Battle of Values

Battle of Values tells the story of the founding of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and how its broadcasts communicated the values of freedom, human rights, and democracy to audiences in closed societies, offering lessons from Cold War broadcasting that are relevant in today's U.S. national security climate. Drawing on his in-depth experience in international broadcasting as well as interviews with present and former broadcasters and archival documents, Mark G. Pomar shines light on the programming and operations of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He describes the founders in the early 1950s and analyzes the broadcasts of the Cold War and post–Cold War years. Pomar examines its broadcasts in Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, and other languages of Eastern Europe and Eurasia and explains how these broadcasts supported human rights, nurtured independent ethnic identities, and covered the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Pomar offers lessons from Cold War broadcasting that are relevant today, amid the Trump administration's efforts to shut down all U.S. international broadcasting and other U.S.-funded media.