Unmuffling
the Voice of America
By Robert R. Reilly in
the Wall Street Journal
In 1999 Congress
abolished the United States Information Agency, which had the responsibility of
telling America's story during the Cold War. It gathered up the leftover
government broadcasting services under an independent, part-time Broadcasting
Board of Governors, or BBG. As a result, U.S. influence abroad waned. This was
a terrible mistake that can now be set right, at least in part, by creating the
U.S. International Communications Agency.
In May, the House
Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously passed the U.S. International
Communications Reform Act, introduced by Rep. Ed Royce (R., Calif.) and Eliot
Engel (D., N.Y.). If approved by Congress, it will eliminate the BBG, which has
oversight of the Voice of America and other nonmilitary government
broadcasting, and transform the board into an advisory committee. The bill also
will create the position of a full-time chief executive officer to run the new
agency.
The Broadcasting Board
of Governors's fatal flaw is that its part-time members (four Democrats, four
Republicans) have executive authority to run government broadcasting. The board
doesn't report to anyone; it is outside the executive branch chain of command.
Try to imagine an effective organization that has eight CEOs who meet once a
month to direct the activities of thousands of employees and scores of
foreign-language services with a $750 million budget. Any such organization is
dysfunctional by design.
This is now generally
acknowledged on both sides of the aisle. In 2010 Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.)
said, "The BBG is the most worthless organization in the federal
government." During her final testimony before Congress in January 2013,
the then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
said, "Our Broadcasting Board of Governors is practically defunct in terms
of its capacity to be able to tell a message around the world. So we're
abdicating the ideological arena, and we need to get back into it." A
State Department inspector general's report that month said "a part-time
Board cannot effectively supervise all U.S. Government-supported, civilian international
broadcasting."
I should know. I was
director of the Voice of America from 2001-02 and had to work under the BBG.
One day a board member with extensive executive experience in private business
told me privately that "you can't possibly do your job with this board. It
should be abolished." That board member was right.
Here are a few
examples. One member of the BBG, without telling me, went to China in 2002 to
negotiate with Beijing officials on VOA's TV broadcasts to teach the English
language. While he was there he ceded editorial control to the Chinese
government, something VOA had never done with a foreign power. It took some
Byzantine maneuvering to walk that decision back.
In 2001 the BBG wanted
to eliminate VOA radio broadcasts to Uzbekistan. Secretary of State Colin
Powell wrote the board not to do this because of U.S. strategic interests. The
chairman sent him a letter back thanking him for his point of view.
The board ultimately
relented and soon thereafter the U.S. deployed troops in Uzbekistan to support
operations in Afghanistan. I asked a board member if he was glad that they
hadn't eliminated the Uzbek service, so we can explain to the people there why
U.S. troops are in their country. "Oh no," he responded, "we go in
and out of radio markets all the time." It didn't occur to him that the
Voice of America was the on-the-air American flag to the Uzbek people and that
one does not continually raise and lower the flag without a depressing effect
on the people whose confidence we are trying to gain.
This episode was
unfortunately typical of board members who had no experience in foreign policy
or public diplomacy, much less in the war of ideas (though the current board is
a big improvement in this respect). Most BBG members have been highly
accomplished individuals who made their fortunes in the media. They sought to
replicate their success according to commercial criteria, which meant aiming at
large youth audiences and abandoning markets where such audiences could not be
attracted.
Thus the BBG
eliminated VOA broadcasting to Brazil, India, Russia and the Arab world
(replacing it with a pop music station, Radio Sawa, which had only two short
newscasts per hour), and repeatedly tried to eliminate VOA's China services.
Who listens became less important than how many listened, or to what. Too often
board members proclaimed that government broadcasting had nothing to do with
U.S. public diplomacy. At which point, one might reasonably ask, then why are
we doing it? And why should the U.S. taxpayer pay for it?
The U.S. has enduring
interests in the world. We need to explain ourselves in the most persuasive way
we can, and by the most effective means, particularly to those peoples and
countries whose future is going to most affect ours, such as China and Russia.
This needs to be done within the U.S. government in a command structure related
to our national security.
Establishing an
International Communications Agency will restore a sense of mission to
government broadcasting and give it some clear leadership. Failure to do this
will be paid, I fear, in American lives. Better to win the war of ideas than
have to win a war.
Mr. Reilly was
director of the Voice of America from 2001 to 2002. He serves on the board of
the Middle East Media Research Institute.
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