Nicholas Schlosser's book on the history of the Berlin broadcasting service RIAS (Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor) adds to the growing body of literature on the cultural Cold War published in recent years. This material has included several studies of US foreign broadcast stations and their role in the war of words, but hitherto no in-depth considerations of RIAS. Perhaps this is because of the station's specialist profile: broadcasting from Berlin's American sector, RIAS programs were aimed not only at West Berliners but also at an audience on the other side of the inner-German border. The book pays most attention to RIAS's political programming, i.e., its news and political commentary broadcasts. The station's entertainment formats, which were in many respects innovative for West German broadcasting, receive no more than a brief mention.

Transcripts of individual broadcasts are the main source for the book. In addition, the author consulted public survey material on RIAS's audience and reception, some of which was compiled by West German polling institutes on behalf of the United States, some by authorities in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The author signals awareness of the fact that the West German polls are not representative in a statistical sense, but he considers them sufficiently valid for the period up to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. In the author's view, the surveys prove that RIAS, particularly its political reporting, was decidedly popular with the East German public.

The first chapter of the book recalls the station's founding history and its institutional development. The explicitly anti-Communist propaganda of the early days proved to be untenable in the long term. Over the course of the 1950s, the American occupation power withdrew its influence from the station until it was represented by only a handful of officers among the top managers. The everyday journalistic work was carried out by German editors, the best known of whom was the later Social Democratic politician Egon Bahr. From the 1950s onward, Germany also provided a large part of the station's budget. In light of this, the claim that it was a US institution, which Schlosser repeatedly makes—at one point describing it as “a representative of the United States in Germany” (42)—seems questionable. The author nevertheless convincingly shows that RIAS was widely perceived as not simply a radio station but as a political bastion of the West in the Cold War—so much so that members of the public in Berlin's West and East alike addressed their political concerns and demands to the station in hundreds of letters.

The book's second chapter explores the interplay between RIAS's political profile and its journalistic ethos and practical working methods. Schlosser has found that although the political mission of the broadcasting service did not conflict with its goal of journalistic objectivity, the two were, in fact, interdependent. The protagonists at RIAS knew that speaking the truth in news reporting was not enough to make an impact. It was equally important to convey an air of objectivity in the station's news presentation, as distinct from the agitational style cultivated by the East German media. The author cites many examples to show how this editorial strategy was put into practice through the careful choice of language for news reports. The station's political stance was nevertheless made explicit in the senior editors' political commentaries. Coverage of and reactions to the East German uprising of June 1953 provide a case study of this. RIAS did not broadcast any open incitements to revolt against the GDR regime, but its reporting and commentaries were an important factor that contributed to the spread of what started as protests by local workers and later became a nation-wide political demonstration. RIAS's West German commentators repeatedly compared the government in East Berlin to the Nazi regime, and interpreted the uprising as a pro-German-unity movement, showing that West German, rather than American, views of the Cold War conflict predominated at the station.

A later chapter is dedicated to East German responses to the RIAS service. The East German media propagated an image of RIAS, painted in firm, unsubtle stereotypes, as an American espionage tool that sought to undermine and destroy East German society with belligerent propaganda. Schlosser interprets the widespread assumption in East German politics that RIAS was harmful as valid proof of the station's impact on the political side of the Cold War. However, his analysis is based on a one-dimensional conception of RIAS's effect on East Germany, which underplays the fact that East German actors also used the station to their own political ends. RIAS provided a useful scapegoat to blame for ongoing problems and a plausible explanation for disgruntlement in the East German population. The study focuses on the period from RIAS's first broadcast in 1946 to the construction of the Berlin Wall, and Schlosser sees the latter as a deep caesura in the history of RIAS: afterward, it could no longer rely on a regular stream of information or visitors from East Germany and thus lost the unique mediator function it had enjoyed in the early days of the Cold War. It nevertheless persevered with its political mission until the Wall came down, and remained very popular with the East German public until German unification in 1990.

Schlosser's book is a thoroughly researched, vividly written, and plausibly argued account of the history of RIAS. It offers interesting insights into the history of the media in East and West Germany during the Cold War. Its reach is limited, however, by the fact that Schlosser's central points of inquiry correspond all too closely with the issues that also preoccupied the senior RIAS staff: did the station perform effective journalistic work? Did this work have an impact, in a political sense, on the Cold War? Did the station help to compromise and weaken the Communist regime in East Germany? The author answers all these questions affirmatively and thus presents RIAS as a success story. But because he too often relies on the protagonists' own descriptions and self-evaluations as recorded in the sources, his analysis fails to transcend the frame of mind of these western Cold Warriors.