Micah Loewinger: The first three months of the Trump administration have seen an avalanche of lawsuits.

Speaker 1: Harvard is suing the Trump administration.

Speaker 2: A federal judge blocks the Trump administration.

Speaker 3: The Supreme Court issued an administrative stay.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. I asked an expert who's been trying to keep up how many cases he's been tracking.

Chris Geidner: That's both a great question that I should know the answer. The fact that I don't is tells you as much as you probably need to know.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, The Divided Dial is back for a new season all about the shortwaves. This week, radio's earliest days.

Speaker 4: It was the first time that human beings had had it in their power to be heard around the world, and a lot of governments figured out that this could be a really powerful tool for the common good, but also, of course, for the waging of wars.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I'm Micah Loewinger. The first few months of the Trump administration have been defined by the constant stream of executive orders, a battering ram of dubious legal action that's brought mass firings, shuttering of agencies, withholding of allocated funds, detentions and deportations, and an existential test for the American judicial system.

Speaker 5: President Trump fired more than a dozen inspectors general during his first week in office. Eight have now filed a lawsuit against the administration arguing that their firings were unlawful.

Speaker 1: Harvard is suing the Trump administration in federal court today, arguing that the administration's attempts to freeze multiple billions of dollars in federal grants are unconstitutional.

Speaker 6: To provoke California into filing a lawsuit. California and many other states are challenging the president's executive order that seeks to end birthright citizenship.

Speaker 7: The justices are allowing the Trump administration to move forward with its ban on transgender people from serving in the military, pending an appeal.

Micah Loewinger: Today, the lead attorneys for Santa Clara County and San Francisco announced they're suing the Trump administration and Doge, the government department overseen by Elon Musk, claiming President Trump and Musk unlawfully ordered the restructuring and mass firing of federal employees.

?Speaker 5: Federal officials have described Kilmar Abrego Garcia's removal as an administrative error, but have not brought him back despite a court ruling upheld by the Supreme Court but said the administration must facilitate his return.

Speaker 8: Some breaking news, in a high-profile immigration case, a federal judge in Vermont just ordered the release of detained Tufts doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk.

Micah Loewinger: For an administration set on rapidly subverting the separation of powers, the onslaught of storylines is part of the strategy, leaving many news consumers and even legal observers on the back foot. I called up one longtime judicial reporter and asked him, how many lawsuits are you tracking nowadays?

Chris Geidner: [chuckles] That's both a great question that I should know the answer, and the fact that I don't tells you as much as you probably need to know.

Micah Loewinger: Chris Geidner, a journalist who has spent most of his career covering the Supreme Court, has been looking for trends as he chronicles all these ongoing legal battles for his website, Law Dork. He says that the courts themselves have slowly begun to approach these cases differently from past administrations.

Chris Geidner: Yes. What we've learned in the first hundred-plus days is that first district court judges, people appointed by Trump in his first term, have been very skeptical of actions that clearly delve far outside of the norm of what is expected. Even once we get up to the appeals court, it takes them a moment to adapt to how differently this administration is operating. There's a presumption of good faith that courts have toward the executive branch. What judges are slowly learning is that they don't necessarily get that this time around.

Micah Loewinger: Can you give me an example of that?

Chris Geidner: Yes. Where we saw that most clearly was with Kilmar Abrego Garcia's case. He was the Maryland man who the administration admitted was taken in an administrative error to El Salvador. He had a withholding of removal, which means that he could not legally be sent to El Salvador. As that case first went up toward the Supreme Court, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, who is a conservative judge, a Reagan appointee, he agreed with the district court judge, Judge Xinis, that Abrego Garcia needed to be brought back. The first time that that case went up to the 4th Circuit, he wrote separately from his colleagues and said, "Listen, my colleagues think this is an easy case. I don't. This is a complex issue, but the administration overreached here." It then goes up to the Supreme Court. We got that ruling where there were no dissenting justices who said, "You need to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia." It goes back down to Judge Xinis. She proceeds a little bit, and DOJ is still appealing again because they don't like what she's saying. This time, when it goes to the 4th Circuit, not only does Judge Wilkinson agree with his more liberal colleagues, he actually writes the opinion for the court. This time, he says, "This is a clear case, and the administration has absolutely overstepped. He goes so far as to citing President Eisenhower's implementation of Brown vs Board of Education to essentially say it is the president's obligation in our constitutional system to implement Supreme Court orders.

Micah Loewinger: Again, Judge Wilkinson, one of the most conservative judges out of the Reagan years, wrote this in his opinion, "It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter, but in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prison without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence, that because it has rid itself of custody, there is nothing that can be done." He went on, "This should be shocking not only to judges but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.

Chris Geidner: This was a warning to the Trump administration. It was also a notice to all of his judicial colleagues across the country.

