Report: voices of war

One of the interesting aspects of the conflict that is currently happening in Ukraine is the media around it. In class we listened to and discussed about three different news radio transmissions: one by the BBC, one by the RTÈ (an irish radio) and one from Vesti FM (a russian one). They were all different from each other under certain aspects, the main point was obviously war news but they all had different ways to explain the events to the radio listeners.

The BBC radio is probably the most reliable as it doesn’t really stand with a specific nation, it just sums up the news from a neutral and objective point of view, even the speaker voice and the audio effects (basically not present at all) are neutral. BBC has also been smart to start transmitting via DAB, who’s transmission is almost impossible to prevent or block, for this reason russian civilians are also able to listen to it as their government can’t blacklist it from the radio frequencies.

An in-between of the two is the irish radio, which found a different method to keep a global point of view of the conflict: a speaker simply translated Putin’s and others words into english while keeping both, the english and the original audio, playing together (obviously the original untranslated audio had a way lower volume compared to the translated one otherwise they would override each other, but if you want to focus on a specific one of the two you should still be able to understand it). The irish radio though does not use DAB to transmit, instead its frequency is around 252KHz (BBC transmits at 15735 KHz).

The last one is the russian Vesti FM radio which is basically a propagandistic radio. I did not understand too much about it but we translated some words in class and we heard “home” and “friends” which are probably used to describe their ukraine “friends” and their land. An interesting fact about this radio is the advertisement before the news section which is somewhat uncommon.

It has been interesting to view the different sides of these transmissions as it makes you understand that you need to keep an eye on what you are listening to, and the way you are getting informations thrown at you, if in a propagandistic way or a neutral one, because with the last one you’ll at least be able to formulate your personal opinion while with the first one is much harder to do so.