The sound of soft power

22:02Josephine McDermott:With the war coming to its closing stages, on German radio, an inebriated-sounding Lord Hoar Hoar made his last broadcast as the Allies arrived in Berlin in 1945. You have heard something about the Battle of Berlin. I would only say that the men who have have given their lives to show that whatever else happens, Germany will live. Es Liebe Deutschland, Heil Hitler, and farewell. He would be tried for treason and hanged. In August 1945, the news came that the world had been waiting for. The Second World War had ended. This was repeated on a loop in English and Japanese by the Voice of America. The White House has just announced that the Japanese government has accepted the peace proposal of the Allied governments.

23:01Stand by for further details.

23:07Josephine McDermott:Still to come on the documentary with me, Josephine McDermott, the post-Cold War era, when a version of a BBC drama played on Russian radio and the moment a New Zealander had to announce the death of Albania's communist leader, Enver Hodja. There was such an anxiety in the radio that day. I remember people were like, there was such a hush all over the place. And I remember my editor looking at me and saying, you have to do it slowly, for God's sake. Slowly. Yes, I said, I'm going to do it slowly. You have to do it with this voice. And then he said, like your father died. I said right so yeah so I read it

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24:45Josephine McDermott:Welcome back to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Josephine McDermott. We've been tracing the start of two of the biggest international broadcasters, the BBC and Voice of America. In March 2025, weeks after being returned to office on a promise to cut taxes, regulation and the size of government, Donald Trump issued an executive order to strip back the US Agency for Global Media. It oversees a number of news outlets, including Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe. He accused it of left-wing bias and more than 1 ,000 VOA employees were put on leave. The electric car billionaire Elon Musk, who was advising the president, wrote this on the social media platform X, voiced by a producer.

25:33Yes, shut them down. One, Europe is free now. Not counting stifling bureaucracy. Hello. Two, nobody listens to them anymore. Three, it's just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching a billion dollars a year of US taxpayer money.

25:53Josephine McDermott:Like other big international media organisations that started on shortwave, such as the BBC, Deutsche Welle and Franz Mediamond, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia have become much more, using other frequencies and also TV, websites, social media and partner stations to publish their content. In 2024, the US Agency for Global Media reported reaching an audience of more than 420 million people weekly in 64 languages. It requested$944 million from the US government to run it that year, pointing out that Russia and China were investing in media markets including Indonesia, Pakistan, Africa and Latin America.

26:37Josephine McDermott:Jamie Shea, formerly a NATO spokesperson, was among those critical of the decision. I use the term soft power suicide. There was no overwhelming financial crisis in the US government that would have necessitated closing down these public broadcasting services. The second thing is that there was no alternative in terms of private sector media in the United States willing to pick up that mantle. Today, we are now in a much more competitive environment where China is learning soft power. Even Russia, despite its poor image, has a go at it with Sputnik, with RT, China with CGTN, the Chinese Global Public Network.

27:19And these countries are putting large sums of money into this. So this is not the time for the United States to abandon the field to these state broadcasters.

27:29Josephine McDermott:Thomas Witherspoon, the shortwave enthusiast we heard from earlier, is certainly not abandoning the field. He's carefully collecting and cataloguing all the audio sent to him from radio's international past. I enjoy so much about the medium that goes above and beyond just its ability to carry information. I've always loved interval signals, which used to tell people, you know, hey, we're about to broadcast, you're on the right frequency for Radio Australia or whatever. It was just so fun to hear some of the different ditties that were played.

28:15From the snippets Thomas Witherspoon has kept from the past to the debate about the

28:25Josephine McDermott:voice of America's future. In June 2025, Carrie Lake, the former TV anchor, appeared before Congress at the House Foreign Affairs Committee. She described being put in charge of the U.S. Agency for Global Media by President Trump. Within days in my role as senior advisor, it became increasingly clear that reform was nearly impossible. The agency was incompetent and mismanaged and deeply corrupt, politically biased, and frankly, a serious threat to our national security. She later said, this place is rotten. It's rotten to the core. President Trump has asked me to go in and help clean it up. And he's also issued an executive order to reduce this agency down to its mandate, to what is mandated, statutorily required.