Micah Loewinger: We've heard the term constitutional crisis invoked by commentators many times over the past couple months. There's some debate about whether or not we're in one, we're on the verge of one. What it means if the executive branch just completely ignores the judicial system. How do you feel about that term? Do you think we're in one yet? Where's the line? Does it matter?

Chris Geidner: I get really nervous about the use of the term constitutional crisis because you could define constitutional crisis down to the point that we've been in a constitutional crisis every day since January 20th. If your definition of constitutional crisis is the executive taking actions that they have reason to believe will be declared unconstitutional, we've been there. You could also go too far direction and say, "Until there is a contempt order and the executive still refuses to adhere, then we're in a constitutional crisis." By time we get there, the horses left the barn. The right way of looking at it is we have a president who isn't so concerned about adhering to the Constitution.

Micah Loewinger: You've said that the so called administrative error that led to Kilmar Abrego Garcia's deportation, the arrest of Milwaukee's Judge Hannah Dugan and the deportation of a two-year-old US citizen are part of a plan. Why in your mind is it important to use that word, plan?

Chris Geidner: Because this is what they want. When you look at Steve Bannon's chaos, all cylinders running strategy. When you look at what Stephen Miller has said in the Oval that day when El Salvador's president was there with Trump.

Stephen Miller: No version of this legally ends up with him ever living here because he is a citizen of El Salvador, that is the president of El Salvador. Your questions about it, per the court, can only be directed to him.

Chris Geidner: They want people to have to challenge every action while they are doing things. The goal of the administration is to see what the Supreme Court lets them get away with. That makes challenging every action important.

Micah Loewinger: Do you think any of these legal challenges are working?

Chris Geidner: I think legal challenges are doing incredible. We saw with the flip a switch removal of status for students. There were these college-by-college reports one Friday of four or five students having their status changed in the system that they wouldn't be allowed to stay going to college in America. Politico reported it led to literally more than a hundred lawsuits. The administration had done this clearly illegally. Every judge, to get those cases sided with the students, started issuing orders. Finally, one Friday morning in court, the Justice Department had announced that they were reversing all of those. That's just one very crisp, solid example of why fighting back does matter and why the courts can hold and can lead to policy changes.

Micah Loewinger: I want to ask you about the national coverage. We talked a little bit about how judges are getting wiser, and they are starting to approach the intent and the legal arguments coming from the Trump administration with a bit more clarity. How do you think the national legal press is doing at covering the Trump administration's legal rationales for their actions?

Chris Geidner: How mean do I want to be?

Micah Loewinger: Be mean. Come on. YOLO.

Chris Geidner: [laughs] You're like, "I love it." I think that there is a reality that institutions protect institutions, because if one institution is fallible, maybe all institutions are fallible. The reality is that it took some of these institutions a bit more time to figure out that this time was going to be a little different even in the first administration. I'll give some examples. The way that people have approached the various executive orders targeting law firms, The New York Times has done stories about, "Then this head of this firm traveled down to Washington to meet with Donald Trump in the Oval Office."

Yes, what you're reporting is fact, but let's say, be clear about what's happening. One of the wealthiest heads of one of the wealthiest law firms in America is trying to protect their financial bottom line at the cost of the rule of law. It's wild to me that you can see these executive orders targeting law firms as anything other than a fundamental attack on the rule of law.

Micah Loewinger: How well do you think the Trump administration is faring in its legal battles? Is it fair to say they're losing more than they're winning, at least compared to what the average news consumer might perceive?

Chris Geidner: I think they are. They're doing very poorly in court. They are so overwhelmed with challenges. We're going through this process of seeing very skeptical district court judges issuing very strong rulings. Once you get up to the appeals courts and the Supreme Court, it is frankly more difficult because those are more ideological judges and justices. Especially when you get up to the Supreme Court, they are conservative. The Trump administration hopes that at the end of the day, the Supreme Court goes along with them. We have seen some signs that the Supreme Court does have limits.

When we had this follow up round of litigation surrounding the Alien Enemies Act, the Supreme Court actually issued an order that was an injunction stopping removals from the Northern District of Texas while they are considering the issue. That's a sharp ruling from the Supreme Court. We've seen some signs that at some excesses, to use a phrase that Chief Justice Roberts used in a speech on May 7, they are willing to rein in some of those excesses. The real question that I have is whether it will be enough.

Micah Loewinger: Chris Geidner covers the Supreme Court and our legal system for his platform, Law Dork. Chris, thank you so much.

