FreeMediaOnline.org,  Free Media Online Blog,  GovoritAmerika.us, Commentary by Ted Lipien, June 26, 2009, San Francisco – Ronald Reagan’s strong response to the imposition of martial law  against the independent Solidarity trade union in Poland in 1981 was distinctly different from President Barack Obama’s nuanced comments about the crackdown on demonstrators in Iran in the aftermath of the disputed Iranian presidential elections. While President Obama may have wanted to show his appreciation of the subtleties of Iranian politics, his public statements projected around the world a sense of confusion and weakness instead of showing firm American support for human rights and democracy.   

Intellectually, President Obama is right that the current situation in Iran is not the same as the communist crackdown on Solidarity in Poland in the 1980’s and may require a different policy response from the way President Reagan dealt with communist regimes. But the right course of improving communications with the Muslim world, set by President Obama’s speech in Cairo, was undermined by his initial refusal to speak out strongly against violations of human rights in Iran. He may have lost some of the earlier respect among supporters of democracy in the Middle East and weakened his position vis-a-vis America’s most determined enemies.

President Obama is right that President George W. Bush had made monumental mistakes by his unsophisticated and interventionist approach to the Muslim world while appeasing other authoritarian rulers, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Public diplomacy mistakes by the Bush Administration are too numerous to list, but U.S. international broadcasting initiatives during the last eight years serve as a good example. The Bush-appointed Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) eliminated all Voice of America (VOA) highly-respected Arabic news programs and created Radio Sawa and Alhurra TV, which are viewed in the Middle East and by independent experts in the U.S. as propaganda stations that lack journalistic standards, credibility and audience. Alhurra had broadcast unchallenged statements by Holocaust deniers at a conference in Tehran organized by no other than President Ahmadinejad. The BBG  had also eliminated Voice of America Russian radio programs just 12 days before the Russian army invaded the disputed parts of the Republic of Georgia. Democrats serving as members of the bipartisan BBG, including former BBG member Edward E. Kaufman, who has replaced Vice President Joe Biden as a U.S. Senator from Delaware, had been instrumental in helping the Bush Administration to make and implement many of the misguided decisions that have replaced objective journalism by the Voice of America with crude propaganda that damages America’s reputation and interests abroad.

President Obama is right in offering a new style of public diplomacy in the Middle East and throughout the world. He did not go to Alhurra to give his first interview targeted for the Middle East but chose an Arab TV network instead. Unfortunately, he still does not have around him enough good advisors who could help shape all of his public statements on human rights and freedom of expression issues, especially in times of crisis, so that he and his Administration do not appear at times as being intimidated by dictators of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s kind or appear naive and impulsive like President Bush.

As someone who was in charge of Voice of America (VOA) radio broadcasts to Poland during the Solidarity period, I agree that the two situations — the imposition of the martial law in Poland in December 1981 and the crackdown on demonstrations in Iran in June 2009 – are not identical. They both required, however, from the President of the United States a quick and decisive public response that would not be misinterpreted by foreign leaders and public opinion. Unfortunately, President Obama did not pass this latest test with flying colors.

Undoubtedly, he is a highly intelligent leader and hopefully capable of making right assessments and decisions. His reading of the situation in Iran may be in some ways correct, but his initial public response to this latest crisis was insufficient and quite wrong. He may have been told that workers and intellectuals in Iran are not as united against the religious regime as the Poles were against the communists in the 1980s. America was never seen by the vast majority of the Polish people as a threatening imperial power; Russia was. On the contrary,  most Poles saw America as an only major ally that could help them free themselves from communism and Soviet domination. And unlike the religious authorities in Iran, the Catholic Church and Pope John Paul II were on the side of striking workers, protesting intellectuals and students.

But while the situation in Iran in 2009 is in some ways different from Solidarity’s struggles in Poland in the 1980s, the need for moral support for pro-democracy Iranian reformers is now just as urgent as support for Lech Walesa was for the Reagan White House.  To achieve their goals,  the reform-minded, largely urban Iranians who are behind the street protests could learn from Solidarity’s success in Poland by sticking to their non-violent posture. They could also follow the example of Solidarity’s intellectual advisers, who had shaped the alliance with the Polish industrial workers, by making a similar effort in reaching out to the poor, highly religious, and anti-Western rural voters who tend to support President Ahmadinejad and the clerical regime.

Even in Poland, where conditions were more favorable to creating a democratic society, the solidarity-building process between intellectuals and workers was long and arduous. It took several decades before the Polish society finally united to a sufficient degree against the communist rule. Strong but not overly aggressive statements from President Reagan, and radio broadcasts by the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, had helped the Poles in their struggle for freedom.

President Obama’s speech in Cairo, offering a new approach in dealing with the Muslim world, was a great public diplomacy success and was  seen in the region as a new beginning. Unfortunately, public diplomacy experts at the White House and the State Department were not able to show a similar sophistication when a sudden crisis developed in Iran. President Obama’s overwhelming public concern how his comments in support for the protesting Iranians might be perceived by anti-Western, anti-democratic, and pro-clerical forces was clearly not the right response and opened him to criticism from his Republican opponents.

