'Frequencies of Deceit': Propaganda broadcasting in the heyday of the radio age - review

“One message from Radio Moscow would appear a day later on the BBC,” wrote Peacock in an online article in June 2025, “then be mocked or repurposed by Voice of the Arabs. Even their critiques of each other began to echo. They listened to each other as much as they spoke, in what I call a dialogic audiosphere: a swirling chorus of competing voices, each shaping and reshaping the language of the other.”

The start of the Six Day War was also the start of the great disillusion. On June 8, 1967, Peacock tells us, “Cairo’s most famous radio broadcaster, Ahmed Said, reported to his listeners that Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian forces had defeated Israel’s army in the Sinai, had hobbled their British and US allies, and were liberating Palestine.”

It was an unmitigated lie – propaganda unsubstantiated by fact. It would soon emerge that Egypt’s air force had been destroyed three days earlier, that Jordan and Syria had been defeated, and that the US and Britain had not intervened militarily to help the Israelis. Israel had achieved this stunning victory over the combined forces of its Arab enemies by itself.

Peacock tells us that Said, in his memoirs published towards the end of his life, maintained that in proclaiming an Arab victory in 1967, he was merely following orders, pointing out that “the war of the radio stations imposed this call.” She believes he was right about that. “By 1967,” she writes, “there was little else that he could say. Decades of practice had led all the broadcasters to a place where their language was profoundly limited.”

Through the intensive research she undertook in the archives of all the major radio stations broadcasting to the Middle East in those years, she proves that they each used similar methods to generate fear, loyalty, and consensus in their listeners. Moreover, they constructed an incestuous audio world of their own, feeding off each other as the claims and counterclaims proliferated. There are, indeed, 51 pages of tightly packed notes appended to her work, providing the source of every statement she brings to her readers’ attention.

In the 20 years following the establishment of the State of Israel, she writes, “propaganda in the Middle East became an enormous state business. Cairo, London, Moscow, and Washington employed thousands of people to produce hundreds of thousands of hours of broadcasts.” Each, she asserts, was intent on disseminating its own version of the past, present, and future, the Cold War, and the rise of Arab nationalism.

Peacock draws little distinction between those international radio stations broadcasting to the Middle East on shortwave, and the domestic radio channels on medium wave providing news, music, and entertainment to the local audience. Among the former were the BBC, Radio Moscow, Radio Beirut, Radio Damascus, Radio Cairo, and, later in the day, the Voice of America (VOA).

Starting in May 1947, the BBC and the PBS decided to counter what they termed a “virulent flood of anti-British propaganda” by setting up a daily program of high culture – opera, classical music, and academic discussion. Based very heavily on the highbrow Third Programme network, set up in the UK in September 1946, they dubbed it the “Second Programme.” Among the 12 illustrations scattered through Peacock’s book, one shows its published schedules for early 1948.

Peacock mentions, in passing, “a covert British station, Sharq al-Adna.” Set up during World War II, doubtless by some unidentified department of the security services, this was a propaganda enterprise, pure and simple. Sometimes calling itself the Near East Arab Broadcasting Station, it broadcast pro-British programs in Arabic from Jaffa. After the end of the Mandate in May 1948, it was moved to Cyprus, and it finally shut down during the Suez crisis in 1956.

The author is an associate professor of history at the University of Alabama. During her undergraduate years, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, she studied in Russia.

Her academic focus includes European history, the Cold War, the Middle East, Russian and Soviet history, and propaganda. She is noted for combining historical research with contemporary issues. Her career includes numerous awards and fellowships, including being a Moshe Dayan Research Fellow at Tel Aviv University.

In Frequencies of Deceit, she traces how the deception, manipulation, and downright dishonesty practiced by the major broadcasters to the Middle East eroded public trust in political solutions peddled by Western and secular state sources. A critical consequence, she maintains, was a loss of trust by Arab public opinion in secular regimes – and this helped lay the groundwork for the emergence and appeal of political Islam as an alternative.

Peacock succeeds in demonstrating how audio propaganda shaped political perceptions and progress in the Middle East over two decades, revealing the deep impact of global propaganda wars on the region’s history.

From the previously under-appreciated source of radio broadcasting, she sheds new light on how and why today’s Middle East has developed.