Summary

  • Liberia’s October 1998 order targeted media posting news on the Internet; Star Radio resumed its online bulletins by 29 October, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
  • The shortwave frequency was revoked under a separate order and remained suspended at year-end, restricting a channel that contemporary project observers said mattered for rural communication.

A return with a different reach

The distinction appeared in the calendar. On 14 October 1998, Liberia’s Ministry of Information ordered local media to stop posting information on the Internet. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) described the directive as aimed at Star Radio and reported that the Ministry of Justice had called it illegal. Nine days later, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications revoked Star’s shortwave frequencies. A third ministry fined the station on 28 October over the employment status of two foreign staff members. On 29 October, Star paid a US$2,000 broadcast-registration fee and resumed Internet postings.

The sequence did not amount to one technical switch being turned back on. The State Department’s 1998 human-rights report says the government reversed the Internet position shortly afterward, while continuing to prohibit Star’s shortwave use at year-end. An International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) evaluation, based on a site visit from 22 October to 12 November and interviews with project participants, says Star’s Internet service and shortwave operations were suspended in October; it places restoration of the Internet service in November.

The accounts may describe different states: permission to post bulletins, the operation of Star’s Internet service, and resumption of shortwave broadcasting were not identical events. The record does not support flattening them into a single restoration date.

That separation is the story. The order against Internet posting addressed what local media could publish through an online channel. The shortwave action concerned authorization to transmit on assigned frequencies. Online posts returned while the radio frequency did not. A government could relax one control while leaving another in place, and that difference mattered for the people each channel could reach.

A channel was not an audience count

Star was a young independent broadcaster in a country rebuilding its media after civil war. IFES records that the station went on air in July 1997 and began shortwave transmissions two months later. By 1998, its service connected a radio newsroom in Monrovia with an Internet publication stream. But the sources do not tell us how many Liberians could reach Star’s posts, how often they did so, or whether every posted item was accessible from inside the country.

The Department of State reported two private Internet service providers beginning operations in 1998 and said there had been no known attempt to disrupt or otherwise limit Internet access generally. That is different from saying every resident had a usable connection, and it is also different from the ministry’s order to media publishers.

Shortwave had a different reach problem. CPJ said its continued suspension kept Star from reaching much of the rural population during an upcoming polio-eradication campaign. IFES interviews likewise describe shortwave as important for organizations seeking to communicate beyond Monrovia. These are reports about expected or valued reach, not audience measurements. They do show why restoring online posting did not substitute automatically for restoring the transmitter: the channels had different access conditions and distribution footprints.

Nor did the sequence establish that the Internet was inherently beyond government control. The online order itself shows an attempt to constrain the publication point. Its reversal shows that the constraint was not durable in this episode, not that it could never be imposed again. The lasting shortwave suspension, meanwhile, depended on a separate frequency and work-permit dispute. The government’s controls were distributed across legal, licensing, labor and technical decisions.

What the reports leave unresolved

CPJ gives the most precise chronology and describes the fee paid before online postings resumed. The State Department supplies an independent annual summary but compresses the reversal to “shortly thereafter.” IFES offers a closer account of the project’s operations and interviews, yet dates restoration of the Internet service to November. None presents a day-by-day server log, the directive’s full legal instrument, web-traffic data or a count of readers. Those absences limit claims about enforcement, actual audience loss and the exact instant Star’s entire Internet service became available again.

The event therefore cannot bear a national-shutdown narrative. It was a targeted restriction on online media publication within a larger pattern of pressure on Star Radio, alongside a distinct and longer-lasting restriction on its shortwave transmission. It also cannot bear the opposite claim that online publication was a sufficient substitute for broadcasting. The evidence supports a narrower conclusion: by 1998, an Internet bulletin had become a channel governments could try to regulate as media, while radio spectrum remained a separate permission surface whose denial could keep a station from reaching rural listeners.

Sources: CPJ, “Attacks on the Press in 1998 — Liberia”; U.S. Department of State, 1998 Human Rights Report: Liberia; IFES, Evaluation of Fondation Hirondelle/Star Radio.