In recent years, historiography has started dealing with Arabic radio transmissions in the Middle East during the interwar period. For example, Andrea L. Stanton, Jeffrey Herf, Rebecca Scales have worked on Radio Jerusalem, Radio Berlin and radios in Algeria. At the same time, other studies have been produced on radios transmitting in Arabic in the Mediterranean sea, such as Radio Cairo and Radio Bari. Generally speaking, articles and books published on these topics have mainly addressed the ‘emission’ side, without taking too much into consideration the ‘reception’ side, i.e. the public listening to radio transmissions. This paper intends to focus on the impact that Arabic programs, transmitted by European Radios, had on the audience, by investigating to what extent is it possible to evaluate that impact through sources that are available to historians. Is local press useful to assess whether radio transmissions were followed and appreciated by the audience? And, in that case, does that mean that radio propaganda had an impact on the people who were listening to (and eventually appreciating) those transmissions? Would diplomatic sources and private memories be more helpful? The first type of sources would actually risk to focus only on the ‘emission’ side’s perception. As Marshall McLuhan stated, media are ‘metaphors’, which do not only carry the message, but also transform it. Yet, diplomatic accounts would non take this transformation into consideration. At the same time, private memories (such as the famous Al-Sakakini diary) would risk to shed light only on upper class or intellectuals, without considering the vast audience of illiterates, who were listening to radio in cafes and who were actually the main target of radios. By drawing on surveys and reports carried out and prepared by the BBC in the late 1930s and early 1940s concerning the Arabic transmissions of Radio Bari and Radio Daventry, and by combining them with articles published on Arabic press all over the Middle East and Diplomatic reports (from British, American, French and Italian archives), this paper aims at addressing the methodological issue of how to evaluate the impact of radio transmissions on the Arab audience, taking into consideration the radio programs Orientalist approach which was employed in order to meet what was considered the ‘Arab taste’.