In an era when the local mass media was censored, Romanians kept up with what was happening in the rest of the world by furtively listening to Radio Free Europe. Many of the country’s intellectual elite, who managed to escape abroad, used this radio station to disseminate their ideas and hearten the population back home while the communist authorities considered it one of the major threats to the regime. Its mission accomplished, Free Europe stopped airing in Romania in August 2008.