The Dalai Lama said that Voice of America Tibetan radio is “vital medicine” for Tibetans, and the Tibetan people consider it as one of the most valuable and priceless gifts from the people and government of the United States to them.

Sign a Petition Save Voice of America Radio to Tibet

The Broadcasting Board of Governors Chief Financial Officer Maryjean Buhler pointed out at last week’s public board meeting that the BBG proposes in its fiscal year 2013 budget a reduction rather than an elimination of the Voice of America Tibetan Service.

The BBG proposal means, however, an elimination of the entire VOA Tibetan radio broadcasting service, leaving only a VOA Tibetan website and a VOA Tibetan television program. Neither of these can be viewed easily in Tibet due to the Chinese regime’s draconian restrictions on private ownership of satellite dishes and its effective blocking of VOA websites. This means that the VOA Tibetan Service would be reduced to providing news only to Tibetans living in exile rather than to Tibetans in Tibet, where the Voice of America is most needed and its radio programs are secretly listen to as reported recently by National Public Radio.

This video from last Thursday’s BBG board meeting includes comments by CFO Maryjean Buhler and BBG Governor Victor Ashe who is said to oppose cutting Voice of America radio broadcasts to Tibet. Ashe said that he received numerous protests and indicated that BBG members are taking another look at this matter.

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This document is reposted from savevoatibetanradio.com website.

Stop the Voice of America’s Tibetan Language Radio from going silent for the Tibetan people

In the FY2013 budget proposal, the Broadcasting Board of Governors plans on eliminating the Voice of America’s Tibetan language radio to Tibet.

The Tibetan People are burning with anguish and pain at this moment

This comes at a period when Tibet is literally burning, and China’s repression and crackdowns on the Tibetan people are at their harshest and most violent. Twenty five young people, mostly monks and  nuns, have self-immolated to draw attention to the attacks  on Tibetan religion and culture. China’s response has been to crackdown harder, conduct beatings and detentions and inflict painful and humiliating ‘re-education’ programs at Tibetan religious institutions.

Wrong political message to the Chinese Communist Party

Cutting this lifeline for Tibetans in their hour of need sends a wrong message to China. China will understand it to mean that decimation of Tibetan religion and culture, and indeed their very identity, will now be overlooked by America. And to the Tibetan people, it will be a heartbreaking blow from a nation that Tibetans love, respect, and consider a friend in stormy weather.

        VOA Tibetan language radio is a unique source of information for Tibetans

A recent NPR report on the Tibetan self-immolations in Tibet said, “The monks listen secretly to Voice of America’s Tibetan service news every night, despite feeling almost physical pain at the bleak news.” That’s because ever since 1991, when the Voice of America was mandated by an act of Congress to start its Tibetan language service, it has been the only international broadcast into Tibet that provides world news, US news, the activities and efforts of the Dalai Lama for his people, and information and analysis on the workings of the free world to Tibet. And today, VOA Tibetan radio is still the only one that gives all of that to the Tibetan people.

Shortwave radio is still a powerful medium in Tibet

Shortwave radio remains a cheap, easily concealed, and thus the safest mode of getting news and information in Tibet. Radio signals are jammed by the Chinese in town centers, but in the rural areas where the vast majority of Tibetans live, Voice of America’s radio is loud and clear.

The Dalai Lama said that Voice of America Tibetan radio is “vital medicine” for Tibetans, and the Tibetan people consider it as one of the most valuable and priceless gifts from the people and government of the United States to them.

Save VOA Tibetan radio on behalf of the millions of Tibetans living under extreme oppression, and the American people who have supported the plight of the Tibetans for over 50 years.

Lobsang Gyatso, a 19-year old monk from Kirti monastery in Ngaba, self-immolated on February 13, 2012.

“The [Buddhist] monks [in Tibet] listen secretly to Voice of America’s Tibetan service news every night, despite feeling almost physical pain at the bleak news.” – NPR reporter Louisa Lim

As reported for National Public Radio (NPR) by Louisa Lim, “Protests, Self-Immolation Signs Of A Desperate Tibet,” “The [Buddhist] monks [in Tibet] listen secretly to Voice of America’s Tibetan service news every night, despite feeling almost physical pain at the bleak news.”

In her NPR report, Louisa Lim describes scenes of repression of the Tibetans by the Chinese regime and of desperation among the local population and Tibetan monks:

“‘Too many of our people died this year,’ one monk told me, referring to nearly two-dozen Tibetans who have set themselves on fire as a protest against Chinese repression. Identifying details have been removed to protect those who talked to NPR.”

NPR did not report in this story that the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a federal agency that manages the Voice of America, has just proposed to terminate VOA Tibetan language radio programs. This news has not yet been widely reported by American media. The BBG also wants to close down the VOA Cantonese Service, thus targeting two languages and cultures which are also being suppressed by the communist regime in Beijing. The Voice of America Tibetan Service was established in 1990 by an act of Congress and went on the air in 1991.

This is what one anonymous Voice of America journalist wrote after hearing the news that the Broadcasting Board of Governors was planning to end VOA radio broadcasts to Tibet:

Tibet activists unfurl a banner from Arlington Memorial Bridge to protest visit of China’s future president that reads 'Xi Jinping: Tibet will be Free'.

This commentary by an anonymous Broadcasting Board of Governors’ journalist analyzes the BBG’s FY2013 budget proposal which calls for silencing Voice of America (VOA) radio broadcasts to Tibet as part of cutting America’s broadcasts to three out of five remaining communist regimes.

Silencing Voice of America Radio to Tibet: Has the Broadcasting Board of Governors Gone Mad?

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) budget submission requests cutting seven employees out of 22 in the Voice of America (VOA) Tibetan Service, ending all six hours of daily VOA Tibetan radio broadcasts.

This is happening on the day China’s Vice President Xi Jinping, heir apparent of the communist regime, arrives in Washington on a get-to-know-you visit.

This is happening while Tibet is burning. A day after the 23rd Tibetan monk self-immolated to protest unprecedented Chinese crackdown on their religion.

This is happening one week after CCTV, China’s state TV launched its first live daily broadcast from its brand new 36000 sq ft studio in Washington DC, the first step of China’s $7 billion media offensive in America.

What is the BBG thinking? Has the Broadcasting Board of Governors gone mad?

And, decimating VOA broadcasts to the Laos (4 out of 6 employees), Vietnam (10 out of 15 employees) and Cantonese to China (all 7 employees). Cutting America’s broadcasts to three out of five remaining communist regimes. (…)

Who needs this Board that cannibalizes its own worker bees to feed itself?

The annonymous Voice of America journalist reported that as Broadcasting Board of Governors executives were planning to abolish Voice of America radio broadcasts to Tibet and fire journalists, they have created several new top level bureaucratic positions for themselves.

BBG members with IBB Director Richard Lobo and Deputy Director Jeff Trimble

The entities – all the entities – function better as self-contained units, serving their respective missions and intended audiences. — The Federalist

We could not agree more with this statement from The Federalist, one of our regular and popular contributors. A Global News Network envisioned by BBG Chairman Walter Isaacson strikes us as a job creation project for former CNN employees, favorite contractors and other recent hires who speak no foreign languages and have no experience in international broadcasting. But they have to do something, so there you have it.

It will be a major distraction to the mission of serving information needs of foreign audiences. That job requires specialization, not centralization. The merger proposal in its current form is also likely to destroy the effectiveness of the surrogate broadcasters. For Chairman Isaacson’s information, surrogate broadcasters were created because there was too much centralization at the Voice of America. A Global News Network can never provide what these surrogate broadcasters and VOA language services need. We know it from our own experience.

Broadcasting Board of Governors: BBG Plans Hit Major Rocks and Realities in VOA Central News – A Federalist Extra
 
 
 
Note: In this piece, we take a look at the operations of the Voice of America (VOA) Central Newsroom.  This is “getting down in the weeds,” a place we don’t often go.  However, as anyone inside the Cohen Building knows,” the weeds” are where the action is, where the big ideas of the BBG’s “flim flam strategic plan” come into contact with reality.  We examine some key aspects of how the “new world order” as dictated by the BBG/IBB is impacting a core VOA operation and its relationship with the various VOA language services and other entities.
 
—
 
For a long time now, stretching across two stages of what has been called the “reorg” in the VOA central newsroom, discussion has been intensifying about the role the BBG envisions for what was, back to the time of VOA’s founding, the essential core operation of U.S. international broadcasting.
 
Recently, an email from the Central News Director, Sonja Pace, touted the newsroom as an important agency core operation. However, based on what The Federalist has learned, it seems that the VOA Central News operation has been thrust by BBG plans into a barely-controlled chaos as it tries to be too many things to too many people.
 
A view purported to be that of VOA David Ensor is that the 40-plus VOA language services are now each their own newsroom. In other words, each service appears to be expected to generate original material to be available on-demand throughout the agency, including the grantee operations of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Sawa/Al-Hurra television, Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Radio/TV Marti.
 
Here is where reality intervenes.
 
Consider the internal VOA environment. It is one thing for a language service to provide a report for distribution to all of VOA. It is another thing altogether when breaking news happens and a language service is besieged by the other forty-odd services for material. What appears to be the plan is for material from services to be “re-versioned.”  It is not clear if the bulk of this is to be done by an already over-burdened Central News operation, or if language services themselves are expected to do this.  It could be a combination of the two.
 
Add to this the various grantee operations, each with their own missions, and the editorial direction and perspectives they want to put to stories, although it is now unknown how a revised reorganization creating a so-called “hybrid” amalgamation of grantees and VOA will affect the latest vision of VOA Central News.
 
This latest development aside, what is happening is a division of resources away from the center.  An example would be the preparation of news items for the central news file.

Rather than continuing what was a finely-honed operation in which Central News, with various regional desks prepared news for distribution to language services, the BBG (with its endorsement last year of what newsroom staffers saw as a highly-flawed program review document) is now busy taking apart that system.
 
VOA language services — many utterly incapable of shouldering the news writing burden in addition to translation of news material not generated within a language service — have been ordered to start writing news for the countries or regions they broadcast to. BBG re-negotiated contracts with major news services to accomplish this.  Having direct access to news services without depending on Central News was long a goal of language services — a symbol of their independence, so to speak. The problem is that many are understaffed and under-resourced, due in large part to the deliberate attempt by the Third Floor’s “ideas people” to seemingly undermine and undo language services, at times using highly questionable audience research.  Added to the mix are requirements for doing television pieces and keeping language service websites updated.
 
To appearances and in its effect, in the revamped news environment, language services will be expected to generate their own radio, television and Internet product, and turn themselves into those 43-plus newsrooms in the Cohen building. This appears to be nothing short of a disaster in the making.  It is unclear how the BBG intends to ensure that services are carrying out this new function well, or detect if they are doing so poorly and what is falling through the cracks, the kinds of things that may not register with the Board when they give something their approval.
 
What we understand is that some the language services contributed a lot of vocal support to decentralization finding expression in the “program review” document ultimately adopted by the BBG.  “Program review” is an in-house process in which language services are critiqued.  Various agency elements get involved in the process and congregate around a large table in an agency conference room for a lengthy discussion of conclusions reached.
 
In this case, a prevailing sentiment in the VOA newsroom is that insufficient consultation took place with the staff making up the varied elements of the newsroom.
What appears to have won the day were the views of language services exerted through the program review process, and a desire by other agency officials to “reinvent the wheel” as far as Central News is concerned.
 
 
Further, if there is any hint that senior officials are inclined to buy into the idea of reinvention, other factors start to kick in, not the least of which would be to get enthusiastically supportive of what is being embraced by senior officialdom in the Cohen.  Cautions and reservations are often muted, as one doesn’t want to be seen as being out of sync with Third Floor thinking.
 
Back for a moment to the plan, mentioned in several BBG Watch reports, to create a Global News Network (remember BBG’s annual budget has remained largely static over the years,  now in the mid $700 million range and BBG and IBB officials have been clear that there should be no expectation of larger budgets coming down the pike).  Under that plan (prior to this latest BBG talk of a “hybrid organization”) in theory any material developed by any of the entities should be able to be used by other entities.
 
However, in reality, what appears to be the case is that the entities don’t necessarily want the same product in the same media.  In the obsession with television product, some entities may want a “re-versioned” piece that is formatted for television.  Others may want a piece for the Internet.  And lastly, some might want all three!
 
And then there is always the presence of shifting priorities.
 
We have heard employees describe situations in which they have had to drop everything to produce a television spot, scramble to put a production together, and are then told to drop the piece for some reason or other. In one case, after
hours of work, an order came down from one major non-VOA BBG entity to have a certain report delivered within 30 minutes.  This may not seem like a big deal.  However, the fact is that all the entities have their own broadcast times and program schedules, making requirements or demands easier said than done.
 
The television aspect of what is now being expected has consequences.  It takes more time and more staff to produce a television piece, compared to what can be done in the same amount of time for a radio piece.  One wonders if this aspect of working with these media hasn’t been examined by agency heads, to see what gets the most bang for the buck.  Cross-pollination of media product is not always a seamless process.
 
The Federalist has heard that in the frenzy to produce TV, senior officials ordered Central News to steadily reduce its production of news items, the so-called central file which used to be the “bread and butter” of VOA, in favor of increasing video product.  At times, this created a situation where VOA’s newsroom often did not cover certain breaking news stories.  One has to wonder what happens when production of news stories finally drops to only a few each day, on the assumption that language services will be able to pick up the burden.  
 
The goal apparently is for Central News to decrease production of news items from say, 100 ore more a day, to only a dozen or so.  If this is correct, it’s a broad differential to be placed on the backs of the language services to make up.  That’s one of the things that appears on its face to be out of whack:  previously VOA Central News was supposed to service all language services, not for individual services to attempt to create material for the entire BBG and its entities, but lacking the resources on hand to do so, in a timely manner and to ensure that reports are accurate.  Also, under the goal, explained in the most recent BBG meeting by Walter Isaacson, to create a new “hybrid” agency, individual entities are to retain their brands and identities.  So it appears that, in addition to the 40-plus separate newsrooms in the Cohen building, similar multiple operations in RFE/RL, RFA, etc. will still be busy doing what they have always done to produce material for their programs.  It’s starting to look like that old Abbott and Costello routine of “who’s on first,” etc.
 