Chris Geidner: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, the radio waves are being politicized, but it was ever thus. This is On The Media. This is On The Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Speaking of lawsuits, there's one pending right now filed by Voice of America journalists who argue that the administration's actions in shutting down the U.S. agency for Global Media, which oversees the VOA, were unlawful and violated congressional mandates. It's been a turbulent time for the roughly 1,300 staff members at the VOA who were put on forced leave when their new boss, twice-failed Arizona Senate and gubernatorial candidate and Trump booster, Kari Lake, was nominated to lead the organization in February.

Kari Lake: We are going to be slimming this agency down, way down. It's going on an Ozempic diet. The rot is so bad, it's like having a rotten fish and trying to find a little portion you can eat, it's unsalvageable right now.

Micah Loewinger: This week, Kari Lake posted a long message on X announcing her plan to, "save the service" that broadcasts to some 350 million people around the world.

Speaker 9: One America News Network, OAN for short, will now provide free content for Voice of America and other government-funded international broadcasters.

Micah Loewinger: One America News is a far-right pro-Trump outlet.

Speaker 10: It's the golden age and self-deporters are getting a $1,000 bonus. It's all next on the Matt Gaetz Show. Let's do this.

Micah Loewinger: It's unlikely that Kari Lake's threats to run OAN content on the VOA will actually happen, but it wouldn't be the first time the VOA has been explicitly politicized. Ronald Reagan did it back in the 80s. In fact, radio has played a vital role in much of the soft power efforts the US has engaged in over the last century. That story and so much more is all coming up in the rest of the hour in Episode 1 of The Divided Dial Season 2. You'll remember that the first season, hosted by reporter, rocker and Minneapolis native Katie Thornton, told the story of the right-wing takeover of talk radio.

The series focused on a company called Salem Media Group and its ultra-conservative lineup. It turned out to be even more relevant than we'd expected when Donald Trump won the election last year, and Salem hosts like Charlie Kirk are now regulars at the White House. For this newest season, which will air on the show over the next three weeks, Katie is still exploring her favorite medium, but this time, it's not the AM and FM bands, it's the shortwaves, because like everything else these days, the shortwaves are facing threats both existential and financial. As Katie will make the case, they are very much worth paying attention to. I'll let Katie take it from here.

David Goren: [unintelligible 00:17:16]

Speaker 11: this is such a cool radio with the little--

Katie Thornton: Last summer I met up with a journalist and radio fan named David Goren.

David Goren: These are beautiful radios.

Katie Thornton: I went to his house in Brooklyn, New York so that we could listen to the radio together. Not any old radio, not AM or FM, nothing you can pick up in your car, but shortwave radio, the little-known cousin of AM and FM with fuzzy stations that can reach insanely far distances. David's been listening to shortwave since he was a kid in the '70s when his uncle gave him a radio.

David Goren: I turn it on, and it's like the radio like leapt out of my hand with the North American service of Radio Moscow.

Katie Thornton: Suddenly, the world was all within reach, available to him right there in this box.

David Goren: In the seventh grade, I became the expert on the next five-year plan in the Soviet Union, the economic plan.

Katie Thornton: Today he's part of the Library of Congress's Radio Preservation Task Force. Together, on a sweaty Thursday afternoon last July-

David Goren: [inaudible 00:18:22]

Katie Thornton: -we sat down to hear what we could find on the shortwave dial today. Just like when David was a kid, we heard lots of government-run stations like Radio Marti.

David Goren: The US broadcasting news and information to Cuba.

Katie Thornton: Voice of Islamic Republic of Iran.

David Goren: China Radio International broadcasting in Spanish. Let's see, anything else [unintelligible 00:18:47].

Speaker 12: The Voice of Italy broadcast in Italian.

Katie Thornton: On other days, David has picked up English language shows from North Korea-

David Goren: They have very strident military stuff.

Katie Thornton: -and news from Cuba.

David Goren: This is Radio Rebelde. Radio Rebel. It goes back to the revolution.

Katie Thornton: On the shortwaves, the global tussle for influence plays out 24/7. We didn't just hear news and propaganda.

David Goren: Let's just go up the bench. We'll probably hear some Morse code.

Katie Thornton: There were beeps and bloops-

David Goren: Here we go.

Katie Thornton: -coded messages sent between amateur radio operators or between government officials who used the shortwaves to send military data or secret instructions.

David Goren: Let's see what else we have.

Katie Thornton: Some of what we heard just sounded like normal radio with lots of music and preaching.

Speaker 13: Strong in the Lord and the power of His might against the wiles of the devil.

Speaker 14: It was hidden just to hide the meaning and the power of the divine name. It is inherent in the name of Yah.

Katie Thornton: That's an end-times ministry that also preaches that the earth is flat.

David Goren: Which is very interesting because shortwave radio wouldn't propagate in a flat earth. Details, details.