The White House could have taken a lesson or two from President Reagan on how to articulate a strong public diplomacy message that strikes the right balance between legitimate policy concerns and the impact of presidential statements on public opinion.  It’s good for the president of the United States to be aware of all the subtleties of foreign policy, but in some situations speaking publicly about them sends a wrong message to both supporters and enemies of democracy. Reagan knew how to use public comments to project a strong and confident image abroad while still being able to practice diplomacy when it served America’s interests and the cause of freedom.

In responding to the crackdown on Solidarity In 1981, President Reagan expressed America’s unqualified support for freedom without any concern that he would be criticized in Moscow and Warsaw for interfering in Poland’s domestic politics or trying to undermine the Polish communist regime’s close links with the Soviet Union. He was still able to engage later in successful negotiations with Soviet and Polish communist leaders when they were already critically weakened by America’s resolve to support freedom. Reagan was decisive but not intellectually inflexible like President George W. Bush. His was the right approach, and history has proved him right.

President Reagan’s Address to the Nation About Christmas and the Situation in Poland, December 23, 1981

I urge the Polish Government and its allies to consider the consequences of their actions. How can they possibly justify using naked force to crush a people who ask for nothing more than the right to lead their own lives in freedom and dignity? Brute force may intimidate, but it cannot form the basis of an enduring society, and the ailing Polish economy cannot be rebuilt with terror tactics.

Poland needs cooperation between its government and its people, not military oppression. If the Polish Government will honor the commitments it has made to human rights in documents like the Gdansk agreement, we in America will gladly do our share to help the shattered Polish economy, just as we helped the countries of Europe after both World Wars.

President Obama’s reaction to street demonstrations in Iran was markedly different in an interview with Harry Smith of CBS News, June 19, 2009.

CBS News Harry Smith: Let’s move on to the news of the day.  The Ayatollah Khamenei gave his speech today, gave his sermon.  He said that the election in Iran was, in fact, legitimate.  He said, “The street demonstrations are unacceptable.”  Do you have a message for those people in the street?

President Obama:  I absolutely do.  First of all, let’s understand that this notion that somehow these hundreds of thousands of people who are pouring into the streets in Iran are somehow responding to the West or the United States, that’s an old distraction that I think has been trotted out periodically.  And that’s just not going to fly.

CBS News Harry Smith: People in this country say you haven’t said enough, that you haven’t been forceful enough in your support for those people in the street, and which you say? 

President Obama: To which I say the last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States. That’s what they do. That’s what we’ve already seen. We shouldn’t be playing into that. There should be no distractions from the fact that the Iranian people are seeking to let their voices be heard.

Now, what we can do is bear witness and say to the world that the, you know, incredible demonstrations that we’ve seen is a testimony to, I think what Dr. King called the the arc of the moral universe. It’s long but it bends towards justice.

President Obama is right that the United States should not be seen as directly interfering in domestic Iranian politics, as this may hurt pro-democratic forces. But there is a big difference between actual interference and strong public statements in support of human rights abroad, especially in a crisis situation. Regardless of what President Obama says or does not say, Ahmadinejad’s supporters will still claim — as they have – that the United States is creating unrest in Iran. But if President Obama had taken a more Reagan-like approach in his public statements, while still maintaining diplomatic flexibility – supporters of human rights around the world would not be discouraged and enemies of freedom would not see him and the United States as confused by the events in Iran and weak against dictators. If the president’s public diplomacy advisers knew what they were doing, this would not have become an issue for the new administration. It is possible to have a sophisticated public diplomacy strategy in the Middle East without appearing too cautious in support of democracy and freedom of expression.

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. 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.

Wojtyla's Women by Ted Lipien

About FreeMediaOnline.org

FreeMediaOnline.org is a San Francisco-based nonprofit which supports media freedom worldwide. 

About GovoritAmerika.us

In December 2008, FreeMediaOnline.org 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 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.

BBG officials initially had told the VOA Russian Service that their requests to resume radio broadcasts were a “non-starter” even after Russia invaded Georgia. Only after weeks of protests, including reporting by FreeMediaOnline.org, the BBG finally allowed VOA to produce a short audio program for the Internet, updated only Monday through Friday. This program is rather difficult to find on the VOA website. We made it available for easier access and listening on the GovoritAmerika.us website managed by FreeMediaOnline.org.

FreeMediaOnline.org,  Free Media Online Blog,  GovoritAmerika.us, Commentary by Ted Lipien, June 04, 2009, San Francisco – President Obama’s recent announcement of a new Global Engagement Directorate that will combine ”diplomacy, communications, international development and assistance” was short on specifics how this new structure might change the focus of U.S. public diplomacy and broadcasting initiatives. That’s hardly surprising, considering that the White House has to deal with many other seemingly more pressing problems. But when the Administration finally starts making hard decisions on global engagement, a greater appreciation of history and foreign cultures could help return some sanity and accountability to these programs. The President and the Senate also have to make better choices in selecting key officials responsible for international communications and avoid the temptation to use propaganda rather than dialogue and journalism in communicating with the Muslim world.  Such officials should be appointed and confirmed based on their qualifications as foreign policy analysts and international media experts rather than selected because of political loyalty or the size of their political contributions. Finally, there is no reason why American taxpayers should continue to fund many of the programs created during the Bush Administration that at best don’t work and often damage America’s image abroad. 