For VOA in particular, television is a black hole – gobbling up resources and with a high price tag attached.  Within easy eyesight of Capitol Hill, agency officials seem to be blind to the fact that this is not an era of unlimited resources.  The United States Government is confronted with problems of enormous import to the American people.  It cannot support the blue skies ideas concocted on the Third Floor of the Cohen Building.  
 
It seems to be the view of VOA director David Ensor that television can be done on the cheap.  Most assuredly it can.  However, it is equally likely that the product will be seen as such.  In the increasingly competitive environment that includes not only international broadcasters but capable regional ones as well, a cheap product is going to be outclassed by superior product.  This will make it all the more likely that potential audiences will turn elsewhere as they have in the Middle East and Iran, two key strategic locales for US international broadcasting.
 
VOA Central News and the VOA language services need to have a balanced, symbiotic relationship.  The plan being orchestrated by agency officials is not that relationship.
 
Wasting American taxpayer money in attempting yet another reinvention is not an option for the BBG/IBB.  The taxpayer cannot be treated in the manner of an ATM machine.  Congress and the White House must demand a higher standard of performance and results buttressed by greater oversight and accountability.
 
Nothing else is going to work or work well enough to justify the expense of U.S international broadcasting which, in the hands of the IBB, is open-ended and growing.
 
If there is one thing to be learned from examining this one issue it is that embracing complexity is not a solution to the dilemmas of U.S international broadcasting.  The reorganization plan concocted by the IBB doesn’t make things run smoother or work better.  The entities – all the entities – function better as self-contained units, serving their respective missions and intended audiences.
 
The Federalist
January 2012
 
 
 

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See the article here:
BBG Plans Hit Major Rocks and Realities in VOA Central News – The Federalist

“If VOA constitutes communications essential to national security, privatization may not be feasible,” – Deloitte

“If VOA constitutes communications essential to national security, privatization may not be feasible,” is a conclusion of a consolidation study done by Deloitte, but the consulting firm recommends a quick action on the BBG plan to merge grantee broadcasters. Free Media Online has obtained a copy of the Grantee Merger Assessment done for the Broadcasting Board of Governors by Deloitte. It was announced at today’s BBG open meeting that the report will be posted on the BBG Strategy website. The report makes references to “language duplication” between VOA and the Grantees, which implies that there are no differences in mission between VOA and the Grantees. If VOA and the Grantees have different missions, then “language duplication” is a non-issue. If they have the same mission — which evidently they do not — then the logical step would be to combine VOA and the Grantees. Deloitte, however, did discover that VOA broadcasts may have a national security and foreign policy mission and is advocating a further study of the BBG’s de-Federalization proposal.

Here are some of the main elements of the report:

Key Findings:

Today RFE/RL, RFA and MBN are three separate private 501(c)(3) organizations with combined resources of approximately $240 million and approximately 2,000 full time employees and contractors. All have a common mission to act as a surrogate media outlet in countries that do not have an open media environment; additionally, unlike RFE/RL and RFA, MBN is charged with providing context about America, its people, and policies.

Aside from Arabic services to Iraq, there is no overlap in language services among the Grantees, or in bureau locations. With just a merger of the Grantees, there is no potential to eliminate duplication of language services beyond that already planned. A combined entity framework can set the foundation for achieving substantial synergies with respect to the large overlap with VOA language services, which is unanimously supported by all Grantee Presidents.

There are several potential benefits of a merger of the three grantee corporations:

- It would serve as a first step in the execution of the Board’s Strategic Plan that calls for consolidating and streamlining management and administrative infrastructure. A merger would create a single grantee management team which would facilitate coordination with the BBG in pursuit of its strategic objectives.

- It creates more financial transparency and demonstrates to stakeholders that BBG leadership is committed to allocating resources as efficiently as possible and eliminating waste – potentially garnering support and trust.

- It creates an enforceable structure for more formalized content sharing, advancing the Board’s strategy to harness original reporting from across the language services to create a global news service with rich programming.

- It creates resource savings over time with the elimination of duplicative administrative and technical infrastructures and pooled purchasing power (e.g., for equipment, services, and insurance). This is a key benefit in our current economic environment.

- Positive reaction from Congress if new services, technologies and broadcast medium can be achieved without an increase to the top line.

- Annual run rate savings of $9M, or about 10% can be achieved on approximately $90M of addressable spend which is approximately 38% of the aggregate Grantee budget.

Savings could expand to nearly $14M annually with aggressive facilities consolidation.

Risks of integrating the Grantee corporations include:

- Possible negative reaction from Congress if a merger of the Grantees impedes the flow of content to audiences.

- Uncertain result of merging a partially unionized workforce with non-unionized staff.

- A potentially broader impact of digital and physical security threats in a merged environment if not mitigated.

- Potential disruption to current foreign business licenses and relationships in host countries.

Over five years, the cumulative net savings from merging the Grantee organizations is estimated to be approximately $30M to $40M. There are cumulative savings of $35M to $50M available with one-time costs of $8M to $12M. The savings result from a small headcount reduction of approximately 45-50 resources, plus non-headcount savings related to sourcing efficiencies, and facilities and technology infrastructure consolidation. Longer term, there are opportunities for additional headcount reduction if facilities are more aggressively consolidated.

Conclusions:

Deloitte believes that the merging of the Grantees does have merit, and does make sense strategically and economically. We heard in numerous discussions with leaders across the Grantees that current structure is a product of the evolution of the Agency, is not ideal, and would not be the logical approach if one were starting fresh. We agree with that perspective. The current siloed structure is not an optimal foundation for the new strategic direction envisioned by the Board.

From an operational perspective, we see no roadblocks that cannot be overcome. The vast majority (around 75%) of the resources of the Grantees are devoted to content and programming, so their day to day roles will not change. Merging the administrative processes, policies, and supporting systems will be no more complicated here than in any other merger of a similar scale.

In the current economic environment, continuing to operate three separate organizations with redundant executive management teams, administrative infrastructures, audits, etc. seems to be an inefficient use of taxpayer resources. The potential annual savings of $9M to $14M could be redeployed toward journalistic initiatives that advance the Board strategic vision.

As with any merger there are risks associated with the potential decline in employee morale. These can be mitigated by swift decision-making and a strong change management program.

Delaying a decision about the path forward will create uncertainty which can dampen employee morale. In addition, delays will stall the advancement of the Board’s strategic plan and cause the organization to miss out on significant potential savings.

Recommendations and Next Steps:

We recommend that the Board approve the merger of the Grantees, and proceed with the design of the new organization and the implementation planning. Based on a typical merger timeframe of about 6 months from a decision, we believe that the Board should target a “Day 1” in July 2012.

To pursue the larger savings available by reducing duplication of language services, as noted earlier and broadly supported by Grantee leadership, we recommend commencing a study on the feasibility, benefits and costs of VOA/OCB de-federalization, reportable at the Board’s March 2012 meeting to explore 3 items:

1. The “quick hit” opportunities available from partially integrating some VOA/OCB operations into the Grantee structure without de-federalization. The objective of this study would be to identify initiatives that could be implemented in parallel with the Day
1 of the Grantee merger in July 2012.

2. The next tranche of opportunities that would become feasible in FY13 without de-federalization.

3. The feasibility of VOA/OCB de-federalization, including benefits, risks, and financial implications.

Key Principles:

There were several key principles that were consistently articulated throughout the visioning discussions with the Grantees. These are things that all believed should be the ‘guard rails’ of any potential integration.

There should be no change in the journalistic mission of the organizations – the current markets and audiences should continue to be served with the content appropriate for them.

The existing market-facing brands should remain intact as they are critical to success. The relationship between the brands and the grantee entity is different across the three organizations. For MBN, the brands (Alhurra, Radio Sawa, Afia Darfur) are the externally known identities, while for Radio Free Asia the brand and the organization are one in the same across its market. RFE/RL has individual brands by service that will be critical to maintain.

The new organization should maintain an entrepreneurial spirit and ability to remain nimble; avoiding bureaucracy.

Risks:

There are five primary potential risks that were identified from discussions with the Grantees.

Congressional reaction:

There is uncertainty as to reaction from Congress. The proposed merger has positive actions in doing more with less, but has the potential to disrupt content if not managed carefully.

Cultural differences:

The three organizations have cultural differences. MBN is a primarily a television focused entity and produces content in a single language , Arabic. RFE/RL and RFA are primarily radio entities (though expanding into other media) and produce content in many languages. Because RFA is much smaller in employee count and budget, it sees itself as a more tightly knit community than the others. It also operates with the least sophisticated resources of the three (e.g. production facilities, technical resources). Bringing together the cultures of these three organizations will require a focused change management effort. Mergers bring uncertainty and change, so there is a possibility that employee morale could suffer resulting in an increased risk of employee turnover. Decision-making delays can exacerbate this situation; employees who are uncertain of the path forward and their role (or lack thereof) in the new organization may be more likely to seek other opportunities.

Unions:

A significant portion of RFA’s workforce is unionized, while RFE/RL has 8 unionized employees and MBN has no unions. A deliberate plan is required to ensure that all parties’ interests are represented in the planning.

Security:

Because of the nature of their work, each organization comes under threat (both physical and digital). Today, when one organization is attacked, the others are unaffected. If the organizations are combined, a threat could affect the scope of the entire operation. For example, if systems are combined and there is a digital attack inspired by RFA’s content, programming and employees in the Middle East and Europe could be affected as well. That said, there are mitigation strategies that could be employed to address this risk.

Staff Reductions:

Management Staff Reductions – Grantee consolidation could eliminate an estimated 13-14 high-level management staff positions, including two Presidents, several VPs and other management support roles. These savings could begin to be as soon as the new leadership structure is executed, and fully realized in the first full fiscal year after merging.

Finance/Admin Staff Reductions – Grantee consolidation could eliminate an estimated 14-15 finance/admin staff positions, including finance management, accounting, and procurement personnel. These savings could begin to be as soon as the new finance organization structure is executed, and fully realized in the first full fiscal year after merging.

HR Staff Reductions – Grantee consolidation is not estimated to reduce overall headcount for HR in the near term, however would likely result in a different mix of positions required -eliminating for example two Director Roles, but increasing the staff at various locations should no facility changes be assumed. The consolidation is likely to require job roles and benefits plans to be redefined and broadly, and HR policy will need to be revisited. If facilities consolidation occurs, there may be an opportunity to reduce 1-2 HR positions.

Facilities Staff Reductions – Real estate consolidation could yield approximately 3-5 facilities staff headcount reductions. In the near term for example, savings would result from offices in the Washington, DC metro area being consolidated. These savings could be realized quickly if existing space is subleased and facilities consolidation begins upon execution of the merger. If facilities consolidation is delayed until the nearest term leases expire, savings will begin to be realized in FY14 and fully realized in FY15.

Communications – Grantee consolidation could eliminate 2-3 communications positions. These savings could begin to be as soon as the new communications organization structure is executed, and fully realized in the first full fiscal year after merging.

Technology Staff Reductions – Grantee consolidation could eliminate an estimated 13 technology staff positions . These savings could begin to be realized as soon as the new technology organization structure is executed, and fully realized in the first full fiscal year after merging. The location/facilities strategy will affect the degree of opportunity in this area. On-site technical resources are required in facilities where production takes place and where there are significant groups of users. Because of the 24×7 nature of some of the operations, shifts are also required which increases overall staffing needs. With fewer locations, it may be possible to streamline the technical staff by up to 25 resources.

Costs to Achieve Staff Reductions – Estimated costs to achieve the identified headcount reduction savings is approximately $2.1M to $2.8M in severance costs. The timing of the severance costs will depend on the execution date of the merger and how aggressively the organization chooses to reduce headcount.

Observations on De-federalization of VOA/OCB and on TSI

VOA, OCB, and BBG/IBB make up approximately $500M (about 66%) of the overall spend on US International Broadcasting, or more than double the spend of the Grantee organizations combined. A full view of synergies opportunities across US International Broadcasting cannot be understood until these organizations are reviewed as well.

Throughout the assessment period, several themes emerged from the discussion regarding VOA, OCB and BBG/IBB:

While there are almost no content overlaps among the Grantees, there are significant overlaps with VOA. The Grantees believe that magnitude of the synergies available by addressing this overlap is greater than the benefits to be gained by just integrating the three Grantees.

All senior Grantee leadership indicated that the merger of the Grantees had merit if VOA was included due to the potential savings resulting from elimination of language service duplication.

It is unclear whether de-federalizing VOA is actually feasible or even desirable. Additional work is required to determine the pros and cons, and financial impact. Issues that must be included in the study are:

Potential loss of major backers:

BBG funding is for a Voice of America that could be perceived as a governmental, rather than an NGO function.

National security:

If VOA constitutes communications essential to national security, privatization may not be feasible.

In the near term, there are opportunities to find efficiencies with VOA, such as co-location to reduce costs. These opportunities are being addressed on an ad hoc basis.

The Grantees have an interest in taking on some of the distribution functions of TSI, especially if TSI is considering outsourcing them to a 3rd party. The Grantees would like to have the opportunity to ‘bid’ on this work before it goes to a 3rd party as they believe they can offer more cost effective solutions. They also would prefer to have great control over the distribution function to ensure their market needs are met.

There is question of whether the TSI backbone transmission infrastructure could be more efficiently operated by a grantee, rather than federal, organization. A reversal of the client/provider relationship between the federal and non-federal organizations could be explored in terms of efficiencies.

Today’s Pentagon budget must expend billions to cope with new Chinese weapons systems. But we can fund outlets of freedom like VOA and RFA that can eventually reduce that threat by fostering political reform in China for a fraction of the cost.

