Fight the Big Lie with the Big Truth

CIA-funded, presented as a private citizens' initiative. Also broadcast factually accurate news to populations whose own press was censored. The question has no clean answer.

Radio Free Europe launched its first broadcasts to communist Czechoslovakia from the Empire State Building in 1950, pledging to deliver news in the American tradition of free speech. Its mid-century slogan was Fight the Big Lie with the Big Truth. The official story: a grassroots initiative funded by freedom-loving American citizens through the Crusade for Freedom campaign.

The official story was the cover. RFE and its sister network Radio Liberty were conceived, directed, and covertly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. The arrangement persisted until 1971, when fallout from the 1967 National Students Association scandal forced public disclosure of CIA media assets. RFE/RL transitioned to overt Congressional funding via the Board for International Broadcasting. The cover story itself had been a form of information management - propaganda about the propaganda apparatus.

So: was it propaganda? The broadcasts were strategically designed as Cold War weapons to undermine Soviet authority and destabilize the Eastern Bloc. The funding source was concealed. The mission was statecraft. By any structural definition, the answer is yes.

And yet. The network transmitted news that was factually accurate and systematically censored behind the Iron Curtain. It prevented Communist authorities from holding monopolies on information in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania. Lech Wałęsa, asked decades later whether RFE played a role in Poland’s struggle for freedom, replied: Would there be an earth without the sun? Václav Havel said RFE provided the only avenue for the free exchange of information, for free journalism during long years of communism.

The contradiction is structurally irreconcilable. An intelligence-funded psychological operation provided higher-quality, more factual, and more liberating journalism to censored populations than their own domestic press did. The question is this journalism? has no clean answer. Holding both halves is the precise pedagogical point.

Sources: about.rferl.org ↗en.wikipedia.org ↗commons.wikimedia.org ↗archive.org ↗iranwire.com ↗uknowledge.uky.edu ↗