Propaganda Is Out, Journalism and Culture Is In – We Hope

If the White House is serious about avoiding past mistakes,  what’s clearly needed in communicating with the rest of the world is a more sophisticated approach that draws on what is best in American diplomacy, culture and objective journalism. Much will depend on what kind of people are put in charge of representing America to the world. They should appreciate what’s best in American culture.  The Administration should look for people who would be in the same league as Edward R. Murrow, who was President Kennedy’s choice to head the now defunct United States Information Agency (USIA), or John Chancellor, President Johnson’s choice to head the Voice of America (VOA) in the days when the White House appreciated the experience of professional journalists. 

The last thing America needs is leaving public diplomacy in the hands of obscure political loyalists who make private business deals on taxpayer-paid trips abroad and help their  business associates get hired as government consultants at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which manages, or more accurately mismanages, U.S. international broadcasts. It’s hard to imagine that the late Armand Hammer, a U.S. business tycoon who made profitable trade deals with Lenin and Stalin, would have been put in charge of U.S. broadcasting during the Cold War, or that the late Edward E. Murrow would be discussing  private business deals with President Putin’s associates on a trip to Moscow if he were now in charge of these broadcasts. But such  apparent conflicts of interest and other abuses were common at the Broadcasting Board of Governors during the Bush Administration. The BBG has been consistently rated in government surveys as one of the worst managed Federal agencies. Read The Washington Post column by Joe Davidson: Employee Poll Makes VOA’s Parent the Worst Place to Work.

Under President Bush, political appointees selected to run State Department’s public diplomacy programs and U.S. international broadcasting were political operatives, advertising executives and mirror entrepreneurs who proved their value to the White House and the Democratic leadership in Congress with political contributions and loyal support. (The BBG is by law bipartisan and must include members of both parties, thus both the Bush White House and the Democratic leadership in Congress share the blame for selecting these individuals.) They were rewarded with jobs for which they were completely unsuited and unprepared.

It is not surprising, therefore, that during the past ten years, Under Secretaries of State for Public Diplomacy and members of the BBG have brought once sophisticated cultural and broadcasting programs to a new low level of simplistic and counterproductive propaganda. They promoted advertising and marketing campaigns that admittedly may sometimes produce desired results in a U.S. domestic business setting but turned out to be ineffective and outright offensive when applied to public diplomacy and international broadcasting. And that’s exactly what these political appointees who lacked any substantive experience in foreign policy, human rights and journalism, have done in trying to communicate America’s message to foreign audiences, especially in the Middle East.

Bring “American” Brand Back

BBG consultants declared “America” as a brand name not to be used in the Middle East and came up with a GM-like collection of new names and new private broadcasting initiatives, each one costing U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars. Since their creators lacked an even basic understanding of Arab culture and refused to listen to advice from area experts, there was no chance that they could be successful. And by all accounts, they were not. They should have asked themselves why the British, who after all perfected serious radio journalism for audiences abroad, did not feel the need to dilute the BBC World Service brand with new stations under many different names. 

Returning to a more sophisticated approach, using high-level cultural diplomacy and serious news broadcasts, may not be easy, as much of the knowledge and experience of previous decades has been destroyed and will take time to  rebuild. The only thing left of sophisticated news analysis and cultural programs once available on the Voice of America are old audio and text files of interviews with important cultural figures in the Arab world. They have been archived by the U.S. Embassy in Egypt, where some U.S. diplomats and local Egyptian employees still understand their value. It’s this kind of understanding and cultural sensitivity that needs to be brought back. Link to Egyptian Treasures from VOA on the U.S. Embassy Cairo website.

The BBG eliminated all VOA Arabic language programs to create privately-run Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television. The programming philosophy of these stations, developed by former BBG member Norman Pattiz, a Democrat  – who despite being then Senator Joe Biden’s protege worked closely with neoconservatives in the Bush Administration – specifically rejected anything cultural in U.S. international broadcasting above the level of Brittney Spears. BBG members claimed that their market research supported programming derived from Hollywood and popular culture. Their professional background, however, made it impossible for them to conduct a sophisticated analysis that would take into consideration Middle Eastern history, cultural sensitivities, and political implications of their programming choices.

The Obama Administration would do well by quickly reversing many of the BBG’s decisions of the past decade. Correcting these mistakes would greatly improve America’s image abroad and save U.S. taxpayers’ money. “American” brand  should be brought back by making the Voice of America again a primary U.S. international broadcaster. VOA broadcasts and Internet site in Arabic should be restored as soon as possible.

