Makes sense. If the broadcasts are for those outside the US, why broadcast in English? Other than for expats and such, it's of little value, especially with world wide sat coverage providing your favorate 24x7 news and entertainment channels.
But about 50% of English-speaking people in the world live outside USA.
Numerous countries of the world, particularly in the middle east and Africa, were carved up by victorious European powers following WW1, and former colonial rulers. These artificial borders remained after they gained independence. These bogus "nations" (Iraq is a prime example) are made up of people of multiple ethnicity, often hostile to each other and sharing little in language or culture. In many cases, there are so many local languages spoken within the unrelated tribes, that the common language for business and commerce used throughout the country is English or French, depending on the former colonial ruler. Other former colonial languages include Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and German. In many areas, these less widespread colonial languages have been replaced by English as the
lingua franca.
But it's not only the VOA. BBC ceased broadcasting to North America, Australia and New Zealand years ago. Sometimes you can still catch a weak signal from the World Service in English, beamed to the Caribbean or Africa. Radio France International quit broadcasting in French and English to the Americas. Radio Canada, Radio Australia and Radio New Zealand have gone dark to N. America.
Their justification is that these broadcasts can be downloaded as streaming audio over the web, and are often relayed via local broadcast stations, or are available over satellites. NPR and PBS broadcast a lot of BBC to fill in gaps in their local programming. We get the BBC World Service on our local public TV station as the 10 o'clock news.
Tune across the SWBC bands these days and about all you hear in English is Bible Beaters. There are still a limited number of English-language broadcasts from Radio Havana, China, the Voice of Russia, and from some of the former communist countries in east Europe. About all I hear from the Voice of Germany these days is the rushing noise from their DRM signal on 3995.
I recall back in the 60's in the UK, shortwave receivers were very common in housholds, and even in car radios. During my last visit about 5 years ago, my brother-in-law listened to FM on his car radio, and it sounded pretty much the same as what we endure over here. His car radio had AM, Longwave and a shortwave broadcast band or two, but he said he had never even tried to listen to anything but FM.
Shortwave broadcasting has about fizzled, except in sparsely populated countries where there is limited or no local broadcasting.
Even with DRM, the Great White Hope of shortwave broadcasters, as more and more people get internet and satellite reception, HF broadcast listening is fading into history, just as it did in the USA right after WW2.
We are supposed to get 7100-7200 back as exclusively amateur in the next couple of years, and they are talking about getting 7200-7300 back at the next World Radio Conference, as well as a
real 60m band.
The BPL industry is banking on HF communications, including amateur frequencies, being declared "obsolete" by governments of the world in the near future.