29:09That's exactly what I'm doing. I don't care if they attack me. We're going to make it right for the American taxpayers.

29:15Josephine McDermott:Democrat Congressman Gregory Meeks set out his view. What you're doing isn't efficiency. It's chaos. The dysfunction lies in the administration's Allergy to truth and democracy, the two pillars that USAGM aims to promote abroad. So I'm not surprised by the choice to gut USAGM since the first Trump administration targeted the enterprise, violating laws and journalistic integrity to shape it into a state media like Russia's or North Korea's. Today, those regimes are actually cheering as we surrender another potent set of soft power tools and abandon the airwaves. In the decades after World War II, the Soviet Union and the United States were locked in a conflict of ideology.

30:07Josephine McDermott:The Cold War was an era of paranoia, fear and mutual suspicion, with a contest for supremacy spread across the globe. It was all about persuading other countries of your ideology, and radio was primed to be a soft power tool. This radio station here doesn't beam its signal at the people of Western Germany, but at people living behind the Iron Curtain. It's just part of the Western armament engaged in the Battle of the Aether. In that Western armament, by far the biggest and most powerful weapon is called Radio Free Europe. That was a BBC report from 1950. The station's former deputy director, Arch Puddington, explained more about the Battle of the Aether in 2025 in the BBC World Service's Witness History.

30:53The communist strategy was to smother all independent voices. Anti-communist journalists were arrested or sent into exile. And there was one source of news, basically, which was the communist government.

31:10Josephine McDermott:While the US had Radio Free Europe, the Soviets had Radio Moscow.

31:41Radio Moscow had some wonderful programming that kind of gave you insight into what they wanted you to hear, what they wanted you to think and believe. Hello, everybody. This is Moscow Mailbag coming around again.

31:58Today, your mailbag team is Doris Maxima, back from her holidays, and myself, Edward Dyatlov.

32:12Yes, Tom's gone on his holidays, and as I said, he has Doris back from hers and looking very fit, I must say. And I feel fit. The first thing I did on getting back was to fish out my umbrella. When I was on a Baltic cruise, it was sizzling hot, and everyone was saying, when's it going to rain? Well, here, when I got back, everyone was saying, rain, rain, go away, come back on another day. But more about my holiday next week, when I've had time to get dug in, and have read some of your letters. Often you could tell when maybe it was a genuine question and then maybe when it was a question that they just threw themselves a softball of something to pitch the party line and everything.

32:53Well, who's our first letter from today, Edward? An old friend of yours, Doris Brian Hartley of Fountain-le-Field, asking what's being done to build up Anglo-Soviet relations. A great deal's being done, Brian. Hello, Brian. It's nice to be talking to you again. You know, I think it would be no exaggeration to speak of a new stage in the development of Soviet-British relations. Very pleasant indeed. For one thing, it's been marked by a series of visits back and forth. I think from a really young age, I learned the difference between subjective and objective by listening to such a wide variety of broadcasters.

33:29So I could, in my mind, know was, that sounds like propaganda to me. Our online media and social media, they put us in echo chambers and it divides us. And the algorithms are based on capturing our emotions with anger and fear and all those things. And they put us in these communities where we can just grow angrier, right? And we're not listening. We're not branching out and hearing what other voices say. I think that shortwave radio was like my introduction into critical thinking. Radio Toronto was one I listened to as well. It was another really kind of hardline station. Cold War stations that did propaganda, you know, they'd have people on there from the countries they were targeting.

34:09And so they sounded like the person next door in a lot of ways, but they were towing the party line of whatever country they were in.

