ABSTRACT
The Communist regimes react to the breaching of their monopoly of information by foreign broadcasts which beam uncensored information, through a variety of public and covert methods. Jamming is the oldest, most direct and best-known weapon to block or to disturb the access to international information channels. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko himself launched a pre-emptive action against the potential danger of tv programmes beamed by satellites directly into domestic sets. The Soviet demand for state control refers not just to television by satellite, but by implication to every form of mass media. The campaign however finally petered out after the Munich stations had been put on a completely new basis, thus puncturing the hopes of the Soviet and East European experts in ‘the department of dirty tricks’. The Voice of America comes under attack for devoting far too much time to the ‘internal affairs of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries’.
