Botswana launches first satellite BOTSAT-1 aboard SpaceX Falcon 9 • Hacker News Board

Post by scrappyjoe » Wed, Apr 02, 2025, 7:13 AM UTC

mmooss wrote: post #231

sokols wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations on the successful launch! > .. I’d listen to the Voice of America.. I grew up listening to VoA as a kid as well, I was born in a then not so developed part of the Balkans. Sometimes I have the feeling that the ordinary Americans don't have a clue about the impact VoA had in the countries like ours.

Out of curiosity, why VOA and not the BBC or something else?

This reply is quite late, but I thought I’d answer it anyway. When I was a child, I enjoyed the VoA more than the BBC Africa service, and when I was a teen my preferences swapped. I had never really thought about why before. And I had never really clicked that the VoA was a propaganda tool.

My best answer is that listening to the VoA as a kid was just way more fun than the BBC. And maybe it being propaganda was a big reason for that. Stories were simple, there were good guys and bad guys, science was awesome and we might make it to Mars by the year 2000.

As I got older, I started to see that things weren’t so simple, I wanted unbiased, or at least balanced, reporting about the region I lived in, and then BBC Africa took over.