The most frightening segment of Barnouw's entire history, however, comes not in the "muddling through" decades of industrial machination and government ignorance, but in the instances where broadcasting is used as an aid to empire. In the final volume of his history, Barnouw states that most of these instances were accidental. But the history of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty shows the conscious U.S. reliance on radio to further counter-revolutionary ends.

The Voice of America was an outgrowth of the international broadcasting systems built during World War II. Transferred after the war to the new United States Information Agency, the VOA was used to help fight Cold War ideological battles. Since Russian transmitters jammed the VOA broadcasts, the VOA transmitted on the 'enemy' country's own domestic bands, and in Russian. The VOA programming was increasingly inflammatory, causing the Soviet Union to cite a 1936 Geneva resolution against broadcasts which "incite the population of any territory to acts incompatible with internal order." In addition, the USIA transgressed against the Copenhagen Convention of 1948 by transmitting on a frequency assigned to Moscow at twice the wattage of the Russian transmitter.

More elusive to consideration are Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Although ostensibly private organizations, they have received considerable financial and editorial aid from the CIA (which is, of course, "empowered to undertake unspecified activities abroad," and does). Radio Free Europe is manned by embittered anticommunist intellectuals from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, and broadcasts from Munich, but its handbook states that it "cannot take a line contrary to United States Government policy or to the beliefs of the United States and American institutions." Radio Liberty (formerly Radio Liberation) is designed to foment anti-Soviet aggression wherever socialist take-over beckons. Both Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty played notable parts in convincing the people of Hungary that a United States invasion in 1956 was imminent. On November 4, the following quotation from The Observer was broadcast: "If the Soviet troops attack Hungary...and Hungarians hold out for three or four days, then the pressure upon the government of the United States to send military help to the freedom fighters will become irresistible...." But four days later, all that Hungary heard was a feeble: "Do not give up your arms."

The VOA, Radio Free Europe and radio Liberty are not the only flagrant U.S. broadcasting propagandist networks. They are only the most successful ones. Radio Free Asia failed because there were not enough anti-Maoists, and no one in Southeast Asia could conceive that a network of that title could possibly support the French against the Viet Minh. Radio Swan aided in the launching of such Latin American escapades as the Bay of Pigs invasion.

The two threads of domestic commercialism and foreign domination are evaluated in Barnouw's "Reckoning." For the former, he quotes Leo Rosten "it seems self-evident that to strain the milk of life through the cheesecloth of advertising must curdle creativity and--more ominously--contaminate truth." For the latter, he states: "The notion that America needs an assortment of...false faces for different purposes is a cold-war heritage that could be usefully abandoned...(also) it has involved large investments of public funds in broadcasting ventures...It is significant that countries which have become important bases for American propaganda transmitters include Portugal, for Radio Free Europe; Spain and Taiwan, for Radio Liberty. In each case, the right to erect our transmitters has been part of a complex relationship involving military aid..."

There are flaws in Barnouw's massive work. The author is clearly not as comfortable in dealing with the literary value of entertainment broadcasts, or with aesthetic endeavor in general; his eulogies of Norman Corwin, Archibald MacLeish and Paddy Chayefsky are embarassing, though they might not have been so if he'd have honed cleanly to a sociological viewpoint. His large chunks of political history often show an unsubstantiated leftist bias, particularly in his coverage of World War II political tensions.

But these are minor points beside the great chain of events Barnouw has for the first time bound together for us. A Tower in Babel. The Golden Web, and The Image Empire should be read by anyone interested in the people's right to information in a democratic society. If the work is lengthy, detailed and at times unevenly, written, it never falls into the traps of dreary academicism. And if Barnouw is sometimes seduced by mere sentiment, the fervor he expresses and the anger he provokes are preferable to most intellectuals' disdain of broadcasting's industrial workings, programming sins and occasional newsworthy virtues