Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty
The mission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is to promote democratic values and institutions by disseminating factual information and ideas.
From Central Europe to the Pacific, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from Russia to Central Asia to the Persian Gulf, countries are struggling to overcome autocratic institutions, violations of human rights, centralized economies, ethnic and religious hostilities, regional conflicts, and controlled media.
Stability -- based on democracy and free-market economies -- throughout this region is essential to global peace.Based on the conviction that the first requirement of democracy is a well informed citizenry, and building on nearly a half century of surrogate broadcasting to this region:
- RFE/RL provides objective news, analysis, and discussion of domestic and regional issues crucial to successful democratic and free-market transformations.
- RFE/RL strengthens civil societies by projecting democratic values.
- RFE/RL combats ethnic and religious intolerance and promotes mutual understanding among peoples.
- RFE/RL provides a model for local media, assists in training to enhance media professionalism and independence, and develops partnerships with local media outlets.
- RFE/RL fosters closer ties between the countries of the region and the world's established democracies.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a private, international communications service to Eastern and Southeastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, Central and Southwestern Asia, funded by the U.S. government. In countries stretching from Belarus to Bosnia and from the Arctic Sea to the Persian Gulf, listeners rely on RFE/RL's daily news, analysis and current affairs programming to provide a coherent, objective account of events in their region and the world.
Strategy / Operations
Concentrating on events within this complex region, RFE/RL provides balanced, reliable information to bolster democratic development and market economies in countries where peaceful evolution to civil societies is of vital national interest to the United States.
RFE/RL operates one of the most comprehensive news operations in the region, with 23 bureaus throughout Europe and the former Soviet Union and over 1,400 freelancers reporting local news and current affairs.
Programs are broadcast in 27 languages.
RFE/RL broadcasts nearly 1,000 hours of programming a week from its broadcast center, located in the former Czechoslovak federal parliament building on Wenceslas Square in Prague, the Czech Republic. RFE/RL's corporate headquarters are located in Washington, DC.
RFE/RL programs can be heard on shortwave frequencies by listeners across the entire broadcast region. Since 1996, RFE/RL has also built a network of more than 210 affiliate partner organizations and 590 transmitter sites that relay programs on the AM and FM bands in 12 time zones. Political circumstances do not currently permit local re-broadcasting in Belarus, Iran, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Nearly six in 10 listeners to international radio in RFE/RL's 18-country broadcast region are regular listeners to RFE/RL.
RFE/RL is also gaining a large new audience through the Internet. Its multilingual website www.rferl.org features both live and on-demand audio and text. In October 2004, the RFE/RL website registered nearly 9 million page views and 2.1 million visits, while more than 800,000 visitors listened to nearly 600,000 hours of live and on-demand RFE/RL Internet audio broadcasts.
The daily report, "RFE/RL Newsline(c)," provides expert analysis on major political events and trends in Central Europe, the former USSR, the Middle East, and Southwestern Asia. Thirteen weekly reports on the region plus Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the daily review "RFE/RL Headlines" are available free-of-cost to subscribers via fax or e-mail as well as on the RFE/RL website. Additional country-specific reports and English-language content are available only at www.rferl.org and www.regionalanalysis.org
Management / Oversight
The president of RFE/RL, Inc. is Thomas A. Dine. Prior to joining RFE/RL in August, 1997, he served as Assistant Administrator for Europe and the New Independent States at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
RFE/RL is a private, nonprofit corporation chartered in Delaware, which receives federal funding as a private, nonprofit grantee. RFE/RL's corporate board of directors is composed of the nine Presidential appointees to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which has oversight responsibility for all nonmilitary U.S. government-funded international broadcasting activities. The chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors is Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, former editor in chief of Readers' Digest (1989-1996), member of the Board for International Broadcasting (1987-1995), and Director of the Voice of America (1982-1984).
External Links[edit | edit source]
- http://www.rferl.org - Official Website