34:16Josephine McDermott:In this Cold War period, Albania, under Enver Hodja, virtually a hermit kingdom, broadcast in more than 20 languages on Radio Tirana. You might wonder how English speakers from democratic countries ended up broadcasting communist propaganda. And that's where the New Zealander June Taylor can shed some light, as she was the person next door. She was the English-speaking voice of communist Albania. Oral historian John Eskom spoke to her in 2022. She said it was her adopted father, Ron, a dentist, who first felt the allure of communist ideology. He was absolutely mind-blowing with Albania and how it was building socialism.

34:58And I think probably that was why he took his whole family to Albania in 67.

35:05Josephine McDermott:June was 16. It was supposed to be a two-year stay, but it lasted more than 20. Ron was to work at Radio Tirana before translating Hodges' writing. Meanwhile, June was directed by the Central Committee to study French at the University of Tirana, and it was suggested she worked part-time at the radio station. I knew that people were listening, but I wasn't really sure that we had a very broad audience. I mean, I was told at one particular moment that a lot of the Marxist-Leninist movements throughout the world were regular listeners. And it was to this audience that the teenager who'd been reluctant to audition 18 years before had the task of announcing the death of the dictator.

35:51There was such an anxiety in the radio that day. I remember people were like... There was such a hush all over the place. I remember going into the studio that day. They must have changed that text like a million times. And, you know, take this bit out, take this bit out, And then somebody would come in from the directory and say, no, hang on a minute, let me hear this. So finally they came back with this, I think it was about one page. And I remember my editor looking at me and saying, you have to do it slowly, for God's sake. Slowly. Yes, I said, I'm going to do it slowly. You have to do it with this voice.

36:29And then he said, like your father died. I said, right. So, yeah. With the deepest grief, we inform you that today, the 11th of April 1985, at 2 hours 15, the heart of the beloved and glorious leader of the party and our people, comrade Enver Hoxha, first secretary of the Central Committee of the Party of Labour of Albania, chairman of the General Council of the Democratic Front of Albania, commander-in-chief of our armed forces, ceased to beat. So I read it. I do remember everybody sitting on the other side of the recording studio, on the other side of the window there. What did she say? What did she say?

37:17And the translator was, would you just leave me alone? I'm trying to follow what she's saying. And everybody was, what is she saying? What is she saying?

37:24Josephine McDermott:As communist regimes collapsed across Europe, Albania's government clung to power. The Central Committee was in a real turmoil and the Central Committee was not sending down directives anymore. Subsequently, so was the radio in a mess. And so slowly things started to change within the radio and all of a sudden we were broadcasting Western music, you know, Western songs. I remember the internal radio did a thing on Tom Jones because he was a minor's son. But he got this whole thing in his songs and all of that. What's new, Pussycat? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So, yeah, things started to change.

38:04Pussycat, pussycat, I've got flowers and lots of hours to spend with you. And when it came down to political decisions and on what we should be transmitting, it was a real mess.

38:17Josephine McDermott:The people of this country, isolated for so long, became stirred by the crumbling of communism, which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The government even legalised opposition parties. We started broadcasting articles that would never dream of broadcasting. I remember announcing stuff about interviews that had been done with the different political leaders now, different opinions on things and, yeah, pluralism. After the collapse of the regime in Albania in the early 90s, June went back to New Zealand. Other stations were also affected by the demise of communism. The medium of shortwave survived, but what was being broadcast on it was changing.

38:59I have in the archive one of the very last recordings of Radio Berlin International after integration between East and West. And they started off with a song by the heavy metal band Europe called The Final Countdown, because it was the final countdown to the end, really, of Radio Berlin International. That broadcast came to you from Radio Berlin International, the voice of the disappearing German Democratic Republic.

39:30Their whole career, these people have been talking about the horrible things about the West, right? And how good it was over on the East Side. So all of a sudden, they're being integrated. So I pack my things and leave now. But not without saying thank you to all of your listeners of RBI who have kept faith with us for so long. And it's bye-bye from your programme host, Kitir Seholt.