Katie Thornton: In just about an hour of surfing the shortwaves, we heard prayer and propaganda news and conspiracy theories. So many languages and some really decent jams from all over the globe. I felt like I had been welcomed into a club that was somehow secret and yet right there for anyone to join. I know it's cliche, but there was something magical about tuning into the world, training my ear to listen through the crackle, hearing the distance. As it turns out, this practice of scanning the dial, finding out what you can hear and from how far away is a century-old art. It was popular among radio's early adopters.

These early distance fiends, as they were known, uncovered something very strange about how radio waves traveled through space. What broadcasters did with that information completely altered the trajectory of the 20th century. This is Season 2 of The Divided Dial. I'm your host, Katie Thornton. I've worked in radio since I was a teenager, sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes behind the mic. In Season 1, I investigated how right-wing talk took over AM and FM radio. In all my years of radio research, I'd never really learned about shortwave radio before.

Listen, I'm not going to tell you that shortwave radio is as influential today as the AM and FM talk radio we covered in season one. It's not. I, and I think you, love the medium of radio. This season we're diving into the often failed promise of a medium that was once ubiquitous, connecting people around the world long before the internet ever did. Like the internet, shortwave also took a turn for the chaotic. Over the next four episodes, I'm going to explain how shortwave radio became a propaganda tool for governments at war and then a propaganda tool for American right-wing extremists and cults.

We'll explore what a little-known battle playing out on the shortwaves right now between radio fanatics and Wall Street can tell us about what happens when we cede control of our public airwaves. That's all coming up on this season of The Divided Dial. Let's get back to the story. Radio broadcasting, as in from one to many. It didn't start on shortwave. It started on AM taking off around 1920. AM was inherently local.

Speaker 15: Dana Larson and Mrs. Westa Larson, happy birthday.

Katie Thornton: Signals reached up to 50, maybe 75 miles.

Speaker 16: By the way, down Texas way, your home state, didn't think [inaudible 00:23:04]

Speaker 17: I will.

Speaker 18: Hilma Taylor up there in Lake Geneva says Happy birthday to us. It's her birthday, too.

Katie Thornton: At night, those listening at home noticed something strange. As the sun set, more stations emerged from the static. They weren't coming from down the street or the next town over. Sometimes listeners in New York-

Speaker 19: Edison Studios, WAAM located at 11--

Katie Thornton: -would hear stations from Chicago.

Speaker 20: [unintelligible 00:23:34] Chicago.

Katie Thornton: A listener in Kansas might hear an opera or a boxing match from the East Coast.

Speaker 21: [unintelligible 00:23:41] come through with a one-two.

Katie Thornton: After dark, it was like the world cracked open, and distant stations faded in and out on ghostly, mysterious winds. Most people had never heard a faraway voice, period. Long distance telephone calls were the costly domain of dignitaries and government officials. Even those were fed across long scratchy copper lines. A disembodied voice without a wire, without a fee, from hundreds of miles away, that awed and baffled people. Even scientists, some of whom believed that radio perhaps could be used to communicate with the dead. Of course, there was an explanation for these voices in the night.

Speaker 22: Let us follow through the steps and the processes in transmitting or sending radio messages.

Katie Thornton: Here's what was happening. The way AM normally works is that radio waves get shot from the top of a tall tower, which is often on top of a tall hill.

Speaker 22: The radio messages leave the antenna as electromagnetic waves and travels with the speed of light.

Katie Thornton: The waves travel over the ground, basically line of sight from the tower to you. It's called a ground wave, and it's the thing that fades out a few dozen miles from the tower. When you shoot out an AM signal, there's another thing that happens almost a byproduct.

Speaker 22: Radio waves are sent out in all directions.

Katie Thornton: It's called a skywave, and the skywave goes up into the atmosphere.

Susan Douglas: The lower layers of the ionosphere, which are about 45 to 75 miles above the Earth's surface, they're like a huge sponge during the day, and they absorb the signals that pass through them.

Katie Thornton: Susan Douglas is a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan. She says that these lower layers of the atmosphere are made up of ions that get all charged up by the sun. In the daylight, those layers are where radio waves go to die.

Susan Douglas: At night, when the sun sets, these layers disappear, and the ones above them, they combine to form a dense layer, and it acts like a mirror to skywaves.

Katie Thornton: At night. These skywaves, the byproduct of AM transmission, they keep going until they bounce off this other layer of the ionosphere, and they come back down to Earth vast distances away.

Speaker 22: When these waves strike the antenna of a receiving set, this entire process is reversed. We hear sound originating at that very moment hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

Katie Thornton: That's what these late night AM radio listeners were hearing. A radio wave that had ricocheted off the ionosphere to get to them, and it rocked their world. Long-distance channel surfing became a fad called fishing in the night, with listeners casting out into the ether and seeing what they could catch.

