Frequencies of Deceit

"This book is international history of the finest quality. It goes beyond the Cold War battle for hearts and minds to say something important about how words and images can reveal or set the contours of a political landscape."--Tony Shaw, coauthor of Hollywood and Israel: A History "Margaret Peacock nimbly shows how Arabic-language radio stations worked in a kind of competitive dialogue in an effort to secure international Arab citizens' loyalty during the Cold War. But the rhetorical world they created became brittle and increasingly disconnected from people's lived experience, finally shattering after the broadcasts falsely claimed victory during the disastrous defeat of the 1967 war."--Andrea L. Stanton, author of This Is Jerusalem Calling: State Radio in Mandate Palestine "Fascinating, important, and timely. Peacock has produced a superb history of the psychological warfare and radio battles that defined--and distorted--the modern Middle East."--James Vaughan, Lecturer in International History, Aberystwyth University "In this dazzling book, Peacock deftly charts the Cold War of international radio propaganda for the hearts and minds of people living in Middle East. She weaves evidence from US, Soviet, British, and Arab sources to map the interplay of lies, selective truths, exaggerations, and wishful thinking that eddied around Arab listeners. Her remarkable study serves as a lesson for our own media-buffeted era, pointing to the price of broken illusions: a stage set for a new generation of extreme propaganda, in this case religious. This is a worthy successor to her excellent study of children in Soviet and American Cold War propaganda and establishes Peacock as a major figure in the field of propaganda history."--Nicholas J. Cull, author of The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989