Advertising America: VOA and Italy

摘要

With President Truman's ‘Campaign of Truth’ in the 1950s, Voice of America (VOA) established itself as one of the most important information programmes of the US government. The $20 million budget allocated to VOA in those years enabled it to employ about 1900 people and to broadcast in 45 different languages. Italy, with its strong and threatening Communist Party, was one of VOA's main targets. However, audience research (performed by the United States Information Agency's Italian branch and by the Italian opinion poll company Doxa) shows that the Italians always preferred their own national network RAI. The US government therefore started to target the RAI, with the aim of placing VOA-produced programmes directly on the Italian network in order to reach a mass audience. This article looks into what went on both ‘on’ and ‘off the air’, analysing how various Italian ‘target groups’ were addressed by VOA. Drawing on documents from the National Archives and Records Administration in both Washington DC and New York City, and from the Doxa archives in Milan, the study examines how the American government prepared to conquer the Italian network RAI.View full textDownload full textRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2011.545596