Susan Douglas: They had a map on the wall with map tacks, and every time they reeled in a station, they would put a map tack on where that broadcast emanated from. Was it Kansas City? Was it Washington, DC? Wherever.

Katie Thornton: Radio manufacturers ran ads with slogans like, "Concerts from 14 cities in one evening." In newspaper editorials, distressed housewives and sometimes husbands lamented that their significant other was spending every evening out in their radio shack. While AM broadcast listeners burned the midnight oil to marvel at all the faraway stations, there was one group of people who weren't so surprised by radio's ability to go long. They were the amateur radio operators, what you might know as ham radio. Basically, guys who weren't broadcasting but were tinkering with radio equipment just to chat one to one, like long-distance walkie talkies.

Back in the days before broadcasting, almost all radio transmission was one to one. The radio waves were mostly used by ship captains or the military and to the hams who were just having fun. In World War I, the US government got worried about interference on those AM airwaves. They eventually assigned specific frequencies for ships, for the military, and for those meddling amateurs.

Susan Douglas: They were kicked down to the waves that were thought utterly worthless, shortwaves.

Katie Thornton: Back then, people thought the shortwaves with short wavelengths, picture a really tight squiggly line, just wouldn't go very far. Even Guglielmo Marconi, the father of radio, thought that longer wavelengths would mean longer distances. The amateurs weren't put off.

Susan Douglas: They began experimenting with them.

Katie Thornton: As it turned out, the shortwaves weren't the short end of the stick.

Susan Douglas: They were getting really far. They were getting stations in Australia, New Zealand, or stations in England and France.

Katie Thornton: For the most part, reception was clearer at night, but it didn't have to be dark to go the distance.

Susan Douglas: Amateurs reported spanning distances as great as 10,000 miles, which was unthinkable. Australia and New Zealand were described in the fall of 1923 as a bedlam of Yankee signals.

Katie Thornton: The amateurs proved something huge, shortwave could do round the clock what AM could only do at night. It could use the ionosphere as a springboard. This changed the game for AM broadcasters who wanted their station to reach more people. In 1923, Pittsburgh's KDKA, the country's first commercial radio station, they got their station on shortwave and reached as far as South Africa. New shortwave stations started up in Switzerland, and Japan, and Venezuela. With the scars of World War I still fresh, this burgeoning international medium was a source of hope.

Michelle Hilmes: There was a lot of utopian discourse around radio that, you know, having allowed people to communicate across all these borders. Would there be no more wars?

Katie Thornton: Michelle Hilmes is a retired professor of media studies who has written a lot about radio.

Michelle Hilmes: It would solve all kinds of problems. Just a huge enthusiasm over the possibilities of shortwave as a medium.

Katie Thornton: Entire magazines were devoted to helping people discover new shows on international radio. Listeners would write to far-flung stations. and the stations would reply with these beautifully decorated cards branded with the station name and maybe some imagery that evoked the national culture of wherever they were broadcasting from. They're called QSL cards. It's international code for, "I confirm receipt of your transmission." Shortwave listeners around the world amassed collections of these ornate cards, tangible evidence of their part in an ethereal global community. By the late 1930s, almost all home radio sets had AM and shortwave settings. The peacenik aspirations for shortwave didn't last.

Michelle Hilmes: It was the first time that human beings had had it in their power to be heard around the world. A lot of government figured out that this could be a really powerful tool for the common good. Also, of course, for the waging of wars.

Katie Thornton: Lots of the world's governments had taken to the shortwaves by the 1930s. No nation used them quite like Germany.

Speaker 23: This is Germany [unintelligible 00:31:14]. We are going to present tonight a radio play entitled Vision of Invasion.

Katie Thornton: Zeesen, Germany's state-run shortwave service, had spent years building a large following in America and around the world, playing things like orchestral music.

[orchestral music]

Katie Thornton: In time, they started pushing out Nazi propaganda tailored for specific countries in 12 different languages. With its own festering Nazi movement, the US was a key target.

Michelle Hilmes: You had people like Axis Sally.

Axis Sally: This is Berlin [unintelligible 00:31:46], and I just like to say [unintelligible 00:31:49] it pays to listen.

Michelle Hilmes: She was an American living in Berlin. She became the first American woman to be convicted of treason after the war, but she was broadcasting into the United States on shortwave.

Axis Sally: Women of America waiting for the one you love. Thinking of a husband who is being sacrificed by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Michelle Hilmes: You might have heard of a person called Lord Haw-Haw.

Lord Haw-Haw: The great exodus from Britain is well underway.

Michelle Hilmes: He was a British man named William Joyce who was working in Germany, broadcasting on their shortwave service.

Lord Haw-Haw: The rich and affluent are removing themselves of their valuable as fast as they can.

