A Secret Program Allowed VOA to Broadcast Television into North Korea. Now It's Gone.

[demmiblue]

The mission of Voice of America, to “tell America’s story to the world,” is hard to fulfill when you’re broadcasting into the void of North Korea. For decades, VOA’s Korean service struggled to meet its mandate, relying on shortwave radio beamed from towers throughout Asia, medium-wave signals broadcast from South Korean towers operated by a Christian religious organization in Texas, and videos circulated on social media accessed by North Koreans outside the country or along the border and able to connect to a Chinese cell network.

Then, in January of 2023, after a decade of difficult negotiations, VOA reached an agreement with the South Korean government to use state-controlled broadcast towers along the border to send a TV signal deep into the North. Suddenly, households in Pyongyang and throughout the country could watch Washington Talk, a twenty-five-minute panel show featuring US foreign policy experts, including former political officials. It aired four times a week.

This effort to bring television from the United States into North Korea was a breakthrough—and, until now, had not been made public. It’s not clear whether those responsible for the decision to defund VOA—Kari Lake, who as Donald Trump’s senior adviser to the US Agency for Global Media has overseen VOA, and Elon Musk, in his DOGE role—were even aware of the program’s existence. (My messages to Lake, USAGM, Musk, and DOGE’s spokesperson went unanswered. In congressional testimony yesterday, Lake described VOA as a veritable den of spies and a “threat to national security.”)

But the demise of VOA’s Korean service—along with the USAGM-funded Radio Free Asia, whose programming also targeted North Koreans—means that information-starved North Koreans now have less access to independent news about what is happening in their country and around the world. (I have also been told that, in April of 2024, RFA began broadcasting into North Korea via the television transmission program, airing a twenty-minute documentary four times a week. While VOA’s Korean service focused on US policy toward North Korea, RFA acted as “surrogate” media, relying on a network of journalists based mostly in Seoul to provide domestic coverage.)

https://www.cjr.org/news/trump-lake-secret-program-voice-of-america-north-korea-tv-broadcast-gone.php

[Jim__]

1. The US government is currently under the control of idiots.

[IrishBubbaLiberal]

2. Collins Radio equipment for VOA

https://www.antiquewireless.org/homepage/vt-exhibit-23/

Voice Of America Station
This exhibit is the control room and one of the Collins 821A-1 250,000-watt transmitters from the VOA station in Delano, California. Built in 1944 and rebuilt in 1965, the station served all of the Pacific Rim and Central and South America from Delano 130 miles north of Los Angeles until its closing in 2007.

VOA was created in 1942 to provide a counterpoint to the propaganda being broadcast by Nazi Germany and Japan over shortwaves. In the first broadcast, VOA pledged to broadcast the news, good or bad, truthfully without any governmental interference or propaganda.

Because the United States did not any large shortwave transmitters available, VOA began construction of three US stations in 1944. They were in Bethany, OH, Dixon, CA and Delano, CA. and were completed and in operation by the end of 1944. Eventually VOA operated 40 transmitters throughout the world and broadcast in 50 languages in order to ensure their signal could be heard in all countries despite efforts of some countries to jam their signals. The three original stations have ceased operations. In the 1980s, a large transmitting station was built in near Greenville, NC and that station remains in operation.

The purpose of VOA was and remains to share our culture with music, information and unvarnished truthful news reporting. The newspapers and broadcast activities in many countries are operated by the governments who broadcast what they wanted their citizens to hear, not what was necessarily the truth.

The market for shortwave broadcasting has been eroded by the popularity and availability of the internet. VOA has severely curtailed its operations accordingly.

[IrishBubbaLiberal]

3. 1968 North Korea seized USS Pueblo spy ship, COLLINS RADIO equipment

Collins Radio equipment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Pueblo_(AGER-2)

https://www.thegazette.com/letters-to-the-editor/collins-hardware-shown-on-pueblo-photo/

Collins hardware shown on Pueblo photo
Alan Erickson
Feb. 2, 2018 12:00 am

The Jan. 24 article in The Gazette 'The Attack on the USS Pueblo” 50 years ago pointed out that the Pueblo carried the latest in communications and cryptographic hardware. That included the latest state-of-the-art products from Collins Radio. The photo with the North Korean sailor shows two tall silver colored racks of equipment which appear to be AN/URC-32 SSB transceivers. This is the Navy version of the Collins KWT-6, a 500 Watt HF SSB transceiver that the USAF (SAC) bought from Collins in the 50s and early 60s. At the extreme right side of the photo you can see the knobs and a bit of the front panel of R-390 Receivers which all of the services bought in large quantities, and some maintain are the best receivers ever built. It's entirely appropriate for the Pueblo to have had a lot of those receivers. The R-390 was designed by Collins Radio but several other companies manufactured them as a build-to-print product, so the nameplate would have to be examined to see if they were built in Cedar Rapids.

Collins Radio, now Rockwell Collins, continues to provide the latest in communications equipment to the military services. I'm proud to have retired from Rockwell Collins and have been mentored by those who built the equipment seen on the Pueblo.