Sources of Failure

How did U.S. international broadcasting go from a series of great successes during the Cold War to disastrous results in the Middle East in the last decade? While the simplistic worldview adopted by the Bush Administration bears some of the blame, the BBG and its members have made a bad situation far worse than it had to be.  These well meaning but completely miscast individuals, most of them with backgrounds in small domestic U.S. businesses, took a Cold War concept of surrogate broadcasting — which in any case was totally unsuitable for the Middle East – and compounded their error by removing from it one element that had made the original surrogate broadcaster – Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty –  vastly successful in broadcasting to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. That element was a high level intellectual and cultural program content developed by local journalists, writers, artists, and intellectuals — not  U.S. advertising experts and political loyalists based in Washington, D.C.

Not satisfied with silencing Voice of America broadcasts in Arabic, the BBG members and their private consultants destroyed cultural uniqueness and effectiveness of RFE/RL Russian broadcasts and terminated VOA radio to Russia just a few days before the Russian army invaded Georgia. FreeMediaOnline.org reported that only one BBG member, Blanquita Walsh Cullum — the only working journalist on the Board – had the courage to to oppose these cuts and spoke out against other abuses, including an ultimately unsuccessful effort by a former BBG chairman James K. Glassman to hire Paula Zahn as the Board’s high profile spokesperson while VOA broadcasts to critical countries were being eliminated. Paula Zahn declined the job offer as a private contractor that would have cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. James K. Glassman, who ended up as President Bush’s last Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, refused to resume VOA Russian radio broadcasts during the Russian-Georgian conflict.

In the process of expanding their power, BBG members deprived  foreign journalists working for their surrogate broadcasters of any measure of independence and authority, which was one of the key elements of success of U.S. broadcasts during the Cold War. At the same time, they failed to provide clear editorial and policy guidelines — another key element that previous American management teams were usually able to put in place successfully by working in partnership with foreign journalists. Those who dared to oppose BBG’s misguided ideas were fired or found their programs eliminated. To cover up their mistakes, the BBG forced foreign employees to sign secrecy agreements and refused to make public independent studies showing the failure of their projects in the Middle East. Read  Report Calls Alhurra A Failure on ProPublica.org.

By all accounts, the broadcasting  Board has been an unmitigated disaster. Some of the abuses are only now beginning to come to light. BBG-approved personnel policies at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which discriminate against foreign-born journalists,  may soon come before the European Court of Human Rights. Close links between the BBG Democrats and neoconservatives in the Bush Administration have proven that the Board does not protect U.S. international broadcasters from political interference with program philosophy and program content.  

The Obama Administration has a choice of abolishing the Broadcasting Board of Governors and closing down Alhurra Television and other private broadcasting entities created during Bush years. Democrats and Republicans in Congress have a common interest in saving taxpayers money, which are now being wasted on ineffective and duplicate programs.

Alhurra Television and the BBG, however, has some powerful supporters, mostly among Democrats who helped to create Alhurra, including former BBG member Senator Edward E. Kaufman, D-DE, a protege of Vice President Biden.  Read ProPublica.org: Alhurra Bleeding Viewers, Poll Finds, But Spending is Up.

One of the key members of the Obama Administration who may have a say in what happens to the BBG and Alhurra is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She is an ex officio member of the BBG, although she does not attend its meetings. She is usually represented at these meetings by a senior State Department official. While President Obama wisely avoided giving interviews to Alhurra, Secretary Clinton was recently interviewed by the network. Secretary Clinton is a friend of BBG member D. Jeffrey Hirschberg. He was one of the Democrats who worked closely with the Bush White House to create Radio Sawa and Alhurra. Hirschberg, a director of the U.S.-Russia Business Council, was also said to be responsible for terminating VOA radio broadcasts to Russia shortly before the Russian invasion of Georgia.

Other than Senator Kaufman and perhaps also Secretary Clinton, Alhurra, which means “The Free One,” seems to have now far fewer supporters, especially among members of Congress. ProPublica.org reported that outraged members of Congress threatened to withhold funding after the network aired a report on a Holocaust deniers conference in Tehran. According to ProPulica.org, “the reporter who covered the conference told viewers that Jews had provided no scientific evidence of the Holocaust.”

As a former acting associate director of the Voice of America (VOA),  I am certain that VOA, the only American-brand broadcaster and a target of numerous BBG program cuts, is capable of providing news and representing America in a credible and responsible manner that will not embarrass the United States. It’s unlikely that VOA would give airtime to Holocaust deniers, as did Alhurra editors and anchors, who apparently felt they had no choice but to follow the BBG dictum of giving the audience what it wants based on market research. Although VOA has had various problems with its broadcasts over the years, it follows much more strict editorial and fiscal standards than the BBG’s favored private broadcasting entities and their contractors.

In some cases, private broadcasting entities and surrogate broadcasters can be effective if they have the right programming philosophy,  proper management and  sufficient autonomy combined with sufficient oversight.  Ultimately, much will depend on the quality and experience of the people the Obama Administration puts in charge of these programs. Their understanding how we can communicate with other nations by presenting what’s best in our culture and intellectual tradition will determine whether these programs will be successful in the future.

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. 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 FreeMediaOnline.org

FreeMediaOnline.org is a San Francisco-based nonprofit which supports media freedom worldwide. 

About GovoritAmerika.us

In December 2008, FreeMediaOnline.org 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 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.

