Radio Inside the American Sector
The most influential American radio and later television programming effort in cold war German history. Located in Berlin after World War II, Radio Inside the American Sector (RIAS) broadcasts became the main source of news and entertainment for German citizens on both sides of the iron curtain.
Created in 1946, RIAS also served as an important vehicle for political debates between East and West Germany, as well as between the United States and the Soviet Union, for over forty years. Moreover, the station served to bring Western European culture to thousands of East Germans living in Berlin and its surrounding areas.American radio operations in Berlin began in early 1946, sponsored by the U.S. military. A system of wired transmissions (Drahtfunk) began broadcasting through preexisting telephone lines in early 1946 under the program label DIAS. Because Berlin was located in the postwar Soviet quarter of Germany, the U.S. radio presence there became a strategic point to disseminate pro-Western propaganda. Among the first DIAS broadcasts was of Soviet- outlawed American jazz music. Soviet jamming of DIAS broadcasts began almost immediately. Berlin’s bomb-shattered telephone lines proved inadequate for large-scale radio transmission, however, and in late 1946 DIAS obtained an 800- watt transmitter, renamed its program RIAS (Rundfunk [Radio] Inside the American Sector), and expanded its programming schedule. The new broadcasts reached past East Berlin and into the East German countryside.
Unlike other U.S.-sponsored international radio programs, RIAS had little di
rect oversight, which allowed it a larger measure of journalistic objectivity. The station gained a reputation among citizens on both sides of the iron curtain for evenhanded coverage of cold war news and political issues. But aside from news coverage, station programming usually propagated Western ideology. Airing jazz and blues music, West German political debates, lessons of democratic theory, and promoting the establishment of universities free from political ideology served to undermine Soviet authority in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
Communist authorities in East Berlin hence referred to RIAS as “Revanchism, Interventionism, Anti-Bolshevism and Sabotage.” Pro-Western propaganda was stepped up after 1955 when RIAS became part of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), and broadcasts were increased to include eight transmitters on shortwave, FM, and AM bands that reached across all of Germany and into Poland and Czechoslovakia.By the 1980s the radio medium became supplanted by television in Germany, and RIAS quickly adapted. In a partnership with the West German government, RIAS created a television station called RIAS-TV. The new station was 90 percent financed by the West German government but controlled by the United States, and it had the dual role of favoring the Christian Democratic governments in Bonn and Berlin as well as promoting American values across the Berlin Wall. RIAS-TV soon had an audience of 3 million GDR residents, mostly youths who liked the MTV- style programming. Although GDR-TV described RIAS-TV as “perverse,” East Germany soon began mimicking RIAS-TV programming in an effort to win back the GDR youth. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, demand for RIAS and RIAS-TV waned and programming officially ended in mid-1992.
Jeff Stone
See also American Occupation Zone; Radio Free Europe; West Berlin
References and Further Reading
Bogart, Leo. Premises for Propaganda: The United States Information Agency s Operating Assumptions in the Cold War. New York: Free Press, 1976.
Snyder, Alvin A. Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies and the Winning of the Cold War. New York: Arcade, 1995.