Discovering the Hidden Listener: An Empirical Assessment of Radio Liberty and Western Broadcasting to the USSR during the Cold War

Discovering the Hidden Listener: An Empirical Assessment of Radio Liberty and Western Broadcasting to the USSR during the Cold War

by R. Eugene Parta
Discovering the Hidden Listener: An Empirical Assessment of Radio Liberty and Western Broadcasting to the USSR during the Cold War

Discovering the Hidden Listener: An Empirical Assessment of Radio Liberty and Western Broadcasting to the USSR during the Cold War

by R. Eugene Parta

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Overview

This overview of the impact of Western radio and Radio Liberty—from the listeners' perspective—addresses questions of audience size and listening trends over time, listeners' demographic traits and attitudes, and more. Based on more than 50,000 interviews with Soviet citizens, the book sheds light on what these broadcasts meant to listeners as the USSR moved toward a freer society.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780817947330
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
Publication date: 09/01/2013
Series: Hoover Institution Press Publication
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 116
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

R. Eugene Parta is the retired director of Audience Research and Program Evaluation for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague. He has worked in the field of international broadcasting audience research since 1969; in Munich he was director of Media Opinion Research of the RFE/RL Research Institute. Parta has written extensively on media use, communications, and public opinion in Central and Eastern Europe and been a frequent speaker and participant in international academic and professional conferences.

Read an Excerpt

Discovering the Hidden Listener

An Assessment of Radio Liberty and Western Broadcasting to the USSR during the Cold War


By R. Eugene Parta

Hoover Institution Press

Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8179-4733-0



CHAPTER 1

SECTION ONE

Measuring the Audience to Western Broadcasters in the USSR


The original draft of this study was prepared for the Conference on Cold War Broadcasting Impact held October 13–15, 2004 at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, California. The conference was co-organized by the Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, with support from the Center for East European and Eurasian Studies, Stanford University, and the Open Society Archives, Central European University, Budapest.

Survey data on Radio Liberty's audience during the coup crisis in August 1991 was available within days of the event. It showed widespread listening to the station. This was not the case during most of the station's history, when the Soviet Union was off limits to Western survey researchers. Western radio broadcasting was considered "ideological diversion" and any attempt at researching the audience for the benefit of a Western broadcaster would have been considered little short of espionage, especially in the case of Radio Liberty.

Given that it was impossible to carry out classic audience research within the USSR itself, second-best methods had to be employed. The fallback was to interview systematically travelers from the Soviet Union who were temporarily outside their country. Beginning in the early 1970s, emigrants from the USSR, primarily Jewish, but also some ethnic Germans, were also interviewed. These research efforts were directed by the Soviet Area Audience and Opinion Research (SAAOR) unit of RFE/RL, located in Paris. The actual interviewing was carried out by independent research institutes in a neutral manner that did not prejudice results in favor of a single broadcaster. The data were relied upon by all the major Western broadcasters to the USSR for their basic estimates of audience size and listening behavior.

During the 1950s and 1960s, interviewing travelers produced primarily ad hoc anecdotal evidence of listening, which provided useful insights but permitted few general inferences. By the early 1970s, data collection had been systematized to the point that preliminary generalized estimates could begin to be made about audience size and composition. During the period 1972–1990, over 50,000 interviews with Soviet travelers were conducted and analyzed using a sophisticated mass media communications computer simulation model developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).Since that part of the Soviet population which was allowed to travel to the West was demographically and ideologically skewed, highly robust methods were required to counteract those biases. Travelers tended to be more male, more urban, more educated, more middle-aged and more likely to be members of the communist party than the population at large. While the MIT simulation program could correct for the demographic skew, there was no real way to correct for the fact that travelers had been carefully screened for loyalty to the Soviet state. This might have had an impact on their willingness to admit to listening to certain Western radio stations (such as Radio Liberty) that were considered ideologically antagonistic. While the focus of this paper is not on methodology per se, the complicated methodological issues involved in surveying a non-representative traveling population are briefly discussed in Appendix A. The underlying principles of the MIT mass media simulation program are dealt with in Appendix B. Methodological issues will be examined in more depth in a subsequent publication.