Katie Thornton: There was also a big band called Charlie and His Orchestra run by the German Ministry of Propaganda. They'd take popular big band and swing songs and add or change lyrics to berate Roosevelt or denigrate Jewish people.

[MUSIC: Charlie and His Orchestra - F.D.R. Jones]

All the Jewish family has a brand new heir

He's their joy

Heaven sent

And they proudly present Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones.

Katie Thornton: They were trying to persuade Americans that the Germans had the right side in the war and that it was crazy for them to fight.

[music]

Nonintervention.

How he shows it, his decision to send troops along.

Katie Thornton: The US Government had banned all editorializing on domestic radio stations during the war, making it illegal for Americans to promote the Nazi cause on the AM airwaves. The feds didn't have any control over shortwave broadcasts beaming in from Germany. The content was still there for the many Americans who wanted to listen. Journalists at CBS and NBC launched counteroffensives.

Susan Douglas: The networks had what were called shortwave-listening posts in New York.

Katie Thornton: Susan Douglas again.

Susan Douglas: They had people who were fluent in foreign languages monitoring international shortwave broadcasts.

Katie Thornton: Then they turned their findings into entertainment, like the hit CBS radio series hosted by a popular detective novelist named Rex Stout. It was called Our Secret Weapon.

Rex Stout: The truth is a weapon that isn't secret in our country, but it's a big secret to the people who Live in Germany, Japan, and Italy. Our enemies don't have this weapon. They don't dare let their people know the truth.

Katie Thornton: Every week, radio sleuth Stout debunked enemy shortwave propaganda.

Rex Stout: First, a broadcast of the official German News Agency on August 2nd.

Speaker 24: The meeting between Churchill and Stalin was very excited and hysterical. It assumed a dramatic--

Rex Stout: On August 8 [unintelligible 00:34:32] at England.

Speaker 24: This morning, Churchill shook hands with Stalin at the Kremlin.

Rex Stout: As we now know, Churchill actually arrived in Moscow on August 12th. You can't beat that for a scoop.

Katie Thornton: The rest of the Allies were also busy fighting Germany's shortwave radio propaganda. It was during World War II that the BBC ramped up what would come to be known as the World Service on shortwave.

Speaker 25: This is London calling in the overseas service of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Katie Thornton: They broadcast news to the world with just a bit of pro-Allies spin.

Speaker 25: The Danes have already had a taste of what German protection means. A better word for it would be plunder, for the Germans are seizing goods and property at will.

Katie Thornton: In early 1942, the US followed suit. The federal government debuted its shortwave radio service, the Voice of America, with an in-language broadcast to Germany.

Speaker 26: This is a voice speaking from America. Our voices are coming to you from New York, across the Atlantic Ocean to London.

Katie Thornton: The Voice of America started as a government-run radio show and they partnered with networks like NBC and CBS to get it out worldwide. NBC and CBS were already broadcasting overseas via shortwave. Shortwave quickly proved so central to the war effort that the US government did something unprecedented. They nationalized all the roughly one dozen shortwave stations broadcasting from US soil, filling the international airwaves with approved broadcasts.

Speaker 27: Daily, at this time, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good or bad, we shall tell you the truth.

Katie Thornton: For the most, part they did that, if a bit selectively. Michelle Hilmes.

Michelle Hilmes: They were walking a fine line between willful propaganda and putting a good spin on things.

Katie Thornton: As the US sent more troops into battle, it used shortwave to boost morale.

Susan Douglas: They began to transmit entertainment programming via shortwave to the troops.

Katie Thornton: Susan Douglas again.

Susan Douglas: This was so important during holidays like Christmas and New Year's, when there you are, freezing and alone and scared.

Michelle Hilmes: They had programs that would allow troops to speak to people back at home. "Oh, here's mailbag, and we have letters from soldiers," and they would read them aloud.

Speaker 28: Dear Mother, tonight I'm very lonely. I've never written that before, and maybe it's a shock to you. Then again, maybe you've read between the lines and have known it all along.

Michelle Hilmes: There was a very popular program called GI Jive with Jill.

Speaker 29: [sings] Here's Jill and the GI Jive.

GI Jill: Hi, fellas. This is GI Jill with GI Jive.

Michelle Hilmes: The World Series. [chuckles]

Speaker 30: The 1942 World Series broadcast. [crosstalk]

Michelle Hilmes: You gotta have the World Series.

Speaker 30: The Yankees on five to nothing as we--

Michelle Hilmes: The Voice of America was very highly respected and many people think that it did a great deal to help us win the war.

Katie Thornton: By the end of the Second World War, the Voice of America blanketed much of the world. It ran in about 40 languages. They were about to get lots of company on the airwaves because in the Cold War, the shortwaves exploded. That's coming up after the break. This is The Divided Dial from On The Media.

