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Listening to the World
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20444 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1992 |
2,904 Words |
| Author
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Stephen K. Thompson
Stephen K. Thompson lives near Washington, D.C. and has been
listening to international shortwave for more than 30 years.
He holds the highest-class amateur radio license issued by the
Federal Communications Commission. |
The plotters isolated me completely from the outside world, both from the sea and the land, creating what was essentially psychological pressure. It was totally isolated.
The most difficult aspect of the situation was the lack of information. Everything was cut off except the television, on which statements by the State Committee for the Emergency alternated with feature films and orchestral concerts. But the security officers from the bodyguard, very smart boys, found some old radio receivers in the services areas [of the dacha], fixed up aerials and started to pickup foreign broadcasts. The best reception was from the BBC and Radio Liberty. Later we managed to pick up the Voice of America. My son-in-law Anatoli managed to listen to Western station on his pocket Sony. We started to collect and analyze information and assess the way the situation was developing.
-Mikhail Gorbachev
The August Coup.
Mikhail Gorbachev, cut off from his allies and, like his countrymen, finding that his television delivered only the information the plotters wished it to provide, thus turned to an older, more reliable source of news; international shortwave radio.
At the same time viewers around the world were watching the dramatic events in Moscow on television, as they happened, Gorbachev and thousands of people inside the Soviet Union sought reliable information on the radio--and received it quite effectively. Shortwave broadcasting, as on countless previous occasions, as on countless previous occasions, demonstrated during the abortive Soviet coup that it remains the single source of information that oppressive governments are unable to deny to their captive populations.
New radio technology has left governments essentially impotent, unable to stem the flood of uncensored news and information that crosses their frontiers hourly, reaching anyone who wants to hear it.
Television easily controlled
Television, however, is a prisoner of its own technology. As Gorbachev was reminded during his captivity, television is easily controlled by governments or plotters. The most significant improvements in television technology, in fact, make the visual medium even more
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