39:55Josephine McDermott:While some stations packed their bags, the BBC World Service continued. I'm John Tusa. I was managing director of the BBC World Service from 1986 to 1992. And that was the time when the Cold War ended, 89, 90. It was a time when communism and the struggle between Marxism-Leninism and free market economics were still at a very, very intense period. And what I think the World Service did, it wasn't so much engaged in that argument, But we always said that what we did was to present as many of the facts as people needed about their life as accurately, as completely as possible. And we knew that, say, in closed societies, particularly like the Soviet Union, people knew that they were getting information which they could not get from their own domestic sources.

40:59And that was something that was extremely important.

41:03Josephine McDermott:Sir John Tusa was part of an unimaginable period now, when a special broadcasting agreement was reached between the BBC and Radio Moscow. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, there was a desire to share British know-how on a wide range of educational, commercial, legal and political matters, with states transitioning away from communist one-party rule. And one of the ways the BBC achieved this was to share the archers.

41:34Josephine McDermott:Dom Siem Pudyash Chetira, or Dom Siem as it was known, translates as House 7, Entrance 4. It was a daily radio soap opera set in a contemporary Moscow apartment block, and storylines included people setting up their own small businesses. Dijim, tell me to die. Die.

41:53Hello?

41:57Josephine McDermott:It was produced in Moscow by a team of Russian writers and actors. members of the crew visited the set of the British Archers in 1994, as reported on BBC television.

42:12The Archers is a veteran of 43 years. Dom Sien is a mere two years old. Set in an apartment block, it's a violent, tough portrayal of everyday life in the Russian capital. It's about real life, about people in Moscow. in a house with a Dom Sien. It's a house, block number seven. It's everyday problems and everyday dramatic stories. Four of the Russians join the archers' cast to improve their skills. In Moscow, Dom Sien is already developing an appreciative audience for so many years accustomed only to propaganda on the radio. Step by step, we become free.

42:55Josephine McDermott:While accurate listening figures aren't available, the UK newspaper The Independent reported in 1997 that the UK government estimated 3 million people were tuning in every day for that particular example of the subtle attraction of soft power. As well as adapting to the shifting needs of world audiences, Sir John Tusa oversaw the introduction of new technology, satellite television, because soft power through broadcasting wasn't just about radio anymore. I'm not aware that the flow of free information stops being important at any particular time. If you believe in it, you should do it. And the sums of money involved are pathetic.

43:37When people say, oh, there's not enough money, what absolute and utter rubbish. And when people say, oh, we can't put in another 200 million. When you look at the cost of defence, and I'm not against that by the by, But when you look at how much has to be spent on defence and you look at how much broadcasting you can get for fractions of that broadcasting and broadcasting constantly, that is incredible value for money.

44:07Josephine McDermott:Today, the World Service has a weekly audience reach of 355 million, including English and 44 other languages. But in March, a report from the Public Accounts Committee, which examines the value for money of UK government spending, warned the World Service was in danger of losing ground to its rivals, driven in part by increased international media spending of state actors such as Russia and China. Since 2014, the service has been funded by a combination of contributions from UK citizens through a licence fee and a grant from the UK government. The same report said the total budget had fallen 21 % in real terms in the last five years, mainly because of reductions in contributions from the licence fee.

44:53Josephine McDermott:In the same month, the government announced it would increase funding over the next three years by£11 million each year. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said, This further increase in support ensures that independent, impartial reporting continues to reach audiences who depend on it. Also in March, a year after President Trump's order to cut the funding of USAGM, a federal judge ruled that Carrie Lake had not had the authority to close the Voice of America and its sister stations. Patsy Widdikaswara was White House bureau chief at VOA before the bulk of its funding was removed. She was also a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the government.