[pause 00:38:01]

Katie Thornton: This is On The Media. I'm Katie Thornton, host of OTM's Divided Dial series. We're right in the middle of Episode 1 of our second season. Before the break, we heard about how groups like the VOA dominated the shortwaves at the end of World War II. During the Cold War, shortwave would become so much more radio.

Speaker 31: Radio repeating.

Speaker 32: This is Tehran Radio [unintelligible 00:38:46].

Speaker 33: The Australian Forces Radio.

Speaker 34: [foreign language]

Speaker 35: You are tuned to the North American service of Radio Moscow.

Katie Thornton: The VOA, the BBC, the Soviet Union, China, Egypt, Iran, Argentina, and so many others were on shortwave, broadcasting their national identity to the world in stories and song. They were joined by newly decolonized nations like Libya and Ghana, whose leaders saw the shortwaves as a way to promote their independence and to fuel an international anti-colonial movement. The global superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, were two of the most dominant voices on shortwave. Shortwave became one of the most ferocious battlegrounds of the Cold War.

At bat for the Soviet Union was Radio Moscow. Founded in 1929, the USSR's government-run network broadcast in over 70 languages with news, propaganda and human interest stories. It offered a Soviet alternative to the BBC and the VOA.

Speaker 36: America hit a new high in crime, and according to FBI reports to the president, nearly half of the criminals were young people. The causes of this menacing situation are well known. The pornographic pictures distributed among adolescents and the exhibitions of abstract paintings and statues that say nothing to either the heart or the mind.

Katie Thornton: The BBC and the VOA were expanding, too, sending more and more coverage over the Iron Curtain. The United States government wanted to reach people in Eastern Europe with messages that weren't so obviously propaganda as the literal Voice of America, so they lied.

Speaker 37: Radio Free Europe gets through with the truth every day.

Katie Thornton: Debuting in 1950, Radio Free Europe was a flame-throwing anti-communist shortwave network.

Speaker 37: Into the closed communist countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania go the facts the people are not allowed to hear, the truth. The truth that helps them hold onto the will and the drive.

Katie Thornton: It was portrayed as grassroots, run by emigres and exiles, and it did employ those folks. Secretly, it was funded by the CIA, which was busy meddling in global politics and supporting pro-capitalist coups during these Cold War years.

Speaker 38: [foreign language]

Katie Thornton: Staff at Radio Free Europe launched weather balloons into the Eastern Bloc, and airdropped over 300 million leaflets instructing listeners on how to tune in.

Speaker 39: Radio free Europe calling Czechoslovakia.

Katie Thornton: The Soviet Union did not like any of this. They spent tons of money trying to drown out Western broadcasts. They'd flood the shortwaves with ear-splitting noises that listeners recalled sounding like a buzzsaw or a machine gun. Sometimes the battle went beyond the airwaves, like when a Czechoslovakian double agent poisoned the salt shakers at Radio Free Europe's Munich office. That plot was foiled before any of the 1,200-plus employees sat down for lunch. Years later, a Radio Free Europe journalist died after allegedly being stabbed with a poison-tipped umbrella. These US-run shortwave stations weren't just beaming out journalism.

Willis Conover: Willis Conover speaking. This is the Voice of America Jazz Hour. The music of jazz parallels the freedom that we have in America. Something that not every country has.

Katie Thornton: In the 1950s and 60s, music, especially jazz, was a key component in the US government's shortwave campaign.

Speaker 40: This, this is the Voice of America.

Katie Thornton: The federal government ran a jazz ambassador program that sent musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington on tours around the world. They focused on countries that the Soviet Union was also hoping to win over. All the while, though, many of these very same musicians faced racism and segregation at home. On the shortwaves. Radio Moscow and others were ready to exploit this contradiction.

Speaker 41: The revolutionary people of Cuba sympathize with all people who struggle for social justice.

Katie Thornton: In the early 1960s, Cuba's government-run service, Radio Havana regularly beamed this show, Radio Free Dixie, up to the United States.

Speaker 41: It is in this spirit that we proudly allocate the following hour in an act of solidarity, peace, and friendship with our oppressed North American brothers.

Speaker 42: Radio Free Dixie invites you to listen to the free voice of the South.

Katie Thornton: Radio Free Dixie was hosted by US Black power activist Robert F. Williams. He was on the lam in Cuba, fleeing drummed up charges that were later dropped. He broadcast a perspective that couldn't be found in the mainstream US media.

Robert F. Williams: One Negro goes to the White House as a member of the president's cabinet while another is gunned down like a wild dog for using white folks toilet. It should be more than clear to us that if we are ever going to be free, we must liberate ourselves.