— Joseph Bosco

Back in March, Joseph Bosco who served in the Defense Department as China country desk officer, wrote an opinion piece for Politico, Launch Twitter in China, in which he made a number of excellent arguments as to why the Broadcasting Board of Governors’decision to end Voice of America radio and TV broadcasts to China is a mistake. It is one of the best media pieces in defense of U.S. broadcasting to China.

“Television and radio,” wrote Bosco, “are still the most effective media to convey dramatic images and descriptions, as well as to provide in-depth discussion, of contemporary historic events. They are also the only contact with the outside world for the millions of Chinese without Internet access.” As China country desk officer at the Pentagon, Bosco participated in VOA’s and RFA’s Mandarin-language programs.

“I can attest to the value of sharing information and ideas directly with Chinese citizens, who want unfiltered communications with the outside world,” he wrote for Politico. In his first appearance on VOA, shortly after the 2001 EP-3 incident, when a Chinese fighter jet harassed and collided with a U.S. reconnaissance flight in international airspace, he told callers pertinent facts that the Chinese government had withheld in its distorted version of the event.

Like many critics of the BBG, Bosco does not deny the importance of new media. But because the Internet and social media sites are censored in China, Bosco — unlike BBG executives — has no illusions that the Internet delivery is enough or that it should be the only option.

Here are some of the points that the former Defense Department official made in his commentary. They are worth repeating as members of Congress are trying to block the BBG’s ill-conceived plan.

It turns out that China has had considerable success censoring the Internet, however. It blocked coverage of the Egyptian crisis, except for the scenes of chaos and violence. Within Egypt, the Mubarak regime managed to shut down the entire system.

Washington should not make Beijing’s task even easier by removing or limiting the most important uncensored communications tool available to Chinese citizens. New technologies should supplement, not supplant, traditional communications that are often more reliable and effective — and sometimes the only international link.

Joseph Bosco previously taught China-U.S. relations at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. He is now a national security consultant.

The latest BBG statement on threats to media freedom, while quite strong, ignores the detention of VOA correspondent in China earlier this year and is silent on violence against journalists in Russia and BBG’s own attempts to censor Voice of America programs to Ehtiopia. This ivites charges of hypocrisy.

— BBG Watch
We welcome the latest BBG statement on recent threats to media freedom. It is the strongest ever in years. Perhaps BBG members are finally rejecting the go-soft-on-dictators marketing strategy advocated by their executive and program development staff. That would be indeed a welcome change. The BBG’s actions over the last few years have caused great damage to media freedom and the reputation of U.S. international broadcasting.

We also note that the BBG has said nothing about its own negotiations with the repressive regime in Ethiopia to place soft programs about health on local networks, its own censorship of VOA programs to Ethiopia, and the dismissal of the Horn of Africa service chief for daring to disclose and oppose the BBG attempt to replace some of the political news reporting with non-political content inoffensive to the regime, which had earlier threatened VOA reporters with death sentences.

BBG-imposed restrictions and censorship lead to the largest ever anti-censorship demostration in VOA’s history, organized in front of the BBG headquarters in Washington by Ethiopian Americans and media freedom activists.

We’re not surprised that the BBG statement did not mention Ethiopia.

Nor are we surprised that the Board statement does not mention China or the detention of a Voice of America correspondent in Beijing by the Chinese police. In February 2011, VOA reporter Stephanie Ho was secretly taped by CBS News in China’s capital screaming for police to stop beating her. She was pushed around, but eventually released.

Read Stephanie Ho’s account of the incident and see her videos in this VOA report:
US Ambassador Decries Chinese Abuse of Journalists

Perhaps this CBS video will remind BBG members of this incident.

Video link if you can’t see it here.

It is also not surprising that the statement says nothing about the BBG plan to end all VOA radio and TV broadcasts to China as of October 1, 2011 — the anniversary of the founding of the PRC — the plan which has been strongly condemned by Chinese human rights activists, members of Congress, human rights organizations in the U.S., pro-media freedom journalists, and Chinese Americans.

The BBG could regain some of its lost credibility if it would take the advice of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and continue VOA radio and TV broadcasts to China. In our opinion, the BBG’s plan to fire 45 VOA Chinese Branch journalists who specialize in human rights reporting and to end these broadcasts is just as great a threat to media freedom as some of the incidents described in the latest BBG statement. Also keep in mind that the BBG statement does not mention Russia, a country where journalists are being assassinated and to which the BBG terminated VOA radio and TV programs in 2008.

It’s much easier to pick on small dictatorships than on authoritarian regimes of major countries like China and Russia, but that is where the BBG has turned its back on human rights activists and other pro-democracy forces with its broadcasting cuts and its marketing approach pushing soft Internet content to placate the censors and achieve higher audience ratings. It is a marketing approach that goes against the BBG mission as envisioned by Congress and does a great disservice to the American people and the cause of freedom around the world.

Below you will find the full text of the BBG statement. Here we also include the first-person account of VOA Beijing Bureau Chief Stephanie Ho who was temporarily detained in the February 2011 crackdown, but managed to keep her video of the incident.

“I was out at Wangfujing Street across from the McDonald’s, which is where the online protest calls were supposed to be set. I was there probably with most of the foreign journalist corps in Beijing and as soon as I got my video camera out, there were guys blocking the lens.

They wouldn’t let me shoot and the street sweepers kept pushing me away. And then it was almost as if on cue, about four or five plainclothes police officers just sort of came out of the crowd, and all of a sudden I didn’t even know what was happening and they were pushing me. They were shoving me and they kind of knocked the camera down and they shoved me en masse inside a little shop.

Police removed five men gathering at a planned protest site in Shanghai.

Watch Stephanie Ho’s Report:

A uniformed guy actually came in with us, and he sort of wedged himself between me and the guy who I thought was maybe going to hit me. I just kept hearing him say, ‘Don’t hit women, don’t hit women.’ I just instinctively knew that I had to get out of there, and so I just pushed everybody and I forced my way outside back to the street. I was grabbed as soon as I got out to the street by three guys and they dragged me away down the alley to the police van.

They drove me to a police station and asked me to sit and wait in an anteroom. I think there was some confusion because I look Chinese, so they thought I was Chinese. Then they saw my I.D. and they said, ‘Oh, wait, you’re Voice of America, does that mean you’re American or Chinese?’ I think they realized they had brought me to the wrong station, so then after about 15 minutes, they brought me to another place, a sort of makeshift office called the Wangfujing Area Construction and Management Office, which nobody had heard of before.

They said, ‘If you’re going to be on Wangfujing Street, you need our permission.’ They said I needed permission to interview people, and I told them I wasn’t interviewing people, I just went to see what was going on.

Raw video of police action in China:

I don’t think there were any Chinese journalists there. If they went, they were well undercover. All the foreign journalists I know were called this past weekend and were warned not to go. I was called by someone who said she was a public security authoritiy, and we don’t know from which office. We tried to call the number back, and someone answered the phone and said somebody must have been using the phone to make phone calls. It’s all very vague and amorphous.

“I took part Monday afternoon in a meeting of foreign journalists at the U.S. ambassador’s office with the German ambassador and the European Union ambassador to discuss what happened yesterday. There were European journalists who had problems, and there were American journalists who had problems. This was definitely a stronger show of force than I’ve seen. There was a sense that it was concerted. There was a sense that it was organized.

And so the result is that 16 news agencies reported having problems, nine actually reported physical problems where they were either beaten or push or shoved. My colleague from Bloomberg was beaten quite badly. They dragged him around, they punched and kicked him. There were a lot of similarities with his experience and what I experienced.

Looking back on it, I’m thinking there might be some logic to the argument that the crackdown was to set an example for foreign journalists that this could happen to you if you come out again next time.”

Statement of the Broadcasting Board of Governors: Recent Threats to Media Freedom

September 15, 2011 | Washington, D.C.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors made the following statement at its meeting on September 15, 2011.

The BBG takes the opportunity of this open meeting to shine a spotlight
on efforts to thwart media freedom and intimidate our journalists in
countries where we work. We’ll provide updates on the status of our
reporters and operations as a standard part of subsequent Board meetings.

The Board expresses profound concern about Iran, where Internet access
to reporting by VOA’s Persian News Network and RFE’s Radio Farda is
blocked, websites are aggressively hacked, shortwave broadcasts are
jammed and persons associated in any way with our programs are arrested
or worse. We learned recently that the Iranian government is jamming
satellite transmissions of the BBC’s Persian service TV. Taken together,
these practices amount to the construction of an “electronic curtain”
isolating the Iranian people from the rest of the world.

We protest the August 31 abduction and expulsion to the Iranian border
of a correspondent with RFE’s Azerbaijani service who was reporting a
story. We have raised the case with the State Department and local
officials and have requested an explanation from the Azerbaijani
government.

We reject a legal warning issued in connection with VOA coverage of the
U.N.-backed tribunal in Cambodia that has been investigating atrocities
committed by the former Khmer Rouge regime. The Board insists on the
journalistic and legal responsibility of all our broadcast services to
provide balanced coverage of important issues, and objects to the
chilling effect the warning may have on independent media inside the
country.

We also object to a recent pattern of intimidation towards RFA and VOA
reporters in Nepal, who have been physically threatened because of their
reporting on Tibet.

Finally, the Board condemns the routine violence that our journalists in
many countries face simply for doing their jobs. On September 3,
Alexandre Neto, a VOA reporter, was assaulted by plain-clothed police
who also confiscated some of his equipment while he was covering a
pro-democracy rally in the Angolan capital of Luanda. A cameraman with
Alhurra TV was attacked on August 10 in Yemen by several unidentified
men who tried to stab him with daggers.

The Board welcomes the news that Abdumalik Boboyev, a correspondent for
VOA, has finally been permitted to travel to Germany to study. Boboyev
was arrested and charged with ‘libel’ last year for his broadcasts. He
managed to avoid prison but was fined $11,000 for ‘insulting the Uzbek
people.’

To learn more about the above incidents, go to:

*BBG Statement on Hacking and Signal Interference in Iran
*Reporters without Borders on Violence in Bahrain
*RFE Azerbaijani Correspondent Abducted, Expelled to Iran
*VOA Statement on Warning to Journalists in Cambodia
*VOA Statement on the Assault on its Reporter in Angola
*BBG Statement of Concern for VOA Reporter Bobayev

BBG Condemns Threats to Press Freedom and Furthers Reform Efforts

September 15, 2011 | Washington, D.C.

At today’s Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) meeting, the Board discussed and advanced plans to carry out a comprehensive reform for U.S. international broadcasting. The Board also called public attention to a string of disturbing incidents of repression and intimidation perpetrated against BBG journalists in recent months in Nepal, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Burma and elsewhere.

The Board decried the longstanding interference with media freedom in Iran and Board Chairman Walter Isaacson noted that, “Taken together, these practices amount to the construction of an ‘electronic curtain’ isolating the Iranian people from the rest of the world.” The Board’s full statement on recent threats to its journalists can be found online here.

The Board adopted revised grant agreements with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN) for consistency across the networks, to better reflect operational realities and to foster increased cooperation among U.S. international broadcasting. In addition, the Board voted and passed the Agency’s FY 2013 proposed budget to OMB. The BBG also agreed to establish an Internet Freedom committee to advise the Board on global Internet freedom and censorship circumvention strategies.

Governor Dana Perino announced the launch of the Innovation Commission that will meet on September 22 in New York City to foster ongoing technical developments across U.S. international broadcasting. The Commission brings together leaders who have proven success in digital media.

At the meeting VOA’s new Director David Ensor highlighted the documentary “Hope Town” which was jointly produced with MBN and showcases religious tolerance in Teaneak, N.J., as well as an innovative and highly popular VOA Mandarin webcast “OMG! Meiyu” that engages a young Chinese audience eager to learn colloquial American English.

MBN President Brian Conniff shared noteworthy Alhurra TV coverage of events in Libya as well as the eyewitness reporting by a Radio Sawa correspondent of gunshots being fired at journalists outside of Bani Walid.

A webcast of the meeting is available at www.bbg.gov.

Richard Gere testifying in Congress

“How did they |monks in Tibet | know the new President would be meeting with their revered spiritual leader? By listening to the Voice of America.”

Speaking in June at the hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Hollywood actor Richard Gere, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the International Campaign for Tibet, called for saving Voice of America broadcasts.

The Committee can also ensure that Tibet programs are properly funded. I know that budgets are tight, but U.S. government Tibet programs are as small as they are effective. For example, because of congressional initiative, the Tibetan language services of Radio Free Asia and the Voice of America broadcast information every day into Tibet. This is almost the only source of independent news available on the Tibetan plateau, and it works. When the Dalai Lama met President Obama in the White House in February 2010, monks in Amdo lit off fireworks to celebrate that the world’s greatest democracy still cared for the plight of Tibet. How did they know the new President would be meeting with their revered spiritual leader? By listening to the Voice of America.

The House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs is chaired by U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), who in her opening statement at the June 02 hearing was critical of the Obama Administration’s approach to the issue of human rights in China.

Richard Gere testifying in Congress

“How did they |monks in Tibet | know the new President would be meeting with their revered spiritual leader? By listening to the Voice of America.”

Speaking in June at the hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Hollywood actor Richard Gere, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the International Campaign for Tibet, called for saving Voice of America broadcasts.

The Committee can also ensure that Tibet programs are properly funded. I know that budgets are tight, but U.S. government Tibet programs are as small as they are effective. For example, because of congressional initiative, the Tibetan language services of Radio Free Asia and the Voice of America broadcast information every day into Tibet. This is almost the only source of independent news available on the Tibetan plateau, and it works. When the Dalai Lama met President Obama in the White House in February 2010, monks in Amdo lit off fireworks to celebrate that the world’s greatest democracy still cared for the plight of Tibet. How did they know the new President would be meeting with their revered spiritual leader? By listening to the Voice of America.

The House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs is chaired by U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), who in her opening statement at the June 02 hearing was critical of the Obama Administration’s approach to the issue of human rights in China.

