Banning RT Broadcasts is Equivalent to WW2 Jamming

censorshipFor those not acquainted with radio “jamming”, it is the deliberate blocking or interference with wireless communications and it is a common form of censorship in totalitarian countries. Its purpose is to prevent foreign radio broadcasts from reaching the country.

During World War 2 in occupied Europe, the Nazis attempted to jam the BBC and other allied radio broadcasts to the continent, but no jamming of German Nazi broadcasts was carried out by Britain.

Lord Haw-Haw (William Joyce) was German radio’s most prominent English language speaker from 1939 to 1945 and his propaganda show “Germany Calling” was regularly broadcast to audiences in Great Britain on the station Reichssender Hamburg and over the airwaves of occupied Radio Luxembourg.

Lord Haw-Haw’s show attempted to demoralize British, Canadian, Australian and American troopers as well as the British public and despite being officially discouraged from listening to the show, it is estimated that nearly 6 million regular and 18 million people occasionally tuned in across Great Britain.

During WW2 we only had radio broadcasting. There was, of course, no Internet and TV had hardly started.

Jamming continued after the end of WW2 for forty or more years, largely carried out by the Soviet Union and its East European neighbouring countries against radio stations such as “Radio Liberty” and “Radio Free Europe”.

Now, in today’s 21st century, we live in an Internet connected world with streaming audio and video available from virtually every country, so the recent banning of Russian state-controlled media outlets, RT and Sputnik, by the USA, the UK and by the EU because of “systematic disinformation” following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is essentially the modern equivalent of radio broadcast jamming.

Campaign For Independent Broadcasting strongly condemns this action by the USA, Britain and the EU. This is not because we condone Russia’s actions in Ukraine in any way, but because we believe that every individual should be free to read, to listen and to watch both sides of any news story.

We don’t expect RT’s and Sputnik’s broadcasts to be accurate or free from bias or disinformation, nor do we expect any different from the BBC, Sky News, CNN, PressTV, Aljazeera, TRT, CGTN and others.

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