Throughout this paper, for reasons of convenience, the term "sample" will be used to refer to the Soviet traveler data. This does not mean to imply that the sample of travelers is a random, scientific sample in the usual sense of the term. It should rather be taken to mean a survey group reconstructed by the MIT simulation program in such a way as to be representative of the adult population of the USSR.

In addition to the traveler survey, an entirely separate project, also managed by SAAOR, surveyed over 25,000 legal emigrants from the USSR on their media habits before emigration. This research could be conducted with the straightforward administration of a detailed questionnaire. Emigrant data were not used for estimating audience size in the Soviet Union, but provided much useful detailed information on listening behavior and permitted cross-checks to validate the internal consistency of the traveler data. Another source of useful information for the radios, although it couldn't be used to estimate audience size, was listener mail. Thousands of letters were received over the years, and their many first-hand accounts of listening behavior, along with their positive or critical comments, were of inestimable value to the broadcast services. However, listener mail is beyond the scope of this study and awaits a separate analysis.

No claim is made that the research approach used by SAAOR during the Cold War produced results that would have been as accurate as surveys freely conducted within the USSR using state-of-the-art methodology. All research findings in this study have to be understood within the limits of that caveat. There are always limits to accuracy and when direct impediments are placed in the way of the research process those limits can be severe. The data, however, do provide a rather remarkable body of internally consistent findings with high face validity, and we feel confident that they offer valuable insights into the role played by Western radio during the Cold War period. Along with the data on media use, a considerable amount of attitudinal data was gathered. As the size and quality of the database increased in the 1980s, and analytical methods became more refined, our understanding of the listeners gained in depth and richness. Through the careful analysis of this extensive database, it became possible to provide broadcast management with crucial information allowing them to adapt programming in order to better meet listeners' needs and desires.

When the Cold War ended and research could be conducted within the USSR, and later in the successor states to the Soviet Union, it became clear that our earlier measurements and understanding of audience behavior were firmly grounded and no major reassessments were required. Subsequent surveys conducted inside Russia after the fall of the USSR bore out the finding of widespread listening to foreign radio stations during the Cold War period and their importance to the Soviet peoples.

This paper is based on the extensive data gathered from SAAOR traveler surveys and addresses the important questions of audience size and listening trends over time, the position Western radio occupied in the Soviet media environment, listeners' demographic traits and attitudinal tendencies, the evolution of the image of different Western broadcasters, and listeners' programming preferences. The role of Western radio in various crisis situations will be examined through a number of case studies. An additional section examines issues of data validation, drawing on comparisons with internal Soviet studies, both official and unofficial. Finally, some tentative observations will be made on the important question of the impact of Western radio and Radio Liberty from the listeners' perspective. Impact can be an elusive issue to quantify and it is imprudent, if not impossible, to isolate a single factor in any causal process. These difficulties notwithstanding, it is important to attempt to better understand what Radio Liberty and Western radio actually meant to their listeners, and how their influence may have inspired or reinforced other tendencies at work in the USSR in its fitful movement toward a freer society.

CHAPTER 2

SECTION TWO

Trends in Listening to Western Broadcasters in the USSR: 1970–1991


2.1. Early Attempts to Quantify the Audience to Western Radio: The 1970s

As noted above, research on listening to Western radio in the USSR was essentially anecdotal or based on listener mail until 1970, when systematic surveying of Soviet travelers to the West began. These initial survey data, however, were too unrepresentative of the Soviet population to permit general inferences concerning the size of audiences to the different Western broadcasters. It wasn't until 1973 that the MIT computer simulation methodology was applied to the data, and an attempt was made to project the survey data onto the larger population of the USSR.

These initial rough projections, based on some 2,000 respondent cases from 1970–1972, showed VOA with the largest audience of all the Western broadcasters — a position it was to hold until jamming was lifted on Radio Liberty in November 1988. This first application of the MIT simulation estimated that on a "typical" day VOA reached about 6% of the Soviet adult population, followed by Radio Liberty at 2.8% and BBC at 1.5%. All "other stations" combined were estimated to reach 7.2%. Cumulative weekly reach estimates were 23% for VOA, 11% for Radio Liberty, 5% for BBC and 26% for the "others."