Jing Zhang, Women's Rights in China president

This woman from a rural area insisted that her name could not be publicized on “foreign radio”, otherwise local officials would never stop persecuting her. I was puzzled and asked what she meant by “foreign radio”. “Voice of America and that Radio something Asia,” she told me.

Ms. Jing Zhang, former Chinese political prisoner and president of U.S.-based NGO Women’s Rights in China, wrote in a recent article for Free Media Online:

Earlier this year, I interviewed a victim of botched sterilization operations mandated by the government’s birth planning policy, which resulted in a crippling disability. This woman from a rural area insisted that her name could not be publicized on “foreign radio”, otherwise local officials would never stop persecuting her. I was puzzled and asked what she meant by “foreign radio”. “Voice of America and that Radio something Asia,” she told me. How would the village officials know of what was being reported on those stations? The victim told me that they would be listening. There were many others who listened in her village. They first found out about the Sichuan earthquake from “foreign radio”. Even village officials were now openly listening to “enemy stations”.

BBG officials dismiss these stories as irrelevant and insist that their reseach shows that almost no one in China listens to VOA on shortwave radio.

How do they conduct their research?

The BBG pays millions of dollars each year to a U.S. company which hires a research company in China. Members of Congress of both parties made fun of these BBG claims. Rep. Connie Mack said: People in China or Cuba, as you can imagine, will not jump in joy and admit it | listening to VOA, RFA, and other Western radio stations|. If you say yes, in China or Cuba, the government will punish you. People are afraid for their own lives.”

Jing Zhang, Women's Rights in China president

This woman from a rural area insisted that her name could not be publicized on “foreign radio”, otherwise local officials would never stop persecuting her. I was puzzled and asked what she meant by “foreign radio”. “Voice of America and that Radio something Asia,” she told me.

Ms. Jing Zhang, former Chinese political prisoner and president of U.S.-based NGO Women’s Rights in China, wrote in a recent article for Free Media Online:

Earlier this year, I interviewed a victim of botched sterilization operations mandated by the government’s birth planning policy, which resulted in a crippling disability. This woman from a rural area insisted that her name could not be publicized on “foreign radio”, otherwise local officials would never stop persecuting her. I was puzzled and asked what she meant by “foreign radio”. “Voice of America and that Radio something Asia,” she told me. How would the village officials know of what was being reported on those stations? The victim told me that they would be listening. There were many others who listened in her village. They first found out about the Sichuan earthquake from “foreign radio”. Even village officials were now openly listening to “enemy stations”.

BBG officials dismiss these stories as irrelevant and insist that their reseach shows that almost no one in China listens to VOA on shortwave radio.

How do they conduct their research?

The BBG pays millions of dollars each year to a U.S. company which hires a research company in China. Members of Congress of both parties made fun of these BBG claims. Rep. Connie Mack said: People in China or Cuba, as you can imagine, will not jump in joy and admit it | listening to VOA, RFA, and other Western radio stations|. If you say yes, in China or Cuba, the government will punish you. People are afraid for their own lives.”

While cutting $8 million from the China branch, there will be an increase of $9 million for BBG and IBB management; while eliminating 45 core journalistic positions, the BBG and IBB will have 48 more managers.

— Huchen Zhang, Senior Editor, Voice of America China Branch

On Valentine’s Day, the BBG announced to all the employees of the VOA’s China branch its proposal to eliminate VOA shortwave radio and TV broadcasts to China on October 1. By switching to Web-only operations, the BBG told us, $8 million would be saved. Forty-five journalists (38 Mandarin and seven Cantonese, 59 percent of the branch’s full-time employees) would lose their jobs.

Read transcript

While cutting $8 million from the China branch, there will be an increase of $9 million for BBG and IBB management; while eliminating 45 core journalistic positions, the BBG and IBB will have 48 more managers.

— Huchen Zhang, Senior Editor, Voice of America China Branch

On Valentine’s Day, the BBG announced to all the employees of the VOA’s China branch its proposal to eliminate VOA shortwave radio and TV broadcasts to China on October 1. By switching to Web-only operations, the BBG told us, $8 million would be saved. Forty-five journalists (38 Mandarin and seven Cantonese, 59 percent of the branch’s full-time employees) would lose their jobs.

Read transcript

2010 OPM's Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey still shows BBG with lowest scores among U.S. government agencies.

BBG structure leads to no accountability, that is, each member of the Board is solely responsible for a certain area or type of broadcasting and members generally have an unwritten mutual no-meddling policy – meaning each member avoids weighing in on the broadcasting supervised by other members.

From U.S. Senator Tom Coburn’s website: Transparency: BBG content is untransparent: studies have to be commissioned in order to find out what Americans are paying to broadcast all over the world. This is not real oversight. Read more

Unless Congress steps in, there is a real danger that a strategic asset of great value to the United States and to freedom-loving listeners around the world will be wasted. The battle for hearts and minds did not end with the Cold War (which broadcasting can help win, by the way). Far from it.

Helle C. Dale, Senior Fellow for Public Diplomacy at The Heritage Foundation has written a number of articles in support of continued use of radio and television by the Voice of America. In her latest article, she points out that the BBG Inspector General argued against the BBG strategy last summer: “Since access to the Internet is more easily controlled than access to shortwave radio, international radio, and satellite—broadcasts such as VOA’s remain the only dependable source of political news, especially during crises.”

How one gets from this analysis to the decision in favor of a wholesale cut in broadcasting remains a mystery, Dr. Dale observed.

Link to Support Continued Voice of America Broadcasting to China

These changes | BBG-proposed cuts for VOA | will stifle the struggles of the young people in China who seek religious freedom and democracy.

Statue of the Goddess of Democracy on the Tiananmen Square, 1989

Young people throughout the world, like the young people who risked their lives 22 years ago in Tiananmen Square, are risking their lives today for basic human rights, freedom, and the right to participate in governing themselves. They look to the United States for inspiration. Their stories deserved to be shared.

VOA is part of a Congressional mandate which provides news broadcasts that promote freedom and democracy from the United States to the world. The VOA Charter states: “The long-range interests of the United States are served by communicating directly with the peoples of the world by radio… 1. VOA will serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news…”

In its budget request, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees VOA has proposed to end its radio and television broadcast to China. This is not part of any potential budget cut problems facing Americans, but rather, it’s Voice of America being forced to re-allocate an actually higher budget than last years away from Chinese language services.

Today as we commemorate the 22nd Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, a day in history when the world watched students in China who sought freedom be cut down, killed, jailed and exiled, I’d like to ask each of you to contact Members of Congress about plans that will censor Voice of America’s Chinese services as of October 1st.

This campaign against VOA is insidious. It comes during China’s media crackdown on stories against Ai Weiwei and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo. It comes during a time when China’s media has blocked news about uprisings in Egypt and Libya. It comes during a media crackdown in China against any stories shared about the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, and other prisoners of conscience.

Why should we think that a nation as large and vast as China that already has to deal with an oppressive internet censorship should have the range of radio broadcast reduced or shrunk in depth or coverage? These changes will stifle the struggles of the young people in China who seek religious freedom and democracy.

And why should we as Americans be the cause of these changes? Our Members of Congress need to reject the Broadcasting Board of Governors’ proposal to eliminate Voice of America’s Chinese services. We must maintain Voice of America’s broadcasts and continue to transmit our ideals of freedom and democracy to all. I’d like to ask each of you to keep the message of Pope John Paul II in your hearts as we continue to press for justice: “Be not afraid.”

Reggie Littlejohn, Women's Rights Without Frontiers president. Photo by Lisa Keating.

“I believe that the VOA Mandarin Service has been singled out for the chopping block precisely because of its effectiveness – it has been the leading international broadcaster into China for nearly 70 years and has an enormous following inside China. VOA has been a thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party by exposing, for example, the persecution of human rights lawyers and the use of forced abortion to enforce China’s hated One Child Policy. My interview about China’s One Child Policy on VOA’s Mandarin Service generated an ardent and wide-ranging discussion, in which people from all over China called in to comment and discuss. The interview gave Chinese citizens a national forum in which to debate passionately held beliefs – an opportunity they otherwise would not have had, but for VOA.”

Reggie Littlejohn speaks at the Capitol Hill Press Conference on Chinese Human Rights of 1/18/11. Also pictured (from the right) are Congressman Chris Smith, Geng He, wife of Gao Zhisheng, and Bob Fu, President of China Aid.

So we are in an information war. And we are losing that war. I’ll be very blunt in my assessment. Al-Jazeera is winning. The Chinese have opened up a global English-language and multi-language television network. The Russians have opened up an English-language network. I’ve seen it in a few countries, and it’s quite instructive.

Because most people still get their news from TV and radio. So even though we’re pushing online, we can’t forget TV and radio.

Secretary Clinton’s testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, March 2, 2011

LUGAR: I thank you for that answer. Let me just add one thought, and that is you have spoken eloquently about the broadcasters, the Broadcasting Board of Governors. And I think Walter Isaacson is taking hold of that as a constructive thing. I would hope that we would be more successful in moving more money toward communication with China, and as we heard with our North Korean hearing yesterday, more complex as to how you get the message. But, this is still a great force of diplomacy to get our message into places. We’re doing better in Iran. We’re doing in better in the Middle East, and we saw, and Tunisia, Egypt and so forth. But, I’m hopeful you can bring us good news about the more aggressive policies, hoping with the BBG and others.

CLINTON: Well, senator, I want to thank you for the report that you did on the broadcasting board of governors and all of the problems that it has experienced. I agree with you. Walter Isaacson is an excellent choice. The board is a very invigorated group of Republicans and Democrats. They understand. We are engaged in an information war. During the Cold War, we did a great job in getting America’s message out. After the Berlin Wall fell we said, okay, fine, enough of that. We’ve done it. We’re done. And unfortunately, we are paying a big price for it.

And our private media cannot fill that gap. In fact, our private media, particularly cultural programming, often works at counterpurposes to what we truly are as Americans and what our values are.

I remember having an Afghan general tell me that the only thing he thought about Americans is that all the men wrestled and the women walked around in bikinis. Because the only TV he ever saw was Baywatch and World Wide Wrestling. So we are in an information war. And we are losing that war. I’ll be very blunt in my assessment. Al-Jazeera is winning.

The Chinese have opened up a global English-language and multi-language television network. The Russians have opened up an English-language network. I’ve seen it in a few countries, and it’s quite instructive. We are cutting back. The BBC is cutting back.

So here’s what we are trying to do. In the State Department, we have pushed very hard on new media. So we have an Arabic Twitter feed. We have a Farsi Twitter feed. I have this group of young techno-experts who are out there engaging on websites and we’re putting all of our young Arabic-speaking diplomats out, so that they are talking about our values.

Walter [Issacson] is working hard with his Board to try to transform the broadcasting efforts. Because most people still get their news from TV and radio. So even though we’re pushing online, we can’t forget TV and radio. And so I look — I would look very much towards your cooperation, to try to figure out how we get back in the game on this. Because I hate ceding what we are most expert in to anybody else.

Dr. Helle Dale of the Heritage Foundation, who frequently writes about U.S. international broadcasting, blogged about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s remark in her testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2, 2011 that the U.S. is losing the information war. Dr. Helle wrote:

“Most people still get their news from TV and radio,” Clinton said. This is entirely true, which makes it hard to understand why the BBG in February stated that it would end VOA radio and television transmission to China by next October, a decision that has caused joy in Beijing and great consternation among VOA employees and Chinese dissidents.

Dr. Helle also commented:

In response to a question from Representative Russ Carnahan (D–MO) in her testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier in the day, Clinton made the same points, adding that she had spoken to BBG Chairman Walter Isaacson about the decline in U.S. global influence. If anyone could have a direct influence on the future of U.S. international broadcasting, it is her. Maybe Clinton should show up for some of the BBG’s monthly meetings and put her foot down.

Read more on the Heritage Foundation blog View the entire testimony on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee video

So we are in an information war. And we are losing that war. I’ll be very blunt in my assessment. Al-Jazeera is winning. The Chinese have opened up a global English-language and multi-language television network. The Russians have opened up an English-language network. I’ve seen it in a few countries, and it’s quite instructive.

Because most people still get their news from TV and radio. So even though we’re pushing online, we can’t forget TV and radio.

Secretary Clinton’s testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, March 2, 2011

LUGAR: I thank you for that answer. Let me just add one thought, and that is you have spoken eloquently about the broadcasters, the Broadcasting Board of Governors. And I think Walter Isaacson is taking hold of that as a constructive thing. I would hope that we would be more successful in moving more money toward communication with China, and as we heard with our North Korean hearing yesterday, more complex as to how you get the message. But, this is still a great force of diplomacy to get our message into places. We’re doing better in Iran. We’re doing in better in the Middle East, and we saw, and Tunisia, Egypt and so forth. But, I’m hopeful you can bring us good news about the more aggressive policies, hoping with the BBG and others.

CLINTON: Well, senator, I want to thank you for the report that you did on the broadcasting board of governors and all of the problems that it has experienced. I agree with you. Walter Isaacson is an excellent choice. The board is a very invigorated group of Republicans and Democrats. They understand. We are engaged in an information war. During the Cold War, we did a great job in getting America’s message out. After the Berlin Wall fell we said, okay, fine, enough of that. We’ve done it. We’re done. And unfortunately, we are paying a big price for it.

And our private media cannot fill that gap. In fact, our private media, particularly cultural programming, often works at counterpurposes to what we truly are as Americans and what our values are.

I remember having an Afghan general tell me that the only thing he thought about Americans is that all the men wrestled and the women walked around in bikinis. Because the only TV he ever saw was Baywatch and World Wide Wrestling. So we are in an information war. And we are losing that war. I’ll be very blunt in my assessment. Al-Jazeera is winning.

The Chinese have opened up a global English-language and multi-language television network. The Russians have opened up an English-language network. I’ve seen it in a few countries, and it’s quite instructive. We are cutting back. The BBC is cutting back.

