Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty adopts new symbol to reflect new times (04/10/05)

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty adopts new symbol to reflect new times

PRAGUE - WASHINGTON - Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) entered a new era with a new symbol on March 30, when a "Torch Aflame" takes over from the "Freedom Bell" as RFE/RL's company trademark.

RFE/RL President Thomas A. Dine said the silver torch with its burnt-orange flame is universal. "Our torch is neither Christian nor Muslim, right-wing or left-wing. It is universal, forward-looking, modern and, above all, the RFE/RL torch is light and illumination, it has youth and energy," he said.

The new company slogan or signature line is "Illuminate Your World" - conveying the fact that the news and information RFE/RL brings daily to millions of people around the world helps them understand their environment and gives them the information tools for the political and economic engagement needed to shape their societies.

The torch replaces the Freedom Bell, which was RFE/RL's logo for more than half a century. It now enters the history books along with the radios of the Cold War days that it symbolized. That history - in truckloads of tapes and documents - was donated to the Hoover Institution archives at Stanford University in California, and is being processed as a record of the ideological fight against Communism in the second half of the 20th century.

It starts with an account of how Radio Free Europe (RFE) came to take the bell as its symbol. It was not, as some people mistakenly believe, America's famously cracked Liberty Bell. The origins of RFE's logo are a 10-ton bell especially made in the British foundry Gillett and Johnston and decorated with a frieze of five figures representing the five races of mankind passing the torch of freedom.

It arrived in New York in 1949 and traveled to 21 cities in the United States as part of the "Crusade for Freedom" drive to raise money to found and promote Radio Free Europe. More than 16 million Americans responded with contributions, and RFE and its bell logo were born.

Instead of the five figures, the RFE bell logo had a vertical divide into a darker and lighter side, generally interpreted as the divide between the democratic West and the communist East.

But for many years now, Europe has been whole and almost free and both the dividing line and the bell have lost their meaning. The original Freedom Bell was permanently installed in West Berlin in 1950. Few people today know where it is, why it is there and what it represents.

RFE/RL itself bears little resemblance to the radios headquartered in Munich that beamed truth and hope across the Iron Curtain to the Soviet Union and its five European satellite states. Since the move to Prague in 1995, RFE/RL has been going through a dynamic process of transformation and modernization that is creating an entirely new organization. The company has broadened every aspect of its operations: it no longer fights communism, it fights tyranny; its broadcasts are no longer confined to the former Soviet bloc, but stretch across continents to Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan; broadcasting is no longer restricted to shortwave frequencies but is heard on a multitude of other, more popular frequencies in rebroadcasts by local AM and FM stations.

And RFE/RL itself is no longer limited to radio broadcasting. It is venturing into television partnerships and has a vibrant, thriving, multilingual Internet site accessed by millions of users all over the world. The latest chapter in RFE/RL's development is "Convergence," a process of internal restructuring and training to integrate a multiple media approach, attracting new audiences and viewers with tailored information.

RFE/RL noted that the easiest way to communicate these profound changes is to change the company symbol; but it is not a simple task to illustrate the new aspects of RFE/RL while showing its essence has remained the same. The essence of RFE/RL today is freedom, as it was 55 years ago, only the technology and geography have changed. RFE/RL's supervisory Broadcasting Board of Governors chose Chermayeff and Geismar, a leading New York-based design firm, to design the new logo. Their creation, launched first on RFE/RL's Internet sites, meets all expectations. The silver torch is a modern representation of the torch of freedom etched on the old bell and a link to RFE/RL's tradition. And the orange flame, in the words of RFE/RL President Dine, "denotes warmth and energy," illuminating understanding to promote the values of democracy.

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