall Histories of International Radio Propaganda

The published literature on propaganda in all languages must be huge–just those titles printed in English make up a very substantial collection. This two-part review essay focuses on those English-language books and reports that deal with the development and use of radio broadcasting in international affairs—in other words (whether the broadcasters like the term or not) propaganda. The history is by now a long one, dating at least to the formation of Radio Moscow’s international service in 1929. And not surprisingly, even this subset of the propaganda literature is a growing one as well, with many titles having appeared since the end of the Cold War, reviewing those decades with details unavailable a few years earlier. Included in this first part are overall histories of international broadcasting, the stories of specific radio services (such as Voice of America), studies of Cold War radio applications (some of them good examples of propaganda themselves), and personal memoirs. The material varies greatly in style (popular to scholarly) and quality. Some studies focus on the political angle, others on people stories, and still others assess the longer-range role of one or another service. A number of older studies are valuable now chiefly for their role as examples of what was known and thought at the time. The oldest book listed here was published in 1958—most of the nearly 50 titles included have appeared in the past two decades and a number remain in print. Excluded from this survey are a host of often promotional publications issued by the individual services—BBC and Voice of America, for example have each published many booklets and reports (and for years Radio Free Europe issued research reports, chiefly on audience work), but these are often difficult to find outside of archives. Otherwise, this is a fairly complete listing of book-length studies of the subject matter that have been published in English. A selection–by no means complete–of useful websites is also included, though those of the individual services, again, are assumed and not covered here. The second segment below focuses more specifically on the role of radio propaganda in World War II.