So here’s what we are trying to do. In the State Department, we have pushed very hard on new media. So we have an Arabic Twitter feed. We have a Farsi Twitter feed. I have this group of young techno-experts who are out there engaging on websites and we’re putting all of our young Arabic-speaking diplomats out, so that they are talking about our values.

Walter [Issacson] is working hard with his Board to try to transform the broadcasting efforts. Because most people still get their news from TV and radio. So even though we’re pushing online, we can’t forget TV and radio. And so I look — I would look very much towards your cooperation, to try to figure out how we get back in the game on this. Because I hate ceding what we are most expert in to anybody else.

Dr. Helle Dale of the Heritage Foundation, who frequently writes about U.S. international broadcasting, blogged about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s remark in her testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 2, 2011 that the U.S. is losing the information war. Dr. Helle wrote:

“Most people still get their news from TV and radio,” Clinton said. This is entirely true, which makes it hard to understand why the BBG in February stated that it would end VOA radio and television transmission to China by next October, a decision that has caused joy in Beijing and great consternation among VOA employees and Chinese dissidents.

Dr. Helle also commented:

In response to a question from Representative Russ Carnahan (D–MO) in her testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier in the day, Clinton made the same points, adding that she had spoken to BBG Chairman Walter Isaacson about the decline in U.S. global influence. If anyone could have a direct influence on the future of U.S. international broadcasting, it is her. Maybe Clinton should show up for some of the BBG’s monthly meetings and put her foot down.

Read more on the Heritage Foundation blog View the entire testimony on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee video

Robert R. Reilly, 25th VOA Director

Now, if an outside observer looked at what has happened to the VOA over the past 10 years, he might notice a pattern – that broadcasting to these largest, most important countries of the world has been eliminated—Portuguese to Brazil gone, Hindi to India eliminated, Arabic to the Arab world ended, and replaced by a pop music station; Russian gone; and the Chinese service is now on the block for extinction in all but its Internet presence (which is blocked).

House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations “Is America’s Overseas Broadcasting Undermining our National Interest and the Fight against Tyrannical Regimes?”

Robert R. Reilly, 25th VOA Director

April 6, 2011

Indulge me in an imaginative exercise: if we were setting up a broadcasting service for the US Government from scratch today, we would probably want to focus on the 10 most important countries and languages groups in the world: in our own southern hemisphere Brazil; in Eurasia, certainly Russia, and then China to the south, India to the southwest, and then swinging around to the Middle East, certainly the Arab world with its 300 million people. Our mission would be to tell these countries and audiences who we are, what we are doing, and why – say, out of a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, as the Declaration puts it. If we want the world to be reasonable, we had better give it our reasons. We might, in other words, create the Voice of America, whose purpose, by government charter, is to do these very things.

Now, if an outside observer looked at what has happened to the VOA over the past 10 years, he might notice a pattern – that broadcasting to these largest, most important countries of the world has been eliminated—Portuguese to Brazil gone, Hindi to India eliminated, Arabic to the Arab world ended, and replaced by a pop music station; Russian gone; and the Chinese service is now on the block for extinction in all but its internet presence (which is blocked).

The pattern is clear but the purpose is not. Why have we done this to ourselves? The excuse 10 years ago, or more, was that history had ended in the sense that the model of a democratic, constitutional, free market political order stood undisputed in its moral authority. But 10 years ago, at the expense of 3000 American lives, we found out that was not true.

Why, then, are we continuing the pattern? Economic considerations might be one explanation but they cannot account for 10 years of this behavior, or for the enormous amount of money that has been poured into Radio Sawa, the pop music station to the Arab world. The elimination of Chinese VOA radio and TV, broadcasting in Mandarin, will save $8 million but loose an audience of at least 6 million.

Do we no longer need to explain ourselves to the world? Do we no longer need to give it our reasons?

Be sure that others are willing to give reasons for us, as the China is doing now with its biting criticism of US policy regarding Libya. The Broadcasting Board of Governor’s rebuttal might be that it is keeping Radio Free Asia, a Chinese surrogate service, albeit with diminished hours, and the VOA web site. However, the internet is highly vulnerable and surrogate radio broadcasting, as very valuable as it is in itself, does not have the mission of explaining who we are, what we are doing, and why.

One of my predecessors as VOA director, Geoffrey Cowan, told me that Chinese foreign ministry officials said that they began the mornings by listening to the Voice of America, because they needed to know what the United States was thinking. They would not tune in RFA to learn that for the very good reason that its mission is to tell the Chinese about China – not about us.

This brings me to the most likely explanation for the elimination of VOA’s services to the most important countries in the world: a lost of the sense of mission. This loss began with the end of USIA, when US government broadcasting was placed under the BBG.

As the BBG consists of 8 CEOs, it is not wonder that confusion ensued. Ancient Rome had trouble with 2 proconsuls. Imagine if it had 8.

Very importantly, most BBG members have been highly accomplished individuals who made their fortunes in private sector media. They, therefore, sought to replicate this success according to commercial criteria – this meant large youth audiences, and abandoning markets in which such audiences could not be attracted. Who listens became less important than how many listened, or to what.

The new diminished mission became news – not the full service radio that VOA offered, which also presented and explained US policies – but news. Play music for 40 minutes an hour on radio Sawa if you must, so long as they listen to the news. After all, said the BBG chief of staff in 2008, “it is not in our mandate to influence.” (Don’t other people offer the news?)

The new BBG chairman, Walter Issacson, said in a recent Al-Hurra broadcast that, “we just want to get good news, reliable news, and credible information out.” Reliable news was always a part of US broadcasting, but the mission has never been reduced to just that. When the Dalai Lama called the VOA Tibet service “the bread of the Tibetan people,” and when Aun San Suu Kyi called the Burmese service “the hope of the Burmese people,” do you think they were just talking about the “news”?

Hope is a theological virtue; it is not engendered by news. The Declaration of Independence was not a news report.

I think the US has enduring interests in the world. I think 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 our future. I think we need to begin again to think through to whom we should be broadcasting, about what, and with what. I think this needs to be done within the US government in a command structure related to our national security – and not by an independent, part-time board. Failure to do this will be paid, I’m afraid, in American lives.

Better to win the war of ideas, than have to win a war. That’s simple economics.

A Chinese free labor union leader like Poland’s Walesa could be declared expendable by the BBG, which manages U.S. international broadcasting operations, because he has no Internet and no higher education, is older than 30 and is poor.

The Washington Times has published an op-ed by Free Media Online president Ted Lipien urging Congress to stop the Broadcasting Board of Governors from silencing the Voice of America radio to China.

Government executives who advise part-time presidential appointees at the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) would want you to believe that silencing Voice of America radio to China is a great political and technological idea that is bound to displease the communist regime in Beijing. The savings would be used to expand Internet presence, or so they claim. But theirs is a misguided proposal that would harm both the United States and pro-democracy forces abroad. It sends a strong signal to authoritarian regimes that Americans either don’t care about human rights or don’t know how to defend them. Not surprisingly, the Chinese communists already have greeted the BBG announcement as a defeat for America. Read The Washington Times op-ed: LIPIEN: Don’t silence Voice of America radio to China

“The BBG is the most worthless organization in the federal government,”

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, told The Cable in an interview. “It’s full of people who know nothing about media or foreign policy. All they are doing is spending money and somebody’s got to look into it.” Read more in The Cable, Foreign Policy magazine blog.

In a nutshell, the station [Radio Liberty] has abandoned its uniqueness, its identity, its face.

Mario Corti Those among the old KGB and the new FSB , who see the U.S. as an enemy rather than a valuable and generous partner of Russia, could only be enormously happy with such leaders in charge of U.S. international broadcasting as the current U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) executive team. They have no reason to worry or need to do anything themselves to undermine U.S.-funded broadcasts; it is being done for them by these American government officials who are now trying hard to hide their mistakes from the White House, the U.S. Congress and the American public.

Directors of language services at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S. taxpayer-funded international broadcaster with headquarters first in Munich, Germany and now in Prague, the Czech Republic, enjoyed at one time a great deal of authority. They often disagreed over programming issues with the radio station’s American management and on numerous occasions their arguments prevailed. Their expert knowledge of their countries and their cultures was widely respected.

In 1956, the head of Radio Free Europe’s Polish Service, Jan Nowak Jezioranski, successfully resisted pressures to call for a violent overthrow of the communist regime in Poland, knowing that such a call would inevitably lead to a Soviet Army invasion. In 1996, many years after leaving RFE/RL, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. He was able to survive his many battles with his American bosses because ultimately they realized that his knowledge of Poland was more sophisticated than theirs.

In better years, language service directors like Jan Nowak could arrange face-to-face meetings with individual members of RFE/RL’s previous oversight body, the Board for International Broadcasting (BIB), who actively sought their opinions on programming issues and acted as advisers rather than as micromanaging CEOs.

Rank and file journalists working at RFE/RL were also unafraid to voice their dissent as their rights and fair treatment were protected by German labor laws and membership in professional unions.

A drastic change in this tradition of dialogue and tolerance of dissent occurred in the 1990s with the creation of a new oversight agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the move of RFE/RL from Germany to the Czech Republic, and the arrival of a new American management team selected by the BBG. Using a communist era Czech law still on the books, BBG and RFE/RL lawyers worked hard to find ways to deny their journalists in the Czech Republic the right to form an effective union. Foreign journalists employed by RFE/RL were deprived of many of the protections of both Czech and American labor laws.

The most dramatic change, however, occurred in the status of RFE/RL language service directors. They lost practically all of their previous authority and direct access to BBG members. The new RFE/RL management insisted that they must report only to them and follow an entirely new programming philosophy developed by a key Board member Norman Pattiz for Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television. These were the two new private broadcasting networks for the Middle East which Mr. Pattiz, a Democrat, created in close cooperation with the Bush White House. His preferred talk show and music format, which he imposed on Middle Eastern broadcasting while terminating all Voice of America Arabic programs with their more serious news and cultural content, as well as his authoritarian radio management style more suitable for the competitive American market than for a multicultural journalistic institution with a mission of supporting freedom of expression, was also being forced on RFE/RL.

If language service directors resisted these changes, their new American bosses were more than ready to fire them or to eliminate their broadcasts altogether, and many lost their jobs and their programs. They were further humiliated by having to sign secrecy agreements to receive their severance pay. It is highly ironic that this condition was being imposed by a publicly-funded institution that claims to promote openness and transparency in the countries to which it broadcasts. The main purpose of this policy, it seems, was to hide management mistakes from the Administration, the U.S. Congress, and American public. Dissent over programming issues that could help identify waste of taxpayers money and problems, such as airing statements by Holocaust deniers on Alhurra Television, was ruthlessly stamped out at the stations under BBG’s management, including RFE/RL.

The consequences of the new BBG management style were disastrous in terms of journalistic integrity, mission effectiveness and audience ratings for RFE/RL, as they were for BBG broadcasting in the Middle East and for the Voice of America (VOA) in Washington, D.C., which is also managed by the BBG. BBG decision to terminate all Voice of America radio broadcasts to Russia, just 12 days before the Russian incursion into Georgia last summer, resulted in an unprecedented 98 percent drop in VOA’s audience reach in Russia, from 7.3% in 2007 to 0.2% in 2009 (est.).

Soviet jammers of VOA and RFE/RL shortwave radio signals during the Cold War and media restrictions imposed more recently by the Kremlin had not been nearly as effective in silencing U.S. broadcasts in Russia as BBG’s own actions, supposedly based on solid audience research. Only one BBG member, Blanquita Welsh Cullum, a Republican,  was said to have voted against ending VOA radio programs to Russia and her attempts to resume these broadcasts after the conflict in Georgia flared up were reportedly blocked by other BBG members, both Democrats and Republicans. In the latest Federal Human Capital Survey, the BBG was once again rated by its employees at the very top of the list of the worst-managed federal agencies.

After the move of RFE/RL headquarters to Prague, language service directors and rank and file journalists quickly lost almost all of their previous independence and authority. With each passing year, they became more and more silent. Visits to Prague by BBG members started to resemble meetings of the Soviet Central Committee. Uncomfortable looking Board members sitting on a podium in a long row in the former communist Parliament building gave inconsequential answers to a small number of questions allowed from the audience of employees fearful of losing their jobs and having to go back to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and other countries governed by authoritarian regimes.

Even more disturbing for supporters of media freedom, however, were frequent firings of famous journalists, writers and artists who were some of the intellectual giants of international broadcasting. One of those fired was Mario Corti, the former head of RFE/RL’s Russian Service, a distinguished Italian journalist, writer, and analyst of Russian politics, society, and culture, admired  among his colleagues for his intellect and the courage to stand up to the RFE/RL management and the BBG. Another was a famous former Soviet dissident Tengiz Gudava, who after his expulsion from the USSR became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Tengiz Gudava was truly a renaissance man. He had a doctorate degree in biophysics, was a journalist, poet, novelist, and musician. He was also a passionate defender of human rights, for which he had spent five years in a Soviet labor camp. He and Mario Corti were both fired by RFE/RL for resisting programming changes demanded by the station’s American managers and the BBG.

Last month, Tengiz Gudava was killed in Prague under still unexplained circumstances. It does not appear at this time that his death was related to his work as a journalist, but because of Tengis Gudava’s dissident status and his sharp criticism of Radio Liberty’s new programming philosophy, Mario Corti broke his long silence about the circumstances of the conflicts they both had with the station’s management and about their firing. Mario Corti gave an interview to a Georgian-American journalist Ia Merkviladze, which was published in online Russian-language magazine in New York City «Мы здесь», and also spoke with FreeMediaOnline.org, a San Francisco-based media freedom nonprofit, where he sits on the board of directors.

 

FreeMediaOnline.org interview with Mario Corti

 

FREEMEDIAONLINE.ORG: Both you and the late Tengiz Gudava had worked at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as journalists for many years, and you also as director of Radio Liberty’s Russian Service. What did you learn about his death and what can you tell us about him as your friend and a fellow journalist?

