The only good thing that will come out of all this chaos is the elimination of most of the USAGM shortwave output, which needed to happen in any case as it was likely ineffective, outside of a few very specific situations. But yes, any Kari Lake replacement is likely going to be clueless about what direction to go next.
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Kari Lake previews her plans for Voice of America in the next Administration.
- Thread starter Bill Betten
- Start date
This brings back my question of "how is it even possible to make the VOA or any international propaganda operation successful today?"
Shortwave is dead. Webcasting and the use of local stations around the world can be easily stopped by a repressive government.
My question, as mentioned a moment ago in response to BigA, is whether there is any effective "way to go" either now or in the future.
The question to ask is: Do we as a country have a story to tell the world? One that's not based on selling products or attracting advertisers?
If the answer is yes, then perhaps the VOA is a way to tell that story. The used to be the goal back in the days of Willis Conover. The goal wasn't to spread propaganda, but to share culture and pride in who we are. Unfortunately, that's become a political issue today.
Here's the original purpose of the VOA:
What's wrong with that?
In the mid-nineties i noticed a number of young people from former east bloc nations working in restaurants I have investments in.
They routinely played music from the 1970's & 80's on the location's jukeboxes and sound systems. I often asked how the knew these tracks since they came from places under the thumb of Soviet dictatorship. From every one of them the answer was; from the radio.
In spite of concerted attempts at jamming, the LW, MW & SW were commonly listened to. All it took was to "turn the radio around a bit" (orient the antenna) and know the hours when the signals were strongest. Their parents listened as well.
Short wave and to some extent long wave sets were common and nearly everyone had at least one.
We've seen how quickly the internet and cellular communications can be shut down.
Satellite holds some promise, but few have receivers.
--Powerful--land based R.F. is really the only thing that can reasonably well overcome government attempts to squelch information.
It is a disgrace that our current, corrupt, kleptocrat administration has squandered this resource.
LCG
They routinely played music from the 1970's & 80's on the location's jukeboxes and sound systems. I often asked how the knew these tracks since they came from places under the thumb of Soviet dictatorship. From every one of them the answer was; from the radio.
In spite of concerted attempts at jamming, the LW, MW & SW were commonly listened to. All it took was to "turn the radio around a bit" (orient the antenna) and know the hours when the signals were strongest. Their parents listened as well.
Short wave and to some extent long wave sets were common and nearly everyone had at least one.
We've seen how quickly the internet and cellular communications can be shut down.
Satellite holds some promise, but few have receivers.
--Powerful--land based R.F. is really the only thing that can reasonably well overcome government attempts to squelch information.
It is a disgrace that our current, corrupt, kleptocrat administration has squandered this resource.
LCG
If a tower falls in the forest...
Other than China, North Korea, and a handful of others, shortwave radio as it was is dead as a doornail, and has been headed in that direction for at least 20 years.
The only people with shortwave receivers in 2026 are hams and a handful of aging SWLs. Few receivers other than those built into ham rigs are being manufactured, and how many are actually sold? Sorry, but those days are over, and will not be coming back.
You are talking about the period before "Mr Khrushchev tore down that wall".
Shortwave began to die in the 90's, 40 years ago, concurrent with the rise of FM world-wide. Instead of shortwave, radios appeared at retail with FM and AM.
And now, many countries have eliminated AM broadcasting totally, while others have reduced the number of statioins with the aim of ending use of the band. In some places, economics have converted AM to a small collection of religious stations... such as El Salvador where the capital used to have over 30 stations and now there are just 3 commercial stations and about 12 religious ones.
Our government, whatever you think of it, has been smart enough to realize that a system based on shortwave is totally obsolete and needs to be closed.
At present, there is no way to get information to people who don't have the radios to receive it.
Note: I am a bit of an expert on shortwave, as I actually owned a commercial SW station once and closed it as "not viable in the future".
Try "50 years" at least. It was in the 70's that FM took over in most nations, eliminating the need for shortwave by allowing economical installations of stations even in small communities. Heck, in the later 60's I built my first 5 FM stations for less than $US 10,000 each.
Yes, there are SW radios on Amazon. But the market for them is not the general public, whether here or in Indonesia or Egypt or Perú.
