Richard Richter, founding president of Radio Free Asia, dead at 88
Richter once said ‘repressive governments reviled RFA, because we were letting people know what was going on in their own countries – providing information that their own leaders would suppress’
Richard Richter, the founding president of Radio Free Asia who organised and led for 10 years its broadcasts to nations in East Asia that are subjected to government news censorship, died June 29 at a hospice in Issaquah, Washington. He was 88.
The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Joan Richter.
Richter, a former news producer for ABC television and WETA, the Washington-area PBS affiliate, organised a staff of technicians and news professionals who in 1996 commenced what became round-the-clock coverage of radio programming in Asian languages, including Myanmar, Cantonese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, Wu (Shanghainese), Tibetan, Uygur and Vietnamese.
Additionally Radio Free Asia (RFA) established a news website in East Asian languages and set up toll-free hotlines for callers.
It specialised in local news programming and recruited, as its news staff, a corps of stringers, broadcasting in local dialects.
They reported on such events as internal ethnic flare-ups and opposition to government policies – which were often a target of government censorship.