Pitch Imperfect

Sanford J. Ungar

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005

Summary:  The Voice of America -- the United States' best tool of public diplomacy -- is being subjected to systematic cutbacks, even as the country's international image is suffering. Washington must reverse the trend or face even greater hostility abroad.

Sanford J. Ungar is President of Goucher College in Baltimore. A former host of National Public Radio's All Things Considered, he was Director of the Voice of America from 1999 to 2001.

In response to the threat of political influence and partisan manipulation, in 1976 an unlikely bipartisan measure outlining an official charter for the network was tacked onto an appropriations bill. The charter declared, among other things, that the "VOA will serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news"; that "VOA news will be accurate, objective, and comprehensive"; and that the network will "present a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions." Once the charter took effect, efforts by U.S. embassies to interfere with VOA broadcasts declined, and the network's credibility and audience grew dramatically.

In the 1980s, the VOA's budget, scope, and repertoire of languages -- and therefore its impact -- expanded steadily, reinforcing what John Chancellor, its director under President Kennedy, had once called its "ramshackle excellence." In many hotspots, VOA correspondents drew praise from their colleagues, American or not, for their courage and competence. Although some of its foreign-language services -- most notably, the Russian one -- were occasionally plagued by émigré politics, the VOA stood alongside the BBC as one of the few worldwide vehicles for trustworthy information. Its coverage of crises such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre won respect worldwide. Even today, it is still common to encounter people in central and eastern Europe who remember huddling as teenagers in darkened rooms to listen to VOA news on shortwave radios or who found VOA jazz programs an inspiration for independent thinking and creativity. (For decades, the jazz presenter Willis Conover was thought to be the second-best-known American in the world, after whoever happened to be the U.S. president at the time.) Throughout much of Asia and Africa, a generation of young people learned to speak "American" by listening to the VOA's slow, limited-vocabulary "Special English" broadcasts, which often served as teaching tools for Peace Corps volunteers.

THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

When the BBG was created in the mid-1990s, in preparation for the VOA's removal from the USIA, one of its goals was to build a so-called firewall between the U.S. government's radio services and its foreign policy agencies, ostensibly to protect those outlets from the sort of political interference that had intermittently plagued the VOA. But some members of the BBG were major political contributors who had hoped to become ambassadors and took the assignment to the board as a consolation prize. Others had their own political agendas. Together they led a chaotic effort to restructure U.S. international broadcasting -- sometimes with poor results.

Relying on the International Broadcasting Act of 1994, the BBG launched an annual review of the VOA's foreign-language services. After conducting audience research and its own assessment of U.S. foreign policy goals and conditions abroad, the BBG began to rank the relevance of the more than 60 languages broadcast by the U.S. government's various networks. Some of the board's resulting recommendations were constructive, including a call for reducing broadcast hours and redundant services in Polish, Hungarian, Czech, and other languages in countries that have been developing independent broadcast sectors of their own. But other conclusions were misguided: English should no longer be a "priority one" language for American broadcasts, the BBG said, and programs in Thai and Turkish, for example, should be eliminated altogether. The problem occurred partly because the BBG's recommendations were generally grounded in listener surveys, the reliability of which varies greatly depending on when, where, and under what circumstances they are conducted and by what methodology.

Ironically, some initiatives, such as the attempt to kill the Thai and Turkish services, were successfully foiled by the State Department. Others, however, were not. The BBG's most controversial move to date was its decision in 2002 to phase out the VOA's Arabic service. The service had long been criticized for being dominated by speakers of classical or Egyptian Arabic and for failing to provide specially tailored broadcasts in local dialects that would appeal to different subregions in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf. Norman Pattiz -- a Democratic appointee to the board who made his fortune as chief executive of Westwood One, the largest U.S. commercial radio operation -- persuaded his colleagues to let him run a subcommittee on the Middle East. Pattiz insisted that U.S. broadcasts to the region should target the masses on the "Arab street," rather than the elites in government ministries and universities who had been the VOA's main Arabic listeners for decades. With funds originally intended for the VOA, Pattiz launched Radio Sawa (sawa is Arabic for "coming together"), a 24-hour-a-day channel that features popular Western and Arabic music with just a few minutes of news every hour and is broadcast primarily to Arab countries with pro-Western governments. In 2004, the BBG spent another $62 million of its federal appropriations to create an Arabic-language television network called al Hurra ("the free one") as an alternative to the popular al Jazeera satellite network based in Qatar. Al Hurra, which principally targets audiences in Iraq and Kuwait, focuses heavily on events related to the transformation of Iraq under U.S. occupation. Similarly, to broadcast in Iran the BBG has established Radio Farda, which uses the commercial-style approach of Radio Sawa to compete with the Farsi service of the VOA. The latter is not expected to survive.

These initiatives, none of which is carried out under the VOA name or staffed with government employees, have been the subject of fierce debate. Although Pattiz claims great success for al Hurra, a survey by Shibley Telhami, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has found that it has a minimal audience and enjoys little credibility. Edward Djerejian, a retired diplomat who led a well-publicized study of U.S. public diplomacy needs in 2003, argues that the $62 million spent on al Hurra would have been better used purchasing "quality American content" for indigenous Arab satellite networks. (Djerejian also suggests that the BBG is skewing surveys to make Radio Sawa look more successful than it really is.) Rami Khouri, the executive editor of The Daily Star in Beirut, has accused the U.S. government of "a fatal combination of political blindness and cultural misperception," calling the creation of al Hurra and Radio Sawa "an entertaining, expensive, and irrelevant hoax." Undaunted, the BBG has now announced the launch of a separate Arabic-language television channel for Europe, one more part of its strategy to support the war on terrorism in the post-September 11 world.

Meanwhile, employees in the VOA's battered newsroom have tried to fend off directives from VOA director David Jackson and other political appointees, who have suggested that the network report more favorably on the actions of the Bush administration in Iraq and the Middle East and more deliberately try to enhance the United States' reputation around the world. Editors have repeatedly been asked to develop "positive stories" emphasizing U.S. successes in Iraq, rather than report car bombings and terrorist attacks, and they were instructed to remove from the VOA Web site photographs of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, even though they were already widely available elsewhere. On several occasions since 2002, VOA management has objected to stories quoting Democratic politicians or newspaper editorials critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy. In July 2004, Jackson demoted and reassigned the VOA's news director, Andre de Nesnera, a veteran correspondent, purportedly as part of a move to bolster the role of a television production unit recently incorporated into the VOA. Colleagues insisted, however, that de Nesnera was being punished for refusing to make the daily news report more overtly sympathetic to President George W. Bush. Yet when nearly half of the VOA's staff of 1,000 signed a petition protesting this and other changes -- a gesture that received much attention in the outside media -- the relevant committees in Congress asked only the BBG about the legitimacy of the complaints. The employee rebellion, dismissed as a mere nuisance organized by pesky, spoiled bureaucrats, was quickly squelched, dashing any residual hope that the BBG could in fact serve as a firewall against political interference.