BBG officials initially had told the VOA Russian Service that their requests to resume radio broadcasts were a “non-starter” even after Russia invaded Georgia. Only after weeks of protests, including reporting by FreeMediaOnline.org, the BBG finally allowed VOA to produce a short audio program for the Internet, updated only Monday through Friday. This program is rather difficult to find on the VOA website. We made it available for easier access and listening on the GovoritAmerika.us website managed by FreeMediaOnline.org.

VOA Responds to Crisis in Georgia

On August 8, 2008, Russia’s military forces in Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia began invading Georgian territory and moving toward its capital, Tbilisi. In response to the crisis, VOA increased its daily Georgian radio broadcasts from 30 to 60 minutes on shortwave and FM. VOA’s broadcast is also available live and on-demand on VOA Georgian’s website. VOA’s Russian Service also provided comprehensive coverage of Russia-Georgia conflict.

Even after the crisis started, former BBG members, Edward E. Kaufman (now a Democratic senator from Delaware) and James K. Glassman (former BBG chairman who was also President Bush’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy) rejected urgent pleas from Voice of America journalists to resume VOA Russian-language radio broadcasts to Russia and to the war zone in Georgia. According to FreeMediaOnline.org sources, Mr. Kaufman blocked a formal request from another BBG member Blanquita Walsh Cullum ( a Republican appointee and the only working journalist serving on the board) to have a new vote on resuming VOA Russian radio programs.

In another part of the budget request, the BBG admits that the Russian service “ceased its radio broadcasts on July 26, 2008,” and “is enhancing its website to appeal to burgeoning web audiences with targeted content.” The document fails to point out that largely as a result of ending VOA Russian radio and television programs, VOA’s annual reach in Russia dropped by 98% from 7.3% in 2007 to 0.2% (est.) in 2009 (another omission). No other international broadcaster, U.S. or foreign, has ever experienced a similarly dramatic fall in ratings. Even a 25% drop would have been a disaster, yet the BBG claims that despite a 98% audience loss VOA “improved its programming to such strategically important countries as… Russia.”

While advocating Internet-only strategy for Voice of America in Russia — rather than far more prudent and far more effective multiple platform program delivery  — the BBG admits in another part of its budget request that the Internet is vulnerable to blockage and censorship by unfriendly governments, ”Governments also target RFE/RL [a BBG-run private broadcaster] with technological disruption, including a global cyber attack in April 2008 which probably originated in Belarus, and Kazakhstan’s blockage of RFE/RL’s Kazakh-language website in the spring of 2008.” Another cyber attack, this time against Georgian websites, occurred during the Russian military intervention in Georgia. A recent article by Understanding Government, “Will America’s Voice Stay Silenced?“, reported on this issue and other problems at the BBG. 

The BBG’s budget request also states that “in response to the crisis, VOA increased its daily Georgian radio broadcasts from 30 to 60 minutes on shortwave and FM.” That statement is only technically correct. What the BBG does not mention is that the broadcasting board also had plans to eliminate all VOA radio programs to Georgia and that the VOA Georgian service was reduced to a handful of journalists who were not able to immediately increase airtime and had to work nonstop for many days just to produce a 30 minute radio program.

The BBG budget request to the U.S. Congress also includes another disingenuous and misleading statement:

VOA Covers Mumbai Terrorist Attacks

VOA’s South Asia Division language services provided wall-to-wall coverage of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, including on-the-ground coverage from stringers, interviews in Pakistan and India, and live call-in shows. VOA Hindi provided its new affiliate Zee TV with reaction from President Bush, President-elect Obama, U.S. officials, experts and members of American-Indian communities.

In fact, shorty before the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the BBG terminated all Voice of America radio broadcasts in Hindi. While bragging and misleading the Congress about its response to the terrorist attacks in India, in another part of the budget request the BBG frankly admits that it plans to close down VOA Hindi service altogether:

BBG proposes to end VOA broadcasts in Croatian, Hindi, and Greek, and discontinue radio rebroadcasts of PNN television programming and one hour daily of original VOA Persian radio.

Another misleading omission in the BBG’s FY 2010 budget request deals with VOA broadcasts to Ukraine:

Ukrainian Language Broadcasting

VOA’s Ukrainian Service continues to have a major impact through its television programming. An October 2008 survey indicated that VOA Ukrainian’s weekly TV programs reach 11.9 percent of the population and that the combined weekly TV, radio, and Internet audience is 14.2 percent (5.7 million people).

In fact, the BBG terminated all VOA radio broadcasts to Ukraine on December 31, 2008, a day before Russia cut off deliveries of natural gas to Ukraine and Western Europe in a billing dispute with Kiev, as it had earlier terminated VOA radio to Russia. Yet the BBG describes both Russia and Ukraine as “strategically important countries” for VOA broadcasting and in another part of the FY 2010 budget request says that “Russia has effectively turned into a one-party dictatorship in the past few years.”

The Broadcasting Board of Governor ignored numerous requests from members of Congress not to end VOA radio programming to media-at-risk countries like Russia and Ukraine. The BBG also ignored requests from members of Congress not to end VOA radio programs in Hindi.

