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.

FALLING ON DEAF EARS

Unfortunately, the VOA is unlikely to get much support from anyone else in Washington. For all the admiration it enjoys overseas, the network has virtually no constituency inside the United States. The prohibition on its broadcasting at home has guaranteed that few, if any, members of Congress have ever heard a VOA program (even though they are now available at www.voanews.com). Most are unaware that VOA headquarters, complete with giant rooftop satellite dishes, sit a few blocks away from the principal office building of the House of Representatives. Votes on appropriations for the network are rarely noticed, let alone tracked, and they never affect a member of Congress' prospects for reelection.

A few influential members of both houses have, in fact, made a particular effort to cut funding for the VOA, which they insist is an expensive relic of the Cold War. Oblivious to irony, some prefer to bolster Radio Liberty (RL), Radio Free Europe (RFE), and Radio Free Asia (RFA), stations created to report domestic news in countries where, because of communism, no independent national broadcasters could. The distinction between these networks and the VOA may seem subtle to the casual observer, but it is real: whereas the VOA was intended as an international news source, RL and RFE were established by the CIA during the Cold War to counter communist propaganda in the Soviet Union and its satellite states, respectively, and RFA, the brainchild of Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.), was launched in 1996 to do the same in Asia. (None of these networks receives funding from the intelligence budget today, and none is officially part of the U.S. government, allowing them greater flexibility than the VOA has in hiring and firing staff.) Capitol Hill has even greater affection for the anti-Fidel Castro stations Radio Martí and TV Martí, even though Radio Martí is believed to have fewer listeners in Cuba than the Spanish service of the VOA and TV Martí has almost no audience, except at the American Interests Section in Havana and on a few Latin American cable channels. The Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which coordinates programming for the two stations, is the rare recipient of "no-year money," federal funds it can hold over indefinitely, and it usually gets more such funding than it can spend. (The Bush administration's budget for fiscal year 2006 includes a request for $10 million to acquire and operate an airborne transmitter that could supposedly evade Cuban jamming of TV Martí's signal.)

Some might argue that as a government-funded network, the VOA should be expected always to portray U.S. policies as righteous and successful; they might even claim that, in the right hands, such propaganda could help defuse anti-Americanism abroad. But experience demonstrates that the VOA is most appreciated and effective when it functions as a model U.S.-style news organization that presents a balanced view of domestic and international events, setting an example for how independent journalism can strengthen democracy. After all, these are the values that the network's charter sought to enshrine, and they are no less important today than before. Many still believe that the VOA delivered its finest performances in the midst of severe crises such as the Watergate scandal and the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton, when it gave full and balanced accounts of the news.

The network still has a critical role to play in introducing American values to the rest of the world. It is no coincidence that in recent years some of the VOA's largest audiences have been in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Tanzania -- countries where the local media simply cannot be trusted to offer an accurate representation of what is happening domestically or around the world. It also is telling that, like the Soviets a few decades ago, the governments of Iran and North Korea now spend considerable effort trying to jam VOA broadcasts. Ironically, by taking English off some of the clearest shortwave frequencies, the BBG has rendered a certain amount of jamming unnecessary.

Some members of Congress have suggested that the VOA's job might best be left to the free market and cable services such as Fox and CNN, which have extensive networks of correspondents. But it is impossible to imagine these commercial operations mounting the effort and shouldering the expense necessary to provide, for both the radio and the Internet, in-depth international news in Burmese, Hausa, Macedonian, Swahili, or others of the 44 languages in which the VOA currently broadcasts. With an annual budget of approximately $150 million, almost 100 million listeners worldwide every week, and increasing penetration in difficult regions thanks to both FM signals and shortwave frequencies, the VOA is still an astonishing bargain for the U.S. taxpayer.

When the U.S. government hopes to open up channels of information in countries facing political or social crises, such as Indonesia or Zimbabwe, it first turns to the VOA to add broadcast hours. If those programs succeed in breaking through domestic barriers to the free flow of information, it is because they carry the VOA label and greater credibility than political speeches or flat declarations of U.S. policy. President Bush seems to be getting the point. In his budget message to Congress in February, he said, "Rarely has the need for a sustained effort to ensure foreign understanding for our country and society been so clearly evident." As he suggests, without a strong and secure Voice of America, reporting the news fully and fairly in its own language and in others, the United States is fated to face more incomprehension in the international community.