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.

Of the various ironies besetting U.S. foreign policy at the moment, one is both particularly acute and little recognized: even as the realization grows that the international image of the United States is in steep decline, the country's best instrument of public diplomacy, the Voice of America (VOA) broadcast service, is being systematically diminished.

In 63 years of operation, the VOA has been a widely respected brand name, symbolizing honest international radio journalism with an American twist. But now, its bureaus in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo have been closed, and those in Moscow and London reduced in size. VOA news broadcasts in standard American English, which ran 24 hours a day during the 1990s, have been cut by almost half. (In contrast, the British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC] has two round-the-clock streams.) In far-flung spots around the world, it is now easier to get government-funded radio news in English from Australia or New Zealand -- or even China, Germany, or various religious broadcasters -- than from the United States. Whereas the VOA's television programs have been expanded in some languages, such as Farsi, those in English have been substantially curtailed. Meanwhile, programming in Arabic and other critical languages is being replaced with commercial-style shows featuring pop music and brief news bulletins. Political interference in programming decisions, thought to be a thing of the past, has returned. Congressionally mandated editorials expressing the official views of the U.S. government, previously set apart, now blend into or trump objective news reports. Dispirited by the trend, some of the network's most senior and most widely respected correspondents have retired.

These developments are in part the unintended consequences of a reform enacted by Congress almost a decade ago. In the late 1990s, the quasi-independent U.S. Information Agency (USIA), long the home of the VOA, was folded into the State Department, with the noble goal of saving money and unifying the government's message overseas. But the restructuring placed the VOA under the ambit of the new Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which also took over the rest of the U.S. government's international broadcasting effort. From the outset, the BBG struggled to establish its authority. Comprising four political appointees from each party, plus the secretary of state, it has often initiated change just to show that it is in charge. Convinced that the VOA is an unwieldy bureaucracy, the BBG has taken key shortwave frequencies away from the network, weakening the most effective tool the United States has ever had for telling its story to the world. Meanwhile, the vacuum created by these measures is being filled by other broadcasters and bloggers, many of them overtly hostile to the United States.

TUNING IN, TUNING OUT

As a government agency with a journalistic mission, the VOA has always been a somewhat peculiar institution. Launched in New York soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it was created to counter propaganda from the Axis powers. Still, its first words, broadcast in German on February 25, 1942, made a grand commitment to honesty: "Daily, at this time, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth."

The VOA did tell the truth, mostly, during World War II. And when the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 authorized the "dissemination abroad of information about the United States, its people, and its policies" by the government, the VOA became a legitimate part of the effort. But like government-produced pamphlets and films about the United States, its radio programs were barred from being broadcast at home, for fear that they might be used by whatever administration was in power to influence the domestic public. (Commercial broadcasters, then gaining strength, also feared government-funded competition.) In time, it took fierce bureaucratic infighting and Radio Moscow's virulent attacks on the West in the late 1940s to guarantee the VOA's survival. Through Russian and other foreign-language services, the VOA was used to denounce Soviet expansionism in Europe.

The early Cold War years were a tumultuous time for the VOA, as for so many other government bureaucracies. An in-house stylebook from 1953 warned starkly, "We are not in the business to amuse, entertain or simply inform our listeners. ... The United States is in the midst of a struggle for the mind of mankind." Some staff members took the prescription to heart, favoring shrill broadcasts to match those coming out of the Soviet Union. But even they were not tough enough for the staffers who leaked information to Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) during the early 1950s. McCarthy's hearings on alleged subversion in government allowed disgruntled VOA employees to claim that the service's broadcasts were soft on communism and that its shortwave transmitters were being placed in remote locations to keep its programs from reaching a maximum audience.

After barely surviving McCarthy's assaults and other government investigations, in 1953 the VOA was incorporated into the USIA and soon moved from New York to Washington. For a time, the change helped insulate the service from ideological battles, and the VOA's awkward coalition of idealistic career diplomats and young, independent-minded journalists committed themselves to building its credibility as a news organization. The late 1950s and early 1960s were a period of expansion and creativity. President John F. Kennedy famously said on its 20th anniversary, "The Voice of America ... carries a heavy responsibility. ... It must explain to a curious and suspicious world what we are. It must tell them of our basic beliefs." Edward R. Murrow, then the director of the USIA, declared, "To be persuasive, we must be believable. To be believable, we must be truthful."

Soon, however, the Vietnam War presented the VOA with another test: President Lyndon Johnson tried to deploy what he often called "my own radio" to counteract the private media's unrelenting criticism of his foreign policy.