Iconic photos from the Cold War cover the corridors of the Prague headquarters of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, news networks created by the U.S. government to counter censorship and disinformation from the Soviet Union and their East European satellite nations during the Cold War.
Images from 1989, the year communist rule melted away in more than a dozen countries, were reminders of earlier days when Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty had broadcast news in Polish, Czech, Slovakian and the Baltic languages; those countries are now robust democracies as well as members of the European Union and NATO.
Those historic photos jostle with more recent images from countries where human rights and democracy are not observed, including Russia, Belarus, Iran, Afghanistan and other nations across Central and South Asia. In total, the two networks broadcasted in 27 languages to 23 countries providing news coverage and cultural programming where free media doesn’t exist or is threatened.
The journalists who broadcast there often do so at great risk.
Many are exiles unable to return to their own countries. Three of their journalists are currently jailed in Russian-occupied Crimea, Russia and Azerbaijan. The charges against them are viewed as politically motivated.
Countering power with news
On 14 March 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order which cut the funding for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the parent agency of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. It also cut the funding of Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Network, the Voice of America — the “official” voice of the United States — as well as Radio & Television Marti which broadcasts to Cuba.
The funding cuts would effectively silence these networks. In response, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. 18 March that argued that Congress has exclusive authority over federal spending and that cannot be altered by a presidential executive order. Voice of America Director Michael Abramowitz filed suit 26 March.
On March 27, the Trump administration announced it had restored the funding for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.
Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty came into being after the end of the second World War when Europe became a divided continent. While the wartime allies, including Britain and the United States, focused on rebuilding their economies after years of war, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sent his army to occupy most of Eastern Europe.
Despite promises made at a meeting in the Crimea, known as the Yalta Conference, during the final months of the war in 1945, Stalin refused to allow free elections in East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
Neither were free elections held in the three Baltic countries — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — which the Soviet Union had annexed in 1940. The crushing of democratic rule in so many nations was characterised by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as “an iron curtain” that had “descended across the continent.”
After years of fighting Nazi Germany, half of Europe was now ruled under a Soviet dictatorship.
Containing communism
The United States responded with a policy of ‘containment’ that aimed to halt the spread of communism without using soldiers and tanks. Radio Free Europe started broadcasting in 1950 followed by Radio Liberty in 1953.
With a system of transmitters pointing east, news programmes that countered the state propaganda were beamed to the countries in the Soviet bloc, eventually in 17 languages. These were tactics that came to be known as ‘soft power’.
Based in Munich, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, or RFE/RL as they became known, attracted dissidents who opposed the Soviet-imposed governments. Their audiences grew during the Cold War, despite threats of prosecution.
In addition to news, broadcasts covered music, sports and science. Banned literature written by dissidents who challenged the communist systems could be heard on RFE/RL. Czech dissident Vaclav Havel was one of those voices.
The Berlin Wall tumbled down in November 1989. It was followed by the Velvet Revolution that overthrew the Czech government and installed as its president, the former political prisoner Haval. He invited RFE/RL to move their base from Munich to Prague.
“My confinement in prison might have lasted longer had it not been for the publicity I had through these two stations,” Haval said at the time.
An outcry in Europe and elsewhere
The news that the Trump administration would shut down the radio networks spread quickly. Listeners, viewers and supporters who had lived through the Cold War years when only pro-government broadcasts were legal, shared their stories on social media:
“In Romania, they [RFE] lightened communism with the hope of freedom.”
“As a small girl, living under a communist regime in Poland, I remember my grandfather listening every night to Radio Free Europe, to get uncensored news from around the world, to get different opinions on the world’s affairs, and probably hoping that one day, he would live in a free world. It was illegal to listen to this Radio, and the quality was very poor, and yet, he would do it every night … ”
Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski recalled how his father had listened to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. “This is a great shame,” he wrote. “My grandfather was listening to RFE in Soviet-occupied Poland in 80s. It’s how we learned basic facts about our own countries because communist propaganda was so tightly controlled.”
On 17 March the Czech Republic asked the foreign ministers of the European Union to support RFE/RL so the journalism could continue.
One diplomat who was in the meeting said that stopping RFE/RL’s broadcasts would “be a gift to Europe’s adversaries.” Already Russia’s state broadcaster, Russia Today, had tweeted that cutting the funding for RFE/RL was an “awesome decision by Trump.”
When Vaclav Havel welcomed Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty to Prague after democracy had been restored to Czechoslovakia, he said that having RFE/RL in the Czech capital was equivalent to having three NATO divisions.
The supporters of the networks are hoping that the soft power of free media is indeed able to pack a powerful punch for free media.
Update to this story: As of 30 March, Radio Free Liberty has informed News Decoder that, while two weeks worth of funds have been received, the rest of U.S. government funding had not yet been restored. We will continue to update this story as we learn of further developments.
Three questions to consider:
1. Why, during the Cold War, were radio broadcasts across closed borders one of the few ways people could receive news that was not controlled by the government?
2. In what ways are people limited in accessing news, culture and music?
3. In what ways might a free media be important in a democracy?