An important finding of this first attempt to quantify audiences showed that there was very little overlap between the two American stations, VOA and Radio Liberty. To a large degree, the audience to each station was different, both in demographic terms and in language of listening. The audience to VOA was relatively young, about three-quarters urban, and about evenly split between men and women. Radio Liberty, on the other hand, had a somewhat older audience, less urban, slightly better educated and strongly represented in the Union Republics. This was consistent with the program offer of each station. Although both stations had strong news orientations, VOA carried considerably more entertainment and U.S.-oriented programming, while Radio Liberty, as a "surrogate" broadcaster, focused on political and cultural aspects of its broadcast area, the USSR, and was on the air in more regional languages.

Although these first general findings were encouraging, subsequent survey data throughout the 1970s showed audiences listen.ing at somewhat lower rates. It is difficult to determine whether the later figures indicated real shifts in audience size, or if they reflected improved data collection techniques that produced a demographically more diverse sample. Figure 1 shows weekly reach rates for the four major broadcasters: VOA, Radio Liberty, BBC and Deutsche Welle through the remainder of the 1970s.

In the 1973–74 data, a now un-jammed BBC moved ahead of Radio Liberty in terms of weekly reach and VOA's audience estimate declined from the 1970–72 data. (From 1973 to 1980, only Radio Liberty was subject to heavy jamming. Jamming was lifted on VOA, BBC and Deutsche Welle in 1973 in the climate of détente.)

Given the development of surveying techniques and analyti.cal methodology during the early and mid 1970s, it seems likely that the earliest estimates from 1970–1972 should best be viewed as general approximations. It was not until the late

1970s, after survey methods had been improved to procure a more diverse sample, and the MIT computer simulation methodology had been further refined, that annual audience estimates could be used to determine listener trends with a high degree of confidence. These estimates will be examined in more detail below.


2.2. Weekly Reach of Western Broadcasters: 1980–1990

This section will focus on tracking audiences to Western radios during the 1980–1990 period when annual data bases were larger, data collection had become more routinely systematized, and the MIT computer simulation software was more specifically adapted to the needs of SAAOR. Consequently, we have more confidence in these estimates than in those for the 1970s shown in Figure 1.

The cumulative weekly reach of the major Western broad.casters to the USSR for this period is shown in Figure 2. (Cumulative weekly reach is the percentage of the population reached in the course of an average week. It will be referred to simply as "weekly reach" hereafter.) A reasonably consistent pattern emerges throughout the period. The weekly reach of the combined Western broadcasters oscillated around 25%. VOA had the highest weekly reach, at around 15%, until it met direct competition from an unjammed Radio Liberty in 1989. BBC was firmly anchored in the 5–10% range and Deutsche Welle hovered around 5% until 1986, when it began a slow but steady decline to around 2% in 1990.

The only station showing a major shift was Radio Liberty. The audience began a slow climb from ca. 7% in 1980 to ca. 10% in 1985, where it stayed until jamming ended in November 1988. At that point, its audience dramatically increased and, in terms of weekly reach, Radio Liberty became the leading Western broadcaster in terms of audience size in 1989 and 1990.

Of course neither the broadcasting nor the listening took place inside a vacuum. In order to better understand the dynamics of listening trends, it is important to view them against a double backdrop: on the one hand, Soviet jamming of the broadcasts, and on the other, events both inside and outside the USSR which might trigger increased interest in listening. Issues such as improvements in transmission capabilities or changes in programming emphasis are beyond the scope of this paper.


