Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government has ruled the country since 2002, and there has been widespread controversy over press freedom in the country, with many doubting that such a freedom even exists. As a matter of fact, the US-based watchdog Freedom House's “Freedom of the Press 2014” report has downgraded Turkey from the category of “partly free” to “not free” because of what the institution called “the worsening media freedom situation.”

At the height of the Cold War, the BBC World Service, Radio Canada International and the Voice of America used high-power, multilingual broadcasts on the shortwave radio bands (1710 kHz–30 MHz) to blast news and information behind the Soviet Union’s “Iron Curtain.” In turn, Radio Moscow, Radio Havana Cuba and East Germany’s Radio Berlin International pumped their own versions of reality to the world via shortwave. 

The Ukraine crisis has shown that Russia has been strong in getting its message across to international audiences, a meeting of US international media chiefs concluded, outlining the need for Washington to create a Russian-language TV news channel. The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a bipartisan agency that supervises government-sponsored media, targeting international audiences, met Wednesday to discuss the coverage of the Ukraine crisis. 

The United States International Communications Reform Act of 2014 (HR4490), passed July 28, 2014 on a voice vote in the House of Representatives, was born out of frustration and desperation – frustration over ways to counter foreign propaganda and desperation to streamline what has become an unwieldy, inefficient, poorly managed and less than effective international broadcast conglomerate.

Government-sponsored international broadcasting is an increasingly high-profile topic, not least because it crosses both metaphorical and physical boundaries between journalism and foreign policy.