According to the BBG’s critics, including BBG employees and their union leaders, misleading and disingenuous statements in the FY 2010 budget request reflect a culture of mismanagement and arrogance that was captured in the OPM’s most recent Human Capital Survey designed to measure employee job satisfaction and confidence in the management. This is what the AFGE Local 1812 government employees union website says about the quality of the management at the Broadcasting Board of Governors:

BBG CLAIMS TITLE AS THE WORST PLACE TO WORK IN GOVERNMENT

DATELINE: Washington, D.C., 01/23/09. AFGE Local 1812 has obtained a copy of the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) ranking of government agencies which included the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) based on the results of the 2008 Human Capital Resources survey. The BBG ranked dead last on three of the four categories the OPM measures in its survey. Finishing second to last in one category prevented an atrocious clean sweep of the four categories measuring the effectiveness of management at the BBG.

The BBG’s management problems are not limited only to federal government workers at the Voice of America working in Washington, D.C. but extend to other BBG-managed  U.S.-funded broadcasting entities throughout the world. Foreign journalists working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a private broadcaster also supervised by the BBG, accuse the management of depriving them, based on national origin, of the same job security and labor protection rights which are available to both American and Czech employees. RFE/RL headquarters are based in Prague, the Czech Republic. RFE/RL’s former acting president, Jeffrey Trimble, is now the BBG’s executive director and was responsible for implementing personnel and other management decisions during the period covered by the Human Capital Survey. He was replaced at RFE/RL in Prague by another BBG-selected official, Dr. Jeffrey Gedmin, a former resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalists-at-risk are a group of the most vulnerable contract employees from countries like Russia, Uzbekistan,  Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Afghanistan, Iran and several others. These journalists charge that by taking advantage of the communist era laws still on the books in the Czech Republic, the BBG has restricted their right to challenge unlawful discrimination and employment termination in Czech and U.S. courts.

Two former RFE/RL employees plan to pursue their claims against RFE/RL and the BBG by challenging the communist era Czech laws in the European Court of Human Rights. They have also petitioned United States Attorney General Eric Holder to open a criminal investigation of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and its supervising Federal agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

On May 6, the Czech news agency, CTK, and the largest Czech national daily Dnes (Today) reported that the two petitioners, former RFE/RL employees, a Croatian citizen Snjezana Pelivan and Anna Karapetian, an Armenian journalist, are charging BBG and the management of U.S. Congress-funded radio station with fraudulent deception intended to keep RFE/RL foreign personnel in a legal vacuum without court protection in the United States and the Czech Republic.

The BBG has also been severely criticized for imposing its programming and marketing strategy on journalists and forcing them to follow recommendations from uninformed consultants, some of them with links to BBG members, rather than allowing journalists and managers to use their own expert  knowledge of the audience. In an interview scheduled for publication this week, former head of RFE/RL Russian Service, Mario Corti, who was forced out in a programming dispute four years ago, charges that the BBG’s strategy and the American management of the station have destroyed the unique value of Radio Liberty broadcasts in Russia and made them nearly ineffective. Corti is now a manager at a private radio network in Russia. Since his departure, RFE/RL has been criticized by a Russian human rights organization for giving airtime to nationalist extremists known for promoting racist views and its Moscow-based bureau chief was downplaying the impact of the murder of a prominent human rights reporter Anna Politkovskaya.

But one of the most severely criticized BBG operations has been the Alhurra Television program for the Middle East.  According to KEBABfest blog, maintained by Arab-Americans, Alhurra viewers are subjected to “hours of mindless chatter interspersed with shallow assessments of selected current events and random feature stories (some of which are marginally entertaining). There is no depth in the news coverage, nor in the rest of the programming. Rather, there is a failed attempt at fast-paced US-style news that comes off as chaotic and incoherent.” Alhurra was also criticized for giving airtime to Holocaust deniers. A study by researchers for the University of Southern California, who conducted a review of Alhurra broadcasts, concluded that “the quality of Alhurra’s journalism is substandard on several levels“ and that the station has no significant audience in the Middle East.

Not surprisingly, the BBG is presenting Congress with a much rosier picture of Alhurra programming:

Expanding our reach.

The new three-hour daily show Al Youm launched on March 8, 2009 has redefined Alhurra’s voice in the region with an information mix unique in the Middle East today. The new show provides a platform for focusing on the news of the day, discussing compelling social issues, and a spectrum of information not presented anywhere else in the region’s media. The program broadcasts reports directly from the Middle East with hubs in Dubai, Beirut, Cairo, and Jerusalem. The mix from the region and America will continue to capitalize on Alhurra’s ability to provide the people of the Middle East with unique insight into America that will inform their views and opinions of the region, the world, and the United States.

