Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

Chapter 12: Just Noise? Impact of Radio Free Europe in Hungary

239 CHaPter 12 Just noise? impact of radio free europe in Hungary istván rév e. H. gombrich, one of the most influential art historians of the twentieth century, who was at one time director of the Warburg institute in london, worked as a so-called monitor and later as a monitoring supervisor , between 1939 and 1945 at the “listening Post” of the B.B.C. in his Creighton lecture in 1969, he summarized his experiences, later published under the title Myth and Reality in German War-Time Broadcasts .1 gombrich claimed that, “i am not sure that german home broadcasts ever got away from the basic conception of the loudspeaker as an amplifier of the political meeting. throughout the first year of the war its professed highlights were the carefully managed relays of Hitler’s or goebbels’ speeches which were invariably held in front of responsive and well-drilled audiences.” until the early 1960s, the propaganda machinery of the Communist world tried hard to follow the german example: “People were encouraged to listen in groups, in factories and barracks, for the idea of the hearer alone in the privacy of his room and able even to switch off was anathema to this theory.”2 in the first half of the 1950s in east and Central europe, governments and local Party bosses aimed at preventing private, solitary listening, and organized instead communal, compulsory listening events at work-places, before, after, and even during working hours, in order to prevent even half-overheard critical remarks, and to provide opportunities for trained expert agitators to interpret the official voice of the regime. the public loudspeaker was a familiar object in the streets and squares, not only in small villages but even in Budapest. the wellknown photographs of large crowds, gathered around public loudspeak1 london: the athlone Press, 1970. 2 ibid., 4. i4 J&P.indb 239 2010.07.05. 7:54 240 ers in 1953 in Budapest, listening to the broadcast of the historic victory of the Hungarian soccer team over england at Wembley stadium, testifies to this wide-spread practice. a few years later, however, marshall mcluhan in his Understanding Media: The Extension of Man recognized that “radio affects most people intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener… that is the immediate aspect of radio. a private experience.”3 the voice coming from the air, entering the solitude of the silent room, well before the beginnings of television programs, had peculiar and dangerous effects on the listener: “it is very far from the material world, so one does not apply material standards to it. the eye alone gives a very complete picture of the world, but the ear alone gives an incomplete one. so at first it is a great temptation for the listener to ‘supplement’ the broadcast from his own imagination , to add what is so obviously lacking in the broadcast.”4 radio stimulates fantasy; it feeds hope. measuring the impact of the private experience of listening to international broadcasts, especially before the terminal weakening of the Communist regimes, was a constant preoccupation for politicians, broadcasters and researchers. leo löwenthal, a former member of the frankfurt school, research director of the Voice of america, first in a talk at the american association for Public opinion research in 1951, then in a paper in the Public Opinion Quarterly, reflected on the methodological problems “posed by the vast populations who are politically inaccessible to systematic polling.”5 to overcome the barrier of the iron Curtain, analysts, pollsters and researchers had to rely mostly on interviews conducted with recent immigrants, unsuspecting tourists, volunteer helpers, and undercover agents. in order “to obtain accurate information about large populations without systematic use of the populations themselves,”6 3 new York: mentor, 1964, 261. 4 rudolf arnheim, “in Praise of Blindness,” reprinted in Raditext(e), Semiotext(e) #16, ed. neil strauss, Volume Vi, issue 1 (new York, 1993), 20. originally published in 1936. Quoted by thomas Bass, “Balloons and Broadcasts : infiltrating the internationalist Barrier dividing east from West. a study in metaphors” (mimeo, 1996), 15–16. 5 Joseph t. Klapper, leo löwenthal, “the Contribution of opinion research to the evaluation of Psychological Warfare,” The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 15. no. 4. (Winter 1951–1952), 657. 6 ibid., 659. i4 J&P.indb 240 2010.07.05. 7:54 241 analysts at the office of international Broadcasting used...