As far as the 60 and 90 meter stations went, yes they started shutting down over 50 years ago. But the big international services were concerned, they didn't start failing until the breakup of the Communist world in the early 1990s, continuing up to today.
I'm not sure what the market is today, if there even is one.
I read an article recently on Bloomberg that focused on China’s media efforts in Africa. Bottom line was that they were ineffective as the content was of little interest to the average listener or viewer. What did get the most audience attention for news? The BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN.
The article also mentioned that China was now moving its efforts away from reaching the general public in Africa, and focusing more on the power elite in various countries.
Huh?!?🤣🤣
Easy to get those “-ev” guys mixed up.😝
The gradual decline of domestic shortwave began almost 60 years ago when FM began to make a local impact.
International shortwave began a slow decline in the 1990s with the growth of satellite and cable distribution, and that process snowballed after 2000 when audio streaming became commonplace.
Despite my opinion of the current regime I will grudgingly agree with you, and I say that as a 60 year SWL.
I would argue that “smart” had nothing to do with it…😖
Yeah, I grew up with Khrushchev on everyone's mind when he might have had his finger on the missile launcher. Of course, it was Gorbachev.
It was in 1966 that I turned in the license to my shortwave station, part of HCSP which was 590 AM and on 90 meters on SW. I moved the AM from San Pedro de Amaguaña to Quito, and tossed the SW transmitter in a landfill.
I'd say it began declining seriously in the late 70s and early 80's when most cities in the free or free-er world got local FMs, replacing the need for SW stations, both domestic and international. In the case I was closest to, in Ecuador, by 1980 stores had radios with AM and FM, while 10 years before, they had ones with AM and SW.
I began DXin in 1958, so am in the same "club". I was mostly an AM DXer, specialized in stations from Latin America.
I think that knowing that all the major international SW nations were closing, had closed or wanted to close their SW stations was a pretty obvious thing to anyone.
For international shortwave broadcasting I was referring to total program and transmitter output which was still quite robust up to the end of the 1980s, regardless of what was happening to actual audience levels. It was early in the 1990s that saw the beginnings of trims to program schedules.
Mr. Eduardo, your interest in radio was commercial; selling stuff. Not what i was referring to.
For that matter, SW and LW have never been commercial factors here in N. America.
The fact that only a handful of nations were the primary target of VOA and RFE via all three bands IS the point I am making.
Those living in dictatorships have no other way of accessing anything beyond the propaganda of their governments. Millions of existing radios can easily receive outside broadcasts if they are strong enough.
Nothing else exists that can overcome authoritarian governments suppression of information.
In our better days we saw value in this mission.
LCG
Radio is radio. In fact, the average person thinks today of "audio" no matter where the sound comes frrom.
Then why did the VOA have something like 70 languages at one point? And over 40 when they were shut down?
There simply are very few places where anyone has shortwave radios any longer.
And short wave is not a way to reach even a small number of people in any place in the world. A few operations, like the remnants of the HCJB group that uses SW to attempt to reach China, have met with the absence of radios.
This is sort of like building a dam in the middle of the Sahara desert to capture rains that will never come.
This has nothing to do with "better" or "worse" day. It has to do with the reality you seem unable to recognize that there are few SW radios left anywhere.
Picky point, but Reach Beyond (former HCJB Global) does not target China with its shortwave output. They do use various South and Southeast Asian languages, along with Japanese and Korean.
I have not followed them for a while after I lost contact with the folks I knew in Ecuador (their engineers helped me design and built my first FM transmitters). I somehow thought they had Chinese programs still.
I know that Indonesia in particular used to have tropical band SW stations "everywhere" and some old WRH editions showed more SW stations than MW ones. I wonder how many of those receivers have survived! The stations are all gone... just two low power ones up at 6.6 mHz. There are hundreds and hundreds of FMs, though.
She was sent in to eliminate inefficiency. Nothing is more inefficient than millions of watts of transmitter power, a thousand employees and essentially no listeners to the broadcasts on Short Wave.
indnesia has 3325 4755 and 9690, part of radio republik of indonesia
The latest WRH shows only 7205 RPI Pro-3 and 7290 RPI Pro-1, with 800 watts and 1 kw respectively under the RPI listing. Here is the listing in the brand new WRH 2026.
