Tag: Decoder

  • Decoder: The Silence of America

    Decoder: The Silence of America

    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?

     

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  • Decoder: The Paris (Dis)Agreement

    Decoder: The Paris (Dis)Agreement

    The newspapers dubbed it “unprecedented”, “historic”, “landmark”.

    Then-U.S. President Barack Obama called it a “tribute to strong, principled American leadership”.

    When 195 countries came together nearly 10 years ago to adopt a legally binding agreement to try to avert the worst effects of climate change, it was considered a triumph of diplomacy and a potential turning point for the world. The deal that emerged is now so well-known it is referred to simply as “the Paris Agreement” or “the Paris Accords” — or sometimes just “Paris”.

    But with a stroke — or several — of his black-and-gold pen, U.S. President Donald Trump has taken the United States out of the fight to stop global warming, casting the future of the pact and everything it hoped to accomplish into doubt.

    Has the departure of the United States doomed the campaign to cut greenhouse gas emissions to failure? And if not, who will take up the torch Trump has cast aside?

    Uncharted waters

    The good news is that climate change experts believe the benefits of a transition to renewables — from energy independence to cleaner air — are so compelling the shift will go with or without the United States.

    The bad is that Trump’s actions will give many countries and companies an excuse to leave the battlefield. And that may make it impossible to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of holding temperature rises to well below 2 degrees Celsius.

    Listing all the steps Trump has taken so far to undermine the climate campaign would take hundreds of words. So here are just a few.

    Since 20 January 2025, the newly-minted U.S. government has:

    • Withdrawn from the Paris agreement for the second time – joining the ranks of Yemen, Iran and Libya as the only countries outside the pact.

    • Said the Environmental Protection Agency would look at overturning a 2009 ruling that greenhouse gases threaten the health of current and future generations – effectively gutting the agency’s legal authority to regulate U.S. emissions.

    • Rolled back dozens of Biden-era pollution rules.

    • Abandoned a deal under which rich countries promised to help poorer ones afford to make the transition to sustainable energy.

    • Eliminated support for domestic and international climate research by scientists.

    • Halted approvals for green energy projects planned for federal lands and waters.

    • Removed climate change references from federal websites.

    • Set the stage to fulfil Trump’s promise to let oil companies “drill, baby, drill” by declaring an energy emergency, which will allow him to fast-track projects.

    Eliot Whittington, chief systems change officer at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, said that the United States is entering genuinely uncharted waters.

    “The Trump administration is making changes far in excess of its legal authority and drawing more power into itself and away from Congress, states and the courts,” Whittington said. “It is doing so in service of an explicitly ideological agenda that is hostile to much green action — despite the popularity of environmental benefits and high level of environmental concern in the U.S.”

    Alibi for inaction

    Trump has repeatedly — and falsely — called the scientifically-proven fact that mankind’s actions are leading to planetary heating a hoax. In November 2024, following the onslaught of deadly Hurricane Helene, he said it was “one of the greatest scams of all time”.

    For a hoax, climate change is packing a painful punch.

    Last year was the hottest on record, and yet even with countries touting net-zero gains, emissions also hit a new high. According to World Weather Attribution, the record temperatures worsened heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, storms and floods that killed thousands, displaced millions and destroyed infrastructure and property.

    In other words, the need to curb emissions is only growing more urgent.

    Alister Doyle, a News Decoder correspondent who authored “The Great Melt: Accounts from the Frontline of Climate Change“, believes Trump’s anti-green policies will slow but not stop the move away from fossil fuels.

    “But while other nations will stick with the Paris Agreement, almost none are doing enough,” he said. “Trump’s decision to quit will provide an alibi for inaction by many other governments and companies.”

    Voters look to their wallets

    Ambivalence about net-zero policies had been on the rise even before Trump took office, stoked by populist political parties.

    There are clear long-term economic benefits of the transition — from faster growth to the avoidance of costs linked to natural disasters. But Whittington said that the short-term sacrifices and infrastructure spending it will require have proven a tough sell when voters are facing difficult financial circumstances at home.

    “After a global inflation shock post-pandemic, governments have little financial space to defray the costs of upfront investment and generally voters feel like they don’t have the space to take on additional costs, even as a down payment on a better future,” Whittington said.

    This is further complicated by a powerful lobby against climate action led by oil and gas companies, which have devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to the effort. While most have also made public commitments to green goals, the sentiment shift has led several to abandon most or all of these in the past few weeks.

    Whittington believes that, despite these setbacks, the energy transition will eventually gain enough momentum that even fossil fuel producers will be unable to step on the brakes. It will be led by multiple countries and propelled by a variety of forces.

    Chief among these is the need in today’s politically fractured world for energy security: the guarantee a country will have access to an uninterrupted — and uninterruptible — supply of energy at a price it can afford. This is particularly important to countries dependent on imported energy.

    China leads the way.

    In its pursuit of energy self-sufficiency, China — both the world’s largest fossil fuel importer and the world’s top greenhouse gas emitter — has earned itself a less dubious distinction: it now leads the globe in the production of renewable energy and electric vehicles.

    “The International Energy Agency says that China could be producing as much solar power by the early 2030s as total U.S. electricity demand today,” Doyle said.

    Europe, meanwhile, has been on a quest to wean itself of Russian oil and gas and has rapidly increased its adoption of renewables. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, is currently the world’s second-largest wind power producer and plans to double capacity by 2030.

    “Europe as a whole — including the UK — generally is leading the world in showing how to cut emissions and grow the economy,” Whittington said.

    The United States, he added, will likely stay involved in areas where it holds a technical edge, such as battery development.

    Even the Middle East will have an increasingly compelling motive for going green(er): the need for other sources of income as fossil fuel demand falls from a peak expected in 2030.

    Public pressure itself may again become a driving force for change.

    As hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, heatwaves and other climate-related disasters increase — and as a younger, more climate-aware generation finds its voice — voters may start worrying less about their personal finances and more about the future of the planet.

     

    Three questions to consider:

    1. What is meant by the “green economy”?
    2. How can a government encourage or discourage climate action?
    3. What, if any, changes to your lifestyle have you made to help our planet?

     

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  • Decoder Replay: Bacteria doesn’t stop at the border

    Decoder Replay: Bacteria doesn’t stop at the border

    During the Covid pandemic, nations realized they needed to work together to keep their people safe. That’s where the World Health Organization comes in. 

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