MARIO CORTI: Unfortunately, his tragic death is still shrouded in mystery. I grieve, especially for his family.

Tragedy has surrounded many Radio Liberty employees. I have already experienced several deaths of my former Radio Liberty colleagues, among them those who died in undetermined circumstances. There was also a personal tragedy in Tengiz’s life. He totally identified himself with his job at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Because of this, he suffered when he was deprived of his much loved work, his extremely popular and much needed program about relations between various nationalities of the former Soviet Union. Tengiz was able to establish a real dialogue on the air. He built bridges between different cultures and religions.

FREEMEDIAONLINE.ORG: What other Radio Liberty journalists died in mysterious circumstances? Could there have been a link between their journalistic work and their tragic deaths?

MARIO CORTI: Certainly there was a link between a bomb placed at RFE/RL headquarters in Munich back in the 1980s and RFE/RL journalistic activities. Fortunately, no one had died in that attack, but a telephone operator had her face seriously burnt. What made the most impression on me, also because at the time I was the acting director of the Russian Service, was the murder of Molly Riffel-Gordin. She was the anchor of “Contacts”, a very popular program she hosted under the pseudonym of Inna Svetlova. She was shot in her face on July 25 1997 while on her way from the central train station to the RFE/RL headquarters in Prague. Czech and German police worked on the case, which still remains unsolved.

Another tragic although not violent death happened on April 5, 2000. On his way home from work Alexander Batchan died of a heart attack. He was a well known journalist who had previously worked for the Voice of America and had recently moved to RFE/RL. And he was only 47.

FREEMEDIAONLINE.ORG: Georgian journalist Ia Merkviladze who interviewed you wrote that when he left Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Tengiz Gudava was angry and upset and accused RFE/RL management of KGB-ness. What made Mr. Gudava voice such accusations?

MARIO CORTI: Naturally, he was puzzled as to why he and his program were taken off the air. Among other things, he pointed out that some RFE/RL employees were graduates of the university which trained children of party members and nomenklatura for careers as Soviet diplomats and KGB officers. But from my perspective, the push for a drastic change in Radio Liberty’s programming philosophy came primarily from the new American management at RFE/RL, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees RFE/RL, and from their private consultants. They were responsible for eliminating popular programs and taking off the air highly respected and admired radio personalities, including Tengiz Gudava and others.

FREEMEDIAONLINE.ORG: Until now you were publicly silent about your dispute with the American management at Radio Liberty. What else did you tell about it to the Georgian journalist who interviewed you after Tengiz Gudava’s death?

MARIO CORTI: I told her that I did not leave Radio Liberty voluntarily. The RFE/RL management first removed me from my position as director of the Russian Service, and then fired me. After my removal, I could have left slamming doors, especially since I refused to accept my severance pay when I was told to leave. RFE/RL has a policy of offering severance pay combined with secrecy agreements to dissident journalists to stifle public criticism of management decisions and any future discussion of the management’s mistakes. I could have gotten my ”hush money” had I only agreed to conditions which I considered as highly improper, even indecent, not only in relation to me but to other RFE/RL journalists and the reputation of the radio station itself, as well as the image abroad of America and American institutions.

FREEMEDIAONLINE.ORG: It seems that despite your disputes with the RFE/RL management, you, Tengiz Gudava and other journalists who had been fired were motivated by a strong desire to save the radio station’s mission as you saw it.

MARIO CORTI: I told the Georgian journalist that I have always had, and still have, great respect and awe for this venerable institution. Its mission is indeed more noble than the judgment and behavior of some individuals who unfortunately happened to work there. I refer here to some of the former American managers. In addition to firing me, they used the pretext of “restructuring” the Russian Service to get rid of  highly talented and experienced journalists who also disagreed with their programming ideas. Unfortunately, the late Tengiz and Serge Iourienen were also among those who had been let go at that time. Another distinguished RFE/RL journalist Lev Roitman, who was also highly critical of the changes being imposed on the Russian Service, left of his own volition.

FREEMEDIAONLINE.ORG: Can you be more specific as to the circumstances that led to your departure from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty?

MARIO CORTI: It all started with a sudden change in the upper management of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty ordered by the Broadcasting Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. Suddenly Jeff Trimble appeared, replacing the very professional Bob Gillette as Radio Liberty Director. Mr. Gillette, a former Los Angeles Times correspondent, was a great journalist and a true gentleman. Then Tom Dine, replaced the competent and very engaged Kevin Klose, a former Washington Post correspondent in Moscow, as the president of the entire corporation. They, in turn, brought their own people and placed them within the organization.

Jeff Trimble, whom Tom Dine called his “eagle,” turned out to be the engine of reform. Neither man had much familiarity with radio journalism and, in my opinion, they did not fit into the radio station milieu. They could never understand that Radio Liberty had its own special culture. At the very mention of the word “tradition” they laughed.

American managers who supported me and the Russian Service were themselves marginalized or forced out by the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Fortunately, they went on to other distinguished careers in the private and public sector. After leaving RFE/RL and the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB), which is part of the BBG, Kevin Klose was hired for a high level executive position at National Public Radio (NPR). Bob Gillette has worked in promoting responsible journalism and media freedom in the Balkans.

As for the team that the BBG brought in to replace them, after some years at RFE/RL Tom Dine returned to lobbying in the United States. Only Jeff Trimble is still associated with U.S. international broadcasting. He eventually replaced Tom Dine and served as RFE/RL’s acting president and is now the executive director of the Broadcasting Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. He was reportedly instrumental in implementing the BBG’s decision to terminate all Voice of America radio broadcasts to Russia just 12 days before the Russian-Georgian war last summer. This move has also led to a tremendous decline in employee morale as well as a historically unprecedented drop in VOA audience ratings in Russia. According to one estimate, the audience reach declined 98 percent in less than a year.

FREEMEDIAONLINE.ORG: How did you describe Mr. Dine’s and Mr. Trimble’s role at Radio Liberty to the Georgian journalist?

MARIO CORTI: They wanted to leave their own footprint in order to justify their existence to the BBG. Since they were “new” themselves, they thought this meant they should do something different, i.e., “new” in response to the demands from the BBG. In the final analysis, what really happened was just “change for the sake of change,” but it had a profound impact on Radio Liberty’s mission and the talented and dedicated journalists who worked there.

They searched for a formula for success, which they found in Moscow “talk” radio stations such as “Ekho Moskvy”. I don’t want to be misunderstood, “Ekho Moskvy” is a great station and provides a valuable service under somewhat difficult circumstances. But in my opinion, the thinking on the part of RFE/RL’s American managers was simple and superficial: since radio stations like Ekho Moskvy were successful, that meant to the RFE/RL managers that their formula should be copied, especially since it corresponded in some ways with Norman Pattiz’s idea of a successful commercial radio station. To them, this was “new.” To me and others who have known Russia for a long time and worked there sometimes for many years, it was a completely misguided idea.

For once, Moscow stations always had and still have FM frequencies, which Radio Liberty could not obtain then from the Russian authorities and still cannot get them now. It was vital for Radio Liberty to expand distribution of its programs in Russia in other ways, which is not a simple task given the political conditions, but that’s what they needed to focus on. Unfortunately, they had no idea where to start, and yet they didn’t  want to listen to any advice.

Instead of dealing with the real problem of program delivery, program distribution, cooperation with independent media, and media restrictions in Russia, they decided to take the easy but pernicious path of reforming the Russian Service from within, because it was easy and they could not think of anything else to do. Their idea was to change Radio Liberty’s broadcasting in form and content as if this alone could solve the problem of program distribution and prevent a fall in audience ratings. As it turned out, their strategy only made audience ratings fall even faster to a level much lower than ever before, which I’m sure is not what the U.S. Congress and U.S. taxpayers expected from the BBG, but that’s what they got.

The BBG now tries hard to keep this information secret and blames media restrictions in Russia, which do account for some drop in audience ratings for RFE/RL and VOA but cannot be blamed for the dramatic declines resulting from BBG-ordered programming and program delivery changes. For one thing, RFE/RL is still on the same AM frequency in Moscow, but the number of listeners there has been consistently dropping.

FREEMEDIAONLINE.ORG: What were some of the ideas which were advanced by the consultants hired by the Broadcasting Board of Governors and implemented by the RFE/RL’s top management?

MARIO CORTI: They wanted to concentrate broadcasting on Moscow and St. Petersburg — mainly Moscow. “Forget about the regions,” they told us. They also wanted more talk shows and — this may sound hilarious to those who know something about radio broadcasting in the Soviet Union — to rely on the old Soviet era UKV (Ultra Short Wave) frequencies, which were designed to prevent Soviet citizens from using their radio sets to listen to Western FM stations in border areas, where such signals could be heard. Knowing that UKV receivers were no longer being produced and the band was being phased out, I vigorously objected to their claims that Ultra Short Wave broadcasts were a good alternative, but I think it was one of RFE/RL’s managers who suggested that there are North Korean radio receivers which can pick up these frequencies and are still being sold in Russia. The idea that broadcasting on Soviet era frequencies being phased out can be a reasonable solution was rather typical for the team of RFE/RL managers and their BBG-hired consultants, who were undoubtedly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their recommendations.

FREEMEDIAONLINE.ORG: Did did you make any alternative recommendations to Mr. Dine and Mr. Trimble?

MARIO CORTI: Besides continuing some of the general goals set by my predecessor, the highly admired and respected journalist and manager Yuri Handler, I decided to decentralize Radio Liberty broadcasting, getting away from Moscow-centrism and expanding the network of correspondents in the regions. It seemed to me that people in Moscow knew little of what was happening in the regions, and listeners in the regions highly valued the attention paid to their concerns. I expanded the St. Petersburg bureau and opened a bureau in Ekaterinburg.

Since we did not have at the time and still do not have an FM frequency, I thought that we should rely on medium wave (AM) frequencies as part of a multi-platform program delivery strategy, which would also include traditional shortwave frequencies, Internet,  television, and cooperative projects with independent journalists and media. AM frequencies were more available, some with good signal quality, and had a good geographical reach unlike UKV. In Moscow we had our own license for a medium wave frequency. I found a similar solution in St. Petersburg, which would have allowed us to transmit our signal to the whole north-west of Russia, where most of the population lives. The management again didn’t listen to our recommendations. I also talked to them about the Internet and digital broadcasting. Now it’s commonplace, and tomorrow, will be even more so. They laughed at these ideas and said that BBG consultants knew better what would work and what would not.

I should mention that shortly before my removal as Russian Service director our audience reach in Russia, as reported by the audience research organization contracted by the Broadcasting Board of Governors,  peaked at around six percent, a figure well beyond what RL was able to achieve since. It was then that the new American management decided to put its plan into action and break with the culture, traditions and intellectual sophistication of the radio’s Russian Service. They abandoned the foundations laid by Yuri Handler together with Kevin Klose. They were determined to transform Radio Liberty into more of a “chat” radio, a clone of Ekho Moskvy and Radio Sawa. Again, Ekho Moskvy is a good station, but the RFE/RL management had no way of achieving the necessary signal strength and program distribution, and on top of that they had pretensions to be a real competitor to Ekho Moskvy — something that was totally unreasonable given their interference with programming and the political conditions in Russia. And so on and so forth. Later on, the management closed down the Ekaterinburg bureau and greatly reduced the St. Petersburg bureau staff. When Radio Liberty in St. Petersburg was taken off UKV, the Soviet era frequency pushed by the BBG consultants, nobody had listened to it for a long time. No one, it seems, had access to those “fantastic” North Korean receivers.

FREEMEDIAONLINE.ORG: The BBG-ordered research also showed that a focus on human rights and high culture in Radio Liberty programs to Russia was passe and should be replaced. You pointed out that some of the consultants who presented this research had links to former BBG member Norman Pattiz, the chief architect of Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television broadcasts to the Middle East. Were you pressured to change Radio Liberty’s Russian programs to make them conform to the style of Radio Sawa?

MARIO CORTI: One of the reasons given for my removal was that I “resisted changes”. After my removal, the RFE/RL management put their own people in management positions in the Russian Service to carry out their plans. They shut down many cultural programs, including the brilliant and popular broadcasts by Sergei Iourienen. They also shut down serious analytical programs, “Commentators at a Roundtable,” as well as Paramonov’s show (which they later reinstated), shut down Savitsky’s popular program on jazz (recently reinstated). They changed the format of other shows, expanded the number of talk shows, and so on.

In a nutshell, the station has abandoned its uniqueness, its identity, its face. Although not nearly as drastic as the BBG’s new format formula for Russia, a similar process was going on and is still going on in Great Britain at BBC’s Russian Service, which has resulted in vehement protests from a lot of respected people, including famous British academics.

FREEMEDIAONLINE.ORG: In your interview with a Georgian journalist you said that Tengiz Gudava and other journalists who were associated with Radio Liberty did not know the full picture of your battles with RFE/RL’s new American management. You also said that with people like that in charge of RFE/RL, “KGB-FSB can sleep soundly.” What did you mean by that?

MARIO CORTI: Let me put it this way. Jeff Trimble and Tom Dine were unhappy with the work of the Russian Service. In particular, Jeff Trimble was unhappy with the Russian Service newscast. I was unhappy too, but for different reasons, I wanted to make it more relevant to people most deprived of access to uncensored information, those who are particularly vulnerable in Russia today.

At one point Trimble – based on a study of our news made by his assistant Michele DuBach who later was appointed by him as Director of Broadcasting – even announced his decision to close our news service. He did not carry it out because he was afraid of a mass rebellion in the Russian Service. To bolster their position in favor of a possible future attempt to get rid of RL Russian Service news, he and Tom Dine ordered outside research. They first applied to the famed Annenberg School of Journalism, which — by the way — recently issued a study highly critical of  BBG’s proud creation Alhurra Television for practicing substandard journalism and lacking audience and effectiveness — a study which the BBG executive staff tried hard to suppress until they were ordered to release it by the Obama Administration.