While the original concept for Alhurra’s surrogate broadcasting, based on outdated Cold War models, came from neoconservatives in the Bush White House, programming and marketing strategy for Alhurra, Radio Sawa and other  U.S. broadcasting entities, which is still followed by the BBG, was introduced by former Democratic BBG member Norman Pattiz, founder of U.S. radio syndicate Westwood One and a protege of Vice President Joe Biden when he was a U.S. senator from Delaware.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors FY 2010 Budget Request to the U.S. Congress (link) provides for an interesting reading and is a good example of how government bureaucrats try to hide their mistakes and mismanagement of government resources while asking U.S. taxpayers for more money, said Ted Lipien, former VOA acting associate director, who is now president of FreeMediaOnline.org, a San Francisco-based media freedom nonprofit which supports independent journalism worldwide.

In response to the termination of VOA radio broadcasts to Russia, FreeMediaOnline.org has helped to launch a Russian-language news website, GovoritAmerika.us, which offers a wide selection of Russian-language news analysis from both U.S. government and nongovernment sources. GovoritAmerika.us is staffed by volunteers and receives no public funding.

WILL AMERICA’S VOICE STAY SILENCED?

07. May 2009
An Understanding Government report

By Mitchell Polman

Washington, D.C. — Since it was founded in 1942, the Voice of America has been just that – a radio voice for the American perspective on the issues of the day and a prime source of information about American society for its overseas audiences. VOA has also brought educational programs to overseas audiences on such issues as public health and business skills. In recent years, however, the broadcasting service has experienced staff cuts, service reductions, and politically-charged controversies.

At the center of the storm has been the Broadcasting Board of Governors, or BBG, which oversees U.S. government-funded media outlets. And these problems have arisen while – largely through emergency supplemental appropriations from Congress in the past couple of years – the Broadcasting Board of Governors has seen its budget actually increase. Critics say that the BBG has skewed priorities and has spent money that could have gone to its broadcasting services on wasteful administrative overhead and public relations efforts.

America’s voice in Russia fades to silence

Last year the BBG made the unpopular and unexpected decision to terminate all Russian language shortwave radio and television broadcasts of the Voice of America. It ordered VOA to shift its resources towards Internet-based broadcasting. The decision has been widely criticized, in large part because Internet penetration in Russia is too low – estimated at 20% by some pollsters – to justify ending radio and television broadcasts to the Russian public.

But critics see more than just a mistaken choice of media. Former VOA Deputy Director, and author of the book Voice of America: a History, Alan Heil, Jr., for example, said regarding radio service to Russia that “the Voice of America cannot continue to be silent. It would not only be contrary to the U.S. national interest. It would also be a distinctly untimely disservice to millions of listeners in Russia and the surrounding republics that had, until last July, depended on VOA Russian for more than sixty years as their reliable window on a turbulent world.”

Critics note that it is easier for governments to block websites and control Internet usage than it is to block shortwave radio, and that shortwave radio is more commonplace in conflict zones – where the need for independent media is most vital. The BBG’s decision has been called shortsighted for other reasons, in particular because the VOA could have continued producing shortwave and FM radio as well as television content using its seasoned Russian-language reporting staff – and used it on the Internet as well. Instead, the BBG ordered VOA to produce content only for the VOA website and terminate all Russian language radio and television programming.

And while some in the Broadcasting Board of Governors may consider shortwave radio to be a dying technology, the Russian government apparently does not. As the Voice of America fades as a radio source, Radio Moscow has been renamed the Voice of Russia, and it continues to broadcast in shortwave throughout both Russia and the entire world.

“Runet” – the Internet in Russia

Obviously, there is a vital role for the Internet in America’s information arsenal. In a December 2008 report, the media research group InterMedia said that television remains the dominant source of news coverage in Russia, but that the Internet is growing. 19% of the population, according to InterMedia, reported using the Internet to follow current events in Russia in 2008, up from 13% in 2007.

However, by some estimates only 2% of Russians have broadband service. Without broadband service, listening to radio programs or watching television programs over the Internet can be difficult. Broadband and DSL subscriptions are on the rise, but they are still mostly available in Moscow and St. Petersburg and other major cities. Several companies have large plans to expand their networks. However, as it stands now, many homes can not get even dial-up service for lack of a landline, and it is doubtful that Russian citizens will put up with or pay for watching or listening to a half hour long program on a painfully slow Internet connection. Overall, it seems clear that the share of the Russian population that is not thoroughly “wired” is now unable to be part of the VOA audience.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty gains while VOA loses

The BBG shifted some of VOA’s resources, including radio frequencies, to a different radio broadcaster — Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). RFE/RL – known simply as “Svoboda,” or “freedom,” in Russian, was a vital source of information for human rights activists inside the USSR during much of the Cold War. However, the two broadcast entities do not share the same mission or approach to broadcasting, so an expansion of Radio Free Europe cannot be seen as a substitute for what VOA has done in the past.

To begin with, RFE/RL focuses exclusively on news involving the country and region that is broadcasting to, whereas the VOA adds world news and reports on American policies and society. In addition, RFE/RL contracts with private companies overseas or surrogates in places like Moscow to reach its audience. The surrogate companies and their staffs and families are often subject to governmental pressure, intimidation, and threats. The Voice of America, on the other hand, broadcasts directly from Washington and avoids these direct pressures.

