Cold War Communication Project Investigates Information Campaigns
Dr. Jane Curry and her team study Cold War radio broadcasts to understand modern communication issues
What can we learn from out-of-date radio programs?
Radio programs of the past serve as archives of culture and history. During the Cold War, radio was the propaganda-saturated battleground between East and West.
Jane Curry, a professor of political science at SCU, is the director of the Cold War Communication Project, a program within the Library of Congress’ Radio Preservation Task Force. Her team studies and archives radio from the Cold War era. Professor Curry has been involved with Cold War and post-Cold War research since 1967 and was the first Fulbright scholar to go behind the Iron Curtain; she has been awarded five Fulbrights, two of which were for teaching.
Her focus has been on Poland, though her work has addressed political questions in a variety of other ex-Soviet nations. For her teaching and scholarship, Professor Curry was awarded the Medal of Honor from the University of Warsaw, Poland, and was the only foreign-born recipient at that time.
The purpose of many of the radio programs Curry studies, such as Radio Free Europe (RFE), was to broadcast into Soviet-controlled nations with information to counter the propaganda issued by the Soviets to keep the populace in check. “We used real news to press against their fake news,” Dr. Curry explained.
According to Curry, RFE was sometimes so good at covertly broadcasting its messages that even high-level officials within the communist government would mistake RFE broadcasts for subversive broadcasts from local stations. The officials would unsuccessfully attempt to seek out which local station broadcast the non-government-approved messages.
“The Cold War was fought with words over radio broadcasts rather than with bullets,” Professor Curry said. Today, she sees a similar information campaign tactic being used by Russia to fuel divisiveness in the United States, especially during the last presidential election cycle. However, unlike with radio, essentially anyone with an Internet connection can participate in the spread of disinformation through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
“It makes a huge difference when we give people alternative information,” Curry said. She believes that, much like how the West used to broadcast alternatives to propaganda into Soviet-controlled territory to destabilize those nations, the modern Russian disinformation campaign is successfully targeting the populace of the United States.
Professor Curry is eager to start her research with the Cold War Communication Project at SCU and build it into an international collaboration between her students in the U.S. and Poland. By examining the management of Cold War information campaigns and propaganda, Professor Curry and the Cold War Communication Project hope to provide insights into how we can counter the spread of disinformation.