2.3. The Impact of Jamming

In the context of the Cold War, the USSR was disinclined to allow their citizens free access to what they called Western "voices." Jamming of VOA transmissions started on February 3, 1948 and BBC on April 13, 1948. Jamming was to be a major weapon of the Soviet government against Western broadcasts throughout the Cold War period and its interruption or intensification served as a barometer of the East-West political climate. Jamming was lifted on VOA and BBC in June 1963, during the period of relaxation of tensions in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis and negotiations on the nuclear test ban treaty. Jamming was resumed in August 1968 during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. It was halted again in 1973 during the period of détente, only to resume in 1981 at the time of declaration of martial law in Poland. Jamming was definitively ended on BBC transmissions in January 1987, and on VOA in

May 1987, during the period of perestroika. Selective jamming of Deutsche Welle started in August 1962 and continued until June 1963. It recommenced during the Czech crisis of August 1968, and the jamming pattern from that point on followed that of BBC and VOA. Radio Liberty was jammed without interruption from its first day on the air in March 1953 until November 22, 1988, and it was the number one target of the Soviet jamming network.

Radio Sweden was subject to some early selective jamming which soon ended. A similar pattern was noted for Radio Canada International, which suffered only occasional selective jamming. Radio France International did not report jamming of its signals.

It is interesting to note the overall decline, as measured by SAAOR, in the weekly reach of all Western stations, from 25.6% in 1985 to 18.9% in 1986. If SAAOR's lower ratings for Western broadcasters were replicated by secret internal polls, the Soviet authorities may have felt that in the perestroika/glasnost' climate it was safe to end jamming on VOA, BBC and Deutsche Welle, since their audiences were already in decline. A jamming halt could be a major public relations benefit in the West, and signal a new climate of openness and confidence within the USSR. As noted, jamming ended on BBC in January 1987 and on VOA and Deutsche Welle in May 1987. Radio Liberty was apparently considered a more serious problem, for intense jamming was to continue another eighteen months.

When jamming ended on Radio Liberty in November 1988, its listening rates immediately shot upwards. By the second half of 1989, SAAOR's estimate of weekly reach was 16.8%, compared to 10% in 1988 under jamming (the latter being a relatively high figure in the circumstances).

While jamming certainly made listening to Western broadcasts in the USSR more difficult, it was not successful in preventing it altogether. Both broadcasters and listeners found ingenious ways of circumventing jamming, and jamming may have had the unintended effect of increasing interest in the broadcasts in line with the maxim "forbidden fruit is often sweeter." At the height of the Cold War, the USSR had constructed such an extensive jamming transmitter network that it cost considerably more to jam Western broadcasts than to broadcast them.

A study conducted by SAAOR in the early 1980s showed that respondents' listening habits were significantly affected by jamming. About half the listeners in the sample (51%) reported that they tuned in Western stations less frequently than before August 1980, when all but Radio Liberty were un-jammed. They also stayed tuned for shorter periods of time. Even though the weekly reach levels of 1980 had been regained by 1984, listeners were tuning in less frequently in the course of a week and hearing fewer programs under difficult listening conditions.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Discovering the Hidden Listener by R. Eugene Parta. Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Hoover Institution Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

LIST OF FIGURES, ix,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, xiii,
PREFACE: August 1991:The Coup, the White House and Radio Liberty, xv,
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY, xix,
SECTION ONE: Measuring the Audience to Western Broadcasters in the USSR, 1,
SECTION TWO: Trends in Listening to Western Broadcasters in the USSR: 1970–1991, 5,
SECTION THREE: Who Were the Listeners and What Did They Hear?, 27,
SECTION FOUR: Western Radio's Place in the USSR Media Environment, 41,
SECTION FIVE: Western Radio and Topical Issues: Six Brief Case Studies, 47,
SECTION SIX: Some Observations on the Impact of Western Broadcasting to the USSR, 63,
SECTION SEVEN: EPILOGUE. A Comparison of SAAOR Findings with Data from the Archives of the Institute of Sociology of the USSR Academy of Sciences: Late 1970s and Early 1980s, 69,
A. SAAOR Survey Methodology: Interviewing Soviet Travelers, 75,
B. The MIT Mass Media Computer Simulation Methodology, 79,
C. Data Validation: Comparison of SAAOR Studies with Internal Soviet Studies and Other Data, 83,
ENDNOTES, 95,
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY, 105,
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, 109,
INDEX, 109,

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