In the case of Radio Liberty’s Russian Service, they didn’t get the negative result they really wanted. The international group of journalists put together by this respected institution [the Annenberg School of Journalism] to evaluate the RL Russian Service came to a generally positive and encouraging conclusion about our performance. I can imagine their surprise when reading the study issued by the Annenberg School of Journalism they discovered that the single most praised feature of our broadcasts was the Russian Service newscast. Then, the management decided to obtain research from Russia on the image of the Russian Service programs among the listeners in Russia. Here again, they miscalculated. The results of this research were also very positive for us.

So here you have three Russian Service success stories in a row: a positive evaluation by the Annenberg School of Journalism, the positive image study, and the peak of around six percent in our audience reach in Russia. So what did RFE/RL management and the BBG do at this point? They hired someone who had previously worked for BBG member Norman Pattiz — it was the latter who had the brilliant idea of creating Sawa Radio and Alhurra Television — and they got exactly the results Jeff Trimble had originally wanted to get. Based on these results, they proceed to “reform” the Russian Service. Great programs were eliminated, audience ratings immediately dropped. I would point out that similar  BBG “reforms” at VOA last year produced an even greater, 98 percent drop in audience reach in Russia; millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars have been wasted. It’s shameful how the  generosity of the American people in support of much needed broadcasting that promotes understanding between nations and cultures is being abused by these officials.

In my opinion, those among the old KGB and the new FSB officials, who see the U.S. as an enemy rather than a valuable and generous partner of Russia, could only be enormously happy with such leaders in charge of U.S. international broadcasting as the current U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) executive team. They have no reason to worry or need to do anything themselves to undermine U.S.-funded broadcasts; it is being done for them by these American government officials who are now trying hard to hide their mistakes from the White House, the U.S. Congress and the American public.

FREEMEDIAONLINE.ORG: When Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was based during the Cold War in Munich, West Germany, RFE/RL employees had full protection of the German labor law. The BBG and RFE/RL management used a communist era Czech law to deprive foreign journalists working for them in Prague of some of these basic protections. Do you think that this policy is designed to make journalists more dependent on the management and to stifle independent journalism and criticism at RFE/RL? Are these journalists vulnerable, in your opinion?

MARIO CORTI: Obviously they are vulnerable. Back in Munich many were members of the German journalists unions while others belonged the Newspaper Guild in New York. Nothing like this is true now. Now, according to the RFE/RL new Policy Manual, EEO regulations do not apply to non-American employees. And a Czech Court recently ruled that Czech labor law regulations do not apply to non Czech employees working for RFE/RL. So RFE/RL is allowed to do with its non American and non Czech employees — and they are the majority — whatever it wants, whether it’s right or wrong. They don’t have to worry about any legal consequences. What they don’t realize, however, is that employees without any rights will have little loyalty and little reason to alert the management to possibly fatal journalistic and programming mistakes if voicing dissent can result in them losing their jobs. Hopefully, the European Court of Human Rights, to which some former employees are turning now, or the Obama Administration will soon put a stop to this shameful treatment by RFE/RL and the BBG of its foreign journalists and other  foreign workers.

FreeMediaOnline.org allows republication of its interviews with attribution and link to our site.

 

More about Mario Corti

Mario Corti was born in Italy but his parents took him to Argentina, where he developed a lifelong interest in Russia. Later on he became a fluent Russian speaker and writer. Living in Italy in the 1970s, he was active in defense of human rights in the Soviet Union and published Russian samizdat books, articles and documents.

From 1979 until 2005, he worked at the U.S.-funded international broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He became the head of Radio Liberty’s Russian Service but left the station together with other veteran journalists over a programming dispute with the American management. He is an author of numerous books and articles, many of them published in Russian. Dreif, a book written in Russian about philosophy and culture, was published in Russia and Ukraine in 2002. His book, Salieri i Mozart, on the relationship between the two composers, was published in Russian in 2005. His articles on human rights and Soviet dissent have appeared in several languages in many countries. He speaks Italian, Rusian, English, German, Spanish, and French and has a working knowledge of several other European languages. Dividing his time between Italy and Russia, he now works as a freelance journalist and a consultant for a media group based in Saint Petersburg.

 

More about Tengiz Gudava

Tengiz Gudava, who had a Georgian father and a Russian mother, was a former dissident who organized music concerts in support of human rights in the Soviet Union and spent five years in a labor camp before being expelled to the West in 1987. He joined Radio Liberty and wrote and produced popular programs in defense of human rights for Russian and Georgian shortwave broadcasts.

Gudava was a harsh critic of the current Russian leadership. After he was dismissed from RFE/RL in 2004, he also posted on his personal website biting criticism of Radio Liberty’s new management and programming philosophy. On the night of April 15, Gudava left his Prague apartment on foot to buy cigarettes. He was found unconscious on a road in a secluded area about a 20 minute drive from his home. Police attributed his death to a car accident but could not explain how he ended up in a strange location a long distance away from his apartment in Prague.

This interview was first published by FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog, May 19, 2009, San Francisco.

No in-depth reports from the Voice of America or high-resolution photos from the State Department, but one can now find sexy images on the VOA Russian website. The Clinton-Lavrov meeting and the First Lady’s visit to the State Department revealed  a sorry state of U.S. public diplomacy and international broadcasting.

It took hours after Secretary Clinton and her Russian counterpart Foreign Minister Lavrov had finished their joint press conference in Geneva before the Voice of America (VOA) Russian and English websites posted  brief reports about the meeting.  These reports were not much longer than a summary of a wire service story that one may find in a local American newspaper. A foreign audience expecting detailed coverage and in-depth analysis with multiple viewpoints from Washington would be greatly disappointed.

The Voice of America is the primary U.S. international broadcaster charged with providing news and information about the United States in English and foreign languages, but its funding and programs to many parts of the world, including Russia, have been slashed by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). If foreign audiences turned to the State Department or the White House websites for timely information and analysis about the state of Russian-American relations and the Obama Administration’s support for human rights abroad, they would have been equally disappointed.

VOA’s English Service relied on a stringer in Switzerland to file her report on the Clinton-Lavrov meeting. VOA Russian Service apparently did not have money send a reporter to Geneva.  If the Russians wanted a different perspective — a view from Washington — there was no instant analysis from American experts on the VOA website after the Geneva meeting about the changing relationship between Washington and Moscow under President Obama. One also did not find any transcripts of post-meeting interviews with U.S. and Russian officials or independent experts, because none were conducted.

That Voice of America still exists and was able to report on the meeting at all is in itself a miracle. In its spearheading of costly and counterproductive propaganda initiatives for the Middle East and privatization of U.S. international broadcasting assets, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which manages the Voice of America, terminated all VOA Arabic programs and slashed many other VOA broadcasts. It funded instead private entities, such as Radio Sawa and Alhurra Arabic television. Government and media investigations revealed that money moved from VOA to fund these initiatives provided more opportunities for employees of these private entities and for private contractors to engage in questionable journalism and financial fraud.

In supporting Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television, Democrats favoring private contractors joined forces with neoconservative Republican BBG members (the Board is by law bipartisan) to deprive more and more Voice of America services of their ability to accurately present American news and values to the world. Last summer, the BBG eliminated VOA radio programs to Russia, just 12 days before the Russian invasion of Georgia.

Drained of resources, the Voice of America is no longer able to practice journalism that would interest and satisfy  a seriously-minded audience in countries like Russia. VOA Russian Service journalists were instructed instead to develop their now miniscule Internet audience by learning from market research and marketing techniques outlined in documents provided to FreeMediaOnline.org by VOA officials who want to remain anonymous.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that  the BBG-commissioned market research in Russia — which showed that Russian focus groups like Mr. Putin, don’t like to hear stories about human rights violations, and are tired of political media reporting — is beginning to have an impact at VOA. A recent VOA Russian Service report, “What American women think about Sexx,” about an exhibit of American women-artists in Moscow, was not only full of titillating images but also far longer and far more detailed than the news report filed after the Clinton-Lavrov meeting.

Such misuse of market research is a prime example of the many failures of U.S. international broadcasting. But equally serious are public diplomacy mishaps at the State Department, which were also revealed during the Clinton-Lavrov meeting and at a later ceremony in Washington to honor women who fought for human rights.

Wanting to dramatize the Obama Administration’s desire to “push the reset button” on U.S.-Russian relations, at the Geneva meeting Secretary Clinton presented Foreign Minister Lavrov with a red plastic button with a Russian word “ПЕРЕГРУЗКА” printed on top. The wording turned out, however, to be an embarrassing mistake. Lavrov pointed out that the word used means “overload” or “overcharge,” not “reset.” The correct was ПЕРЕЗАГРУЗКА.

FreeMediaOnline.org has learned that Secretary Clinton hit on the “reset button” idea in Geneva with her team. According to one source, the translator hadn’t gotten there yet, and someone who said he spoke Russian well suggested what word to use.

If the State Department still had experienced and competent public diplomacy officers, they would have made sure that Secretary Clinton’s idea, which was not bad from a PR perspective, would not be mishandled. At the very least, they would have called the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, the official State Department translators section,  or any Russian journalist – but apparently no one did. One former VOA Russian Service broadcaster observed that she has never seen Lavrov, who usually looks very dour, smile so much as he made fun of the mistake in the presence of Mrs. Clinton and her team.

While VOA’s coverage of the Clinton-Lavrov’s meeting was minimal at best, for several days after the meeting the State Department website provided no information in text form on what was discussed and no usable photos. In yet another embarrassing mistake, the State Department posted a photo, which stayed on the site over the weekend, claiming to show Secretary Clinton greeting Foreign Minister Lavrov, when in fact the person with her on the photo was somebody else.

The State Department did, however, post a long video of the Clinton-Lavrov press conference rather promptly.  The Bush Administration public diplomacy team at State greatly favored the use of video, probably because it requires little additional effort to post on the website. But a long video of the press conference without a translated transcript is of little use to foreign journalists who work under tight deadlines, may have limited knowledge of English,  and may not have high-speed Internet access. They simply won’t bother to spend time reviewing the video, taking notes, and reporting.

In the past, the Voice of America might have carried such a bilateral press conference live in its Russian-language radio program and provide instant commentary on the event. Even without live shortwave radio delivery, which was eliminated by the BBG, VOA Russian Service could have put an audio transmission from the press conference on the Internet  and post a written transcript within minutes. But BBG officials made sure that VOA no longer has resources to send a Russian Service reporter abroad or to provide such coverage.

One of the functions of the now defunct United States Information Agency, which was responsible for public diplomacy, was to make sure that foreign media promptly received accurate U.S. government information about important meetings with foreign leaders, as well as copyright-free photographs, audio recordings and videos, which foreign journalists could then use at no cost and without any restrictions. After USIA was disbanded, no one at the State Department seems to want this responsibility or has a budget to carry out such functions, while the Broadcasting Board of Governors deprived VOA of resources to do serious journalistic work for countries like Russia. The State Department, which took over USIA’s public diplomacy functions, has not made arrangements for employees to work on weekends or at night to perform such trivial functions as taking photos, posting transcripts of press conferences, and uploading accurately identified, royalty-free images.

The vast majority of images on the State Department and Voice of America websites come from the Associated Press and cannot be reused by foreign media outlets unless they are also AP customers. They are useless to citizen journalists working for such websites as GovoritAmerika.us, which was launched by FreeMediaOnline.org– a San Francisco-based media freedom nonprofit — to compensate for program cuts and restrictions imposed by the BBG on the Voice of America.  The website provides Russian-language information from multiple U.S. government and nongovernment sources and relies on copyright-free photos from U.S. government and other websites.

The meeting in Geneva took place Friday, March 6.  On Tuesday, March 10,  a single official photo showing Secretary Clinton presenting Foreign Minister Lavrov the red button with the embarrassing inscription  – this time Mr. Lavrov properly identified  – finally appeared on the State Department site. It also took four days for the transcript of the press conference to be posted by the State Department.

A similar problem reappeared a few days later during an important human rights event sponsored by the U.S. government. First Lady Michelle Obama went to the State Department to honor foreign women who risked their safety to defend human rights in their  native countries, including Russia and Uzbekistan. Despite the unprecedented nature of the First Lady’s participation in such an event, neither the State Department nor the White House website posted any good quality, high-resolution photos of Secretary Clinton and Michelle Obama presenting the 2009 Women of Courage Awards to these human rights activists. Yet another opportunity for effective public diplomacy was wasted by U.S. government officials. At least in this case, the Voice of America Russian Service deserves credit for finding enough resources to post a more detailed story.

The most recent mishaps show that the U.S. government no longer has the knowledge of how to manage U.S.-funded international broadcast journalism and public diplomacy. The Bush Administration’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, James K. Glassman,  was a great believer in using private Internet contractors to conduct public diplomacy on behalf of the U.S. government with the help of video and the latest interactive technology. He and other Bush appointees failed to understand, however, that technology cannot be a substitute for an in-depth understanding of foreign cultures and substantive experience in public diplomacy, journalism, and human rights issues.

As a former chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, Glassman was responsible for terminating VOA Russian radio and TV programs and refused to resume them even after the Russian attack on Georgia. He assured journalists in VOA’s Russian Service that his preferred Internet-only strategy  would work and was not concerned that no other major international broadcaster wanted to give up completely Russian-language radio and TV on-air programs.

All international broadcasters except VOA managed to maintain their audience reach in Russia in 2008 despite Mr. Putin’s continued efforts to restrict foreign and independent domestic media reporting. The British broadcaster BBC has reduced funding for its radio programs to Russia –   for which it has come under criticism, and there are calls for an investigation — but it has not completely eliminated live Russian-language radio broadcasting.  While relying more on the Internet and developing its Web-based reporting, BBC Russian Service has recently introduced a  weekend news program in its newly refreshed radio schedule. VOA is barely able to fund a skeleton Web team to work on weekends and  it no longer has funding for anything resembling regularly scheduled live radio and TV programming to Russia.