45:33Josephine McDermott:She spoke to the World Service. They dismantled everything in terms of our physical infrastructure. I don't even have my badges. They confiscated our equipment, our laptops and everything, shuttered satellite studios and so on. So the judge has accepted a staggered plan to bring us back to work. Getting our physical infrastructure back will take time and a lot of taxpayers' money, but that's not our hardest work. I think the hardest part of all is to regain the trust of the weekly global audience that relied on VOA that we have ignored for the past year. For some, a return to what it was doing isn't what's needed.

46:10Josephine McDermott:Significant change is. Ivana Stradner was born in Serbia and is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in the United States. I do believe that the Voice of America should have been reformed a long time ago. The Voice of America and other similar media platforms are not perfect. We don't need to really shut them down. All we have to do is to reform them. I would definitely make the content more exciting for the young audience. I would make more podcasts. I would work more closely with social media influencers. Russia has been in this battlefield for a very long time. And of Of course, such social media tweets or posts on Instagram are not going to be visible, that you can see that it's coming from Russian intelligence.

47:00They have really, really adopted their influence operations. They have leveraged AI. I have to admit that I'm very, very concerned about the future of the information space unless we really wake up and put our adversaries on the defensive.

47:16Josephine McDermott:What is happening to soft power in that information space? A lot of the media organisations that started on shortwave 100 years ago still exist, but they have evolved. They can use mediumwave, FM, digital platforms and partner stations to reach their radio audiences across borders. There's also satellite for radio and TV, the internet and social media. And while shortwave radio was still a major part of a broadcaster's toolkit in the 1990s, it arguably isn't today, except in some regions and in conflict zones where it can bypass government censorship. It's true. It's a medium that's sunsetting for broadcasters, you know, and has been for a long time.

47:54And it just has to do with the audience not being there. So these are stations that are off the air. Swiss Radio International, The Voice of Greece, Radio Canada International, Radio Netherlands, Radio Norway. From the very end of the very last broadcast of Radio Netherlands in English. Thank you for listening and goodbye. Goodbye!

48:20Josephine McDermott:So has soft power been adapted well enough as platforms and technology have evolved? My name's Nick Newman. I'm a senior research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. And before that, I used to work at World Service many years ago and at the BBC News website. I think the key way of delivering soft power in the future is going to be through multiple channels. We know that more attention, particularly for younger people, comes through accessing news through social media or through digital channels. I think the biggest change right now is not the end of soft power or of international broadcasters.

48:58It's more about the fragmentation of the information ecosystem. And it's really about how these things coexist. So global broadcasters like the BBC continue to be important for many audiences, highly trusted in many countries. You also have state broadcasters. But now on top of that, we've got everything else through social media. And that includes activists, includes influencers and creators. It also includes diaspora media that quite often is highly trusted by people inside the country. So the BBC and others are really competing for attention with many, many more sources of information. One of the things that comes out of research again and again is that people really want trusted, impartial, accurate and transparent news.

49:40Time and time again, we see people in information situations that are chaotic trying to access that kind of information.

49:48Josephine McDermott:Does the archive teach us anything? Well, perhaps it's that broadcasters are always jostled by the whims and demands of political situations and the ideologies of the day. They change as the competing interests of the world shift, like the signals coming down from the ionosphere in strange, unpredictable places. The pioneers of international radio used the latest science and technology to test the possibilities of how humans could reach each other in the 1920s, and they'd surely want us to do the same in the 2020s. We can't know where that will take us. the soft power battle continues and the result of that fight will affect us all radio having firmly been a soft power weapon in its earliest days and through the cold war is changing and while the ways that we hear the spoken voice and its subtle persuasion are altering the archive reminds us that from Frank Conrad in his garage having a bit of fun on a Saturday playing records for the boys to the happy station show with its smiles across the miles there's someone else out there with us It gives us collective experience.

51:00Josephine McDermott:I hope you've enjoyed this one. This translation is now closing down. It was produced and presented by me, Josephine McDermott. The technical producer was Nicky Edwards and the editor was Tom Bigwood.