During the abortive coup to topple him in 1991, the Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev kept in touch with developments by listening to the BBC World Service. Felicitously, the Soviet Union had stopped jamming international shortwave radio broadcasts four years earlier, on the orders of Gorbachev himself.
Broadcasting was part of the western democracies’ strategy of containment in the Cold War. The captive populations of the Soviet bloc knew they were being fed lies by their official media. They hungered for reliable information and, with government funding but editorial independence, western news organisations provided it.
Now, the position is reversed. Autocracies are advancing their foreign-policy goals with well-funded broadcasting services. The difference is that these stations aren’t providing information. Not at all. My colleague Dominic Kennedy