Katie Thornton: Outlets like Radio Moscow and Radio Havana won followers around the world with their mix of propaganda and just factual reporting on civil rights abuses in the US. Governments saw winning people over on shortwave as a key path to winning the Cold War. Even after the CIA's secretive role at Radio Free Europe was revealed in the early '70s, not much changed. In fact, Congress increased its budget, and they kept pumping out news and tunes. Increasingly, they played the defiant and oh so American sound of rock music, which was heavily censored in the USSR and Eastern Bloc. On the US government-run taxpayer-funded shortwave, they broadcast groups like Metallica and Mötley Crüe to listeners around the world.

[MUSIC - Mötley Crüe: Kickstart My Heart]

Woah, yeah

Kickstart my heart, give it a start

Woah

Katie Thornton: By the early 1980s, the US government's shortwave stations reached an estimated 80 million people each week. It took tons of manpower, and it was a huge infrastructure project, too. The government had miles upon miles of fields filled with antennas. One man didn't think that was enough.

Ronald Reagan: We're as far behind the Soviets and their allies in international broadcasting today as we were in space when they launched Sputnik in 1957.

Katie Thornton: On the home front, Ronald Reagan had vetoed public broadcasting budgets and overseen a massive deregulation of the airwaves that allowed for big businesses and conservative and religious broadcasters to dominate AM and FM radio. Season 1 of The Divided Dial. On international radio, on shortwave, the great deregulator had no qualms about spending taxpayer dollars. He poured public money into the VOA and Radio Free Europe.

Ronald Reagan: I'm pleased to call on Director Wick and Minister Filali to sign this agreement, an important stand towards strengthening the signal of the Voice of America.

Katie Thornton: Reagan's administrators wrung their hands over what to do about rock music. Lots of them didn't believe it represented the best of Western culture. After long internal debates, they decided to keep the rebellious racket going on the shortwaves. Meanwhile, on the journalism side, Reagan led a shakeup by sidestepping one of the Voice of America's long held tenets, the idea that a free press is the US' best advertisement. Sure, that idea hadn't always been perfectly executed, but Reagan opted instead for more heavy-handed anti-communist propaganda.

Reagan's VOA ran explicit editorials on behalf of the administration. Many longtime leaders resigned, replaced by more amenable colleagues, including Richard W. Carlson, father of right-wing bloviator Tucker Carlson. It was Reagan who launched a costly new shortwave service targeting Cuba with hardline anti-communist messages.

Ronald Reagan: Today, I'm appealing to the Congress, help us get the truth through support our proposal for a new radio station, Radio Marti, for broadcasting to Cuba.

Katie Thornton: While public broadcasting floundered at home, government-subsidized propaganda and bad hair metals reverberated on shortwave from the US to the world. In its first seven decades of life, shortwave transformed from an idealistic experiment in global cooperation into a hardened government tool of information warfare. Then in the late 1980s, much of the medium's reason for being crumbled.

Speaker 43: In Eastern Europe, which the Soviets had held by force Since World War II, Mikhail Gorbachev said that Moscow would no longer interfere.

Speaker 44: Serious fighting begins in the early morning, a staccato of machine gun bursts punctuated by cannon fire.

Speaker 45: In the last weeks and months, we've seen one Communist party after the other in Eastern Europe knocked off its perch by the people.

Katie Thornton: The Cold War was over. On this medium that seemed almost tailor-made for propaganda, there was vacancy, airtime for rent. In the US, a particular group of people was ready to snatch it up.

Speaker 46: You must form your militia unit.

Speaker 47: Pay no heed to the federal government, which is a counterfeit enemy, foreign government.

Speaker 48: Are you a white woman such as myself who is sick of being harassed and tormented? Call Aryan Nations for a whiter, brighter America.

Speaker 49: We don't want to have to kill you. We hope to not have to kill you, but we can kill you. If need be, we will kill you. What are a few lives in the grand scheme of liberty?

Speaker 50: I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today.

Speaker 51: These stations and the programs grew, and they took over. They dominated.

Speaker 52: What is associated in the public's mind with shortwave, it's no longer the BBC World Service. Now, it's the guys who helped Timothy McVeigh bomb a federal building.

Katie Thornton: Next time on The Divided Dial, it's the shortwave story you've never heard, the private citizen who took over a fringe medium with a fringe message and used it to build a movement that fundamentally changed mainstream US politics. The Divided Dial is written and reported by me, Katie Thornton, and edited by OTM's executive producer, Katya Rogers. Music and sound design is by Jared Paul. Jennifer Munson is our technical director. Fact checking by [unintelligible 00:50:02]. This series was made possible with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Micah Loewinger: On The Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer. On The Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Brooke Gladstone is going to be out for a couple more weeks. I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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