With the elimination of live Voice of America’s Russian-language radio and TV programs, VOA’s annual audience reach in Russia registered a dramatic 98% decline, from 10.3% to 0.2% (estimated based on 2008 data). Despite offering more sex and less politics, it was most likely the largest single audience decline in international broadcasting history for any major media outlet that has not completely left the market but merely changed its program content and program delivery strategy.

It seems that the legacy established by the officials eager to promote primitive propaganda and privatization of government functions still hangs over the State Department and the Voice of America.  These government bureaucrats know very little about journalism, public diplomacy, and effective use of the Internet. Instead of taking advantage of the latest innovations in interactive Internet technology to promote American views and ideas abroad, they tarnished America’s image by  leaving vital government PR functions in the hands of greedy and incompetent private contractors.

Several members of Congress, including Senator Richard Lugar (R-Indiana), are trying to revive support and funding for professionally conducted U.S. public diplomacy. Senator Lugar introduced S. Res. 49 on February 13, 2009, expressing the sense of the Senate regarding the importance of public diplomacy. He also wrote an oped for ForeignPolicy.com on this topic. Another U.S. Senator, Sam Brownback (R-Kansas),  has called for abolishing the Broadcasting Board of Governors. He introduced legislation that would establish the National Center for Strategic Communications, an agency similar to the now defunct U.S. Information Agency. Senator Patrick Leahy (D -Vermont) has tried to stop the BBG from eliminating U.S. broadcasts in foreign languages but his efforts have been ignored by the Board members and their executive staff.

Whether these and other calls for reforming U.S. public diplomacy and international broadcasting will be answered and result in meaningful legislative changes will depend on the cooperation from the Obama White House. Perhaps the mishandling of the meeting in Geneva and  the inability to take a full PR advantage of Michelle Obama’s presence at an important human rights event at the State Department will encourage the Administration to look seriously into this problem. If nothing is done to reform public diplomacy and international broadcasting, the job of explaining America to the world will remain in the hands of incompetent government officials and private contractors working without any guidance, coordination or supervision.

About Ted Lipien

Ted Lipien is a former Voice of America acting associate director. He was also a regional BBG media marketing manager responsible for placement of U.S. government-funded radio and TV programs on stations in Russia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries in Eurasia. In the 1980′s he was in charge of VOA radio broadcasts to Poland during the communist regime’s crackdown on the Solidarity labor union and oversaw the development of VOA television news programs to Ukraine and Russia.

About FreeMediaOnline.org

In 2006, Ted Lipien founded FreeMediaOnline.org, a San Francisco-based nonprofit which supports media freedom worldwide.  He is also author of “Wojtyla’s Women: How They Shaped the Life of Pope John Paul II and Changed the Catholic Church” (O-Books – June 2008). In his book he describes the efforts of the KGB and other communist intelligence services to place spies in the Vatican and to influence reporting by Western journalists.

About GovoritAmerika.us

In December 2008, FreeMediaOnline.org has launched a Russian-language web site — GovoritAmerika.us ГоворитАмерика.us  – which includes summaries of some of the more serious news and commentaries from multiple U.S. government and nongovernment sources. According to Ted Lipien, the web site is designed to compensate for the loss of information from the United States for Russian-speaking audiences due to program and budget cuts implemented by the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

the performance of America’s international broadcast entities has been quite successful in telling America’s story (largely the task of the VOA) — Hillary Clinton

The dismantling of VOA as America’s voice to the world became an ideological and bureaucratic goal of both the Bush Administration and of the BBG, despite the latter’s bipartisan status. After the decision to invade Iraq had been made,  the Board worked closely with neoconservatives Bush White House staffers to privatize U.S. international broadcasting by subcontracting this vital government function. The idea was to make U.S. international broadcasting more responsive in supporting the Bush Administration’s policies — something that VOA journalists, protected by their Congressional charter and committed to journalistic independence, were unwilling to offer, neither to the White House nor the BBG.

In their push to give themselves maximum control, the BBG not only eliminated jobs of  U.S.-based VOA journalists, most of them American citizens, but at the same time denied foreign journalists hired abroad job security and basic protections of American labor laws. These protections were available to VOA journalists, which made them more independent but annoyed the Bush White House and the BBG because they were unable to control them.

In carrying out its privatization plan, the BBG closed down many VOA language services, including the VOA Arabic Service, and created private entities such as Radio Sawa and Alhurra, with new multiple executive positions and contracting opportunities for favorites of BBG officials. (Some of the former Democratic BBG members, including Norman Pattiz and Senator Edward E. Kaufman, were in the forefront of implementing the neoconservative privatization agenda and the Bush White House propaganda goals in the Middle East; they were in fact more enthusiastic supporters than some of the conservative Republican members, but in the end most Republicans and Democrats supported the  Bush Administration’s plans.)

Other major international broadcasters felt no similar need to create new broadcasting entities with new names and new missions. The British Broadcasting Corporation also expanded its media coverage in the Middle East and recently launched a Persian TV channel, but it is proudly and consistently promoting the BBC brand.

Focused on privatization and advertising schemes in international broadcasting and public diplomacy, the Bush Administration and the BBG worked together to destroy the Voice of America as an internationally recognized American broadcaster and went on to create multiple brands, such as Sawa and Alhurra, with no solid journalistic traditions or clearly defined goals. The BBG corporate structure is now very similar to the multi-brand corporate structure of General Motors.

The Public Diplomacy Council, a nonprofit organization which includes former diplomats, academics and other foreign policy experts, agrees that the BBG’s policies are designed to waste U.S. taxpayers’ money.  The PDC has called on President Elect Obama and Congress to take urgent action in reforming publicly-funded U.S. international broadcasting and is proposing consolidation of all five broadcast entities into a single international network. The PDC believes that the proposed consolidation and replacing the Broadcasting Board of Governors by a new nonpartisan oversight commission would result in “cost savings aimed at making U.S. global broadcasting unmatched on the airwaves and in cyberspace.”

As it is customary during the confirmation process, Hillary Clinton’s answers to Senator Lugar’s questions were quite vague and may very well have been written based on information provided by the BBG staff. She made no reference to numerous reports about major editorial and financial scandals at Radio Sawa and Alhurra, such as airing of unchallenged statements by Holocaust deniers and giving extensive airtime to Islamist extremists and racist Russian politicians. ( These decisions were made by untrained and unmanaged contract employees in support of the BBG’s goal to achieve a mass audience in Iran and Russia. Their effort to gain higher ratings by playing up to the presumed worst prejudices of their audience was in any case unsuccessful, but it created a distorted impression of American values and damaged America’s reputation as a supporter of freedom.) 

 A study prepared by the Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School, University of Southern California, which was commissioned by the U.S. government, concluded that Alhurra, Arab-language television to the Middle East managed by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) fails to meet basic journalistic standards and is seen by few.  Read FreeMediaOnline.org report: “U.S. Taxpayers Pay for Spreading Racist Views on Radio Liberty in Russia: What Would Barack Obama Say If He Knew…”   

Use the following link to the ProPublica.org web site to view the Alhurra Holocaust report (with English subtitles) as an example of what the BBG’s marketing strategy has produced at these privatized U.S.-funded stations:  http://www.propublica.org/feature/alhurra-video

One statement that deserves further analysis was Clinton’s assertion that “the BBG has learned that it must rely on the best market analysis to understand the unique listening habits and attitudes of the populations we seek to inform.” The BBG indeed spends tremendous amount of taxpayer money on market research, and BBG members often make claims that their decisions are driven by research.

Unfortunately, most BBG members have demonstrated that they lack both experience and judgment to apply research results to political realities in countries without free media. Senator Lugar asked a very good question whether the U.S. should try to reach a mass audience in the Middle East through entertainment programming. Perhaps understandably at this point, Hillary Clinton could not provide a clear answer.

While still working for the BBG, I became aware that BBG members and staffers were spending countless hours pouring over research data showing that the word “American” was unpopular in the Middle East and trying to come up with new names for their Middle East privatized broadcasting enterprise. They lacked knowledge, experience, and sophistication to realize that the problem was not with the word “American,” American society, or the Voice of America, but with the Bush Administration Middle East policies and their own preoccupation with marketing and advertising.

Making outdated Cold War-like assumptions about the Arab and Islamic culture, they named their TV station (Alhurra) ”The Free One.” It was utterly naive of them to believe that their audiences would be fooled by the lack of the word “American” in the name selected for the new network.

In the process of trying to disassociate their new broadcasting outlets from America, the BBG insulted Arab pride by implying that Middle East audiences were uniformly lacking basic freedoms.  It did not occur to them that this was not an East European-like audience, which truly lacked basic freedoms during the Cold War and looked to the West for help. Those in the Middle East who do not want to hear American news or the word “American” are not going to become viewers and listeners anyway, but most would rather have access to authentic American news and culture from a clearly identified source rather than rely on light-weight news and entertainment hiding behind propagandistic names from another era and another part of the world.

The new Secretary of State should inquire about some of the decisions made by the BBG during the last weeks of the Bush Administration. They included the shutting down of VOA radio broadcasts to Russia just 12 days before the Russian military invasion of Georgia and the Board’s refusal to resume them during the crisis. The BBG also ended VOA radio broadcasts to Ukraine just hours before Russia cut off the flow of natural gas supplies to that country and the rest of Europe. The BBG also wanted to end VOA radio broadcasts to Georgia.

The BBG staff claims that each one of these blunders was justified by solid market research. As someone who as a former BBG employee has placed U.S.-supported programming on stations in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Russia, and Iraq, I known that some of the research results obtained in closed and repressed societies are questionable ( for example, WMD intelligence research in Iraq, another closed and repressed society). But the main problem is not the quality of the research but the inability of the BBG members and their staff to interpret the data in light of political realities on the ground.

Most political loyalists serving on the BBG lack journalistic and human rights advocacy experience and know very little what it means to live in a country without free media. They nearly always have failed to understand what American broadcasting means to both dictators and victims of human rights abuses. Unfortunately, this is not something that reading audience research reports on countries without free media can teach them.

QUESTIONS FOR THE RECORD, SENATOR RICHARD G. LUGAR: Many have criticized the Bush Administration’s decision to try to reach broader audiences in the Middle East through efforts such as Radio Sawa and Al Hurra TV. Critics argue that Sawa – which relies primarily on a pop-radio format with a smattering of news – fails to deliver sufficient information to serious listeners who desire to hear unfiltered news about their country and the rest of the world. Opponents of AL Hurra – which attempts to serve as a counter to Al Jazeera – claim that it often fails to provide sufficient counterpoints to radical and inaccurate claims made by participants on many of its programs.

141. Does the Obama Administration intend to continue funding Radio Sawa in its current, mostly music, format? Similarly, what changes does the Administration intend for Al Hurra?

142. Does the Obama Administration believe that the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees both Al Hurra and Radio Sawa as well as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, is the appropriate vehicle to provide managerial and policy guidance to the disparate broadcasting entities? Does the Administration seek to alter or even replace the BBG?

HILLARY CLINTON: Let me answer these two questions together. For the most part, the performance of America’s international broadcast entities has been quite successful in telling America’s story (largely the task of the VOA), and in serving as important surrogates for missing independent media in countries where a free press and independent media have been repressed, such as Afghanistan and Burma, where RFE/RL and Radio Free Asia respectively operate. Beyond the precise content of the news, our international broadcast services demonstrate an essential lesson of free societies – the requirement of an independent media for a robust democracy.

A robust and effective BBG in turn requires a strong and unambiguous fire wall between the professional journalists and editors at BBG, and others in the U.S. government whether at the White House or the State
Department. I recognize this to be a fundamental requirement of effective international broadcasting.

The BBG is an independent agency but the Secretary of State holds a seat on the Board, through which the Department can express its views. State also clears editorials for the VOA broadcasts. But the most
effective BBG will be one at arms length from these and other government agencies.

Now is the time to review the Arab language services – they have grown in listenership in recent years, and we should review their performance and impact to determine whether Al Hurra and Radio Sawa are achieving their full potential.

We recognize that our biggest challenge is to ensure that our messages are listened to, considered and, we hope, acted upon by people in the Middle East, and Muslim societies around the world. To do this effectively, the BBG has learned that it must rely on the best market analysis to understand the unique listening habits and attitudes of the populations we seek to inform, and these conditions differ substantially from one country to its neighbor. So we must start with the market, and then devise our message accordingly, which more and more will include new digital platforms.

 

This commentary can be republished with attribution to FreeMediaOnline.org

Ted Lipien is a former Voice of America acting associate director. He was also a regional BBG media marketing manager responsible for placement of U.S. government-funded radio and TV programs on stations in Russia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries in Eurasia. In the 1980′s he was in charge of VOA radio broadcasts to Poland during the communist regime’s crackdown on the Solidarity labor union and oversaw the development of VOA television news programs to Ukraine and Russia.

In 2006, Ted Lipien founded FreeMediaOnline.org, a San Francisco-based nonprofit which supports media freedom worldwide.  He is also author of “Wojtyla’s Women: How They Shaped the Life of Pope John Paul II and Changed the Catholic Church” (O-Books – June 2008). In his book he describes the efforts of the KGB and other communist intelligence services to place spies in the Vatican and to influence reporting by Western journalists.

In December 2008, FreeMediaOnline.org has launched a Russian-language web site — GovoritAmerika.us ГоворитАмерика.us  – which includes summaries of more serious  news and commentaries from multiple U.S. government and nongovernment sources. According to Ted Lipien, the web site is designed to compensate for the loss of information from the United States for Russian-speaking audiences due to program and budget cuts implemented by the Broadcasting Board of Governors. The web site, which includes links to VOA Russian Service news reports, is also designed to counter the BBG marketing strategy, that has forced broadcasting entities to focus on entertainment programming and to avoid hard-hitting political reporting that might prevent local rebroadcasting or offend local officials. GovoritAmerika.us web site was developed without any public funding and is managed by volunteers. It is also hosted on LiveJournal.com.

This report was first published by  FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog Commentary by Ted Lipien, January 25, 2009, San Francisco.