Historically, the Voice of America had a larger audience in Russia than RFE/RL has at present. According to InterMedia, VOA’s Russian language service had a cumulative annual audience for 2007 of 6,504,030 people (broadcasting for three hours of radio daily and one hour of TV) while RFE/RL had 3,613,350 people (broadcasting eighteen hours daily on radio). VOA radio had an average weekly listenership of 481,780 listeners, VOA TV had an average weekly viewership of 722,670 viewers and VOA had 120,445 visitors for its website from Russia. These statistics are for Russia only – they do not include Russian language speakers from Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan or other former Soviet republics, which are believed to be a substantial audience.

Finally, there is also some dispute about the methodologies being used to determine the number of visits to VOA’s Russian language website. Sources familiar with VOA’s numbers comment that roughly half of the visits to VOA’s Russian language site may actually be coming from inside the United States. Even if this estimate is exaggerated, there is no disputing the fact that the number of VOA website users is far below the audience that VOA TV and radio enjoyed in Russia. The most recent InterMedia study shows VOA’s annual audience reach in Russia dropped by 98% in just one year: from 7.3% in 2007 to an estimated 0.2% in 2009 (0.2% is the VOA Russian Internet reach.) This drop was experienced only by VOA, so it cannot be solely because of the Russian government’s restrictive media policies. Clearly the disappearance of VOA radio service has harmed America’s ability to reach out to Russian citizens.

Reaction from inside and outside Russia

The cutbacks in VOA service have drawn protests from many quarters. On July 31, 2008 a prominent group of human rights activists in St. Petersburg, Russia, including Aleksandr Nikitin, Anna Sharogradskaya, Olga Staravoitova, and lawyer Yuri Schmidt, sent a letter to Congress asking it to intervene with the BBG saying, “(The Russian) public is deprived of objective coverage of events inside the country and abroad. International radio stations broadcasting in Russian and Internet are the only sources of unbiased, balanced, and truthful information, especially analysis of global events. That is why we believe that it is premature to end VOA’s Russian Service broadcast.”

The bi-partisan Congressional Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, or CSCE, sent a letter to the Broadcasting Board of Governors in October 2008 protesting the Russian service cutbacks as well as planned reductions in VOA’s Ukrainian and Georgian services then-Chairman Alcee Hastings (D-FL) and Ranking Minority Christopher Smith (R-NJ) asked for VOA shortwave radio service to be restored saying, “Freedom of the media in Russia, especially on the airwaves, has been cut to the point that it is extremely difficult for people to hear views other than those espoused by the Kremlin.”

Problems with the BBG decision emerged in stark relief during the August 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia. Russian language VOA programming went off the air on July 26, less than two weeks before the Russian army entered Georgia on August 7, 2008. Russian speakers in the region thus had one less source for coverage of the war and of the American government’s views. The Georgian language service had also been slated to go off the air, but was granted a reprieve and temporarily increased at the insistence of Congress.

VOA would suffer similar embarrassments in the months ahead as, for example, it terminated Ukrainian language radio service the day before Russia disrupted gas service to Ukraine on January 1, 2009, and when VOA’s highly popular Hindi language radio programs (with an audience of eight million listeners a week) went off the air shortly before the terrorist attacks on Mumbai. After protests from VOA supporters, VOA radio returned on a Moscow-based AM channel for only thirty minutes a day Monday through Friday, down from its previous three hours.

Former VOA Staff Calling for Service Restorations

One of the most prominent critics of the BBG is Ted Lipien, who spent 33 years with the VOA as a reporter and then as Associate Director for Central Programming. Retiring in 2006, Mr. Lipien soon after started the website FreeMediaOnline.org to assist independent broadcasters and journalists worldwide. Responding to the cutbacks at VOA, Mr. Lipien launched GovoritAmerika.us, a Russian language site containing news summaries from U.S. government and non-governmental sources.

Mr. Lipien’s criticisms of the BBG go beyond disagreements over planned cutbacks. He charges that BBG market research findings have led Voice of America to cut back on criticism of the Putin government. Mr. Lipien has similarly charged that market research was behind a Radio Liberty decision to carry a program featuring Russian extremists, which sparked protests from Russian human rights groups. Lipien says that most of the responsibility for the cutbacks in Russian language service is the responsibility of Ted Kaufman, a close confidante of Vice President Biden who replaced Biden as U.S. senator from Delaware.

Lipien is also critical of BBG member Jeffrey Hirschberg, charging that Hirschberg’s business interests in Russia are “an apparent conflict of interest” with his BBG responsibilities. Hirschberg, a former Director of the U.S.-Russia Business Council, is still on their board and is a partner and Managing Director of Kalorama Partners, LLC, a Washington, DC-based consulting and risk-management company. However, no specific conflict of interest has been documented and it is worth noting that Hirschberg is also a board member of the human rights group Freedom House. But according to Lipien, “in many ways, BBG’s business-connected members with conflicts of interest are more dangerous for journalistic independence at VOA and RFE/RL than the White House and State Department officials who in the past had also tried to interfere with programming for political reasons.”

James Glassman, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy near the end of George W. Bush’s term, was previously the BBG Board Chairman and led the effort to abolish the Russian language services. The board members who voted to abolish the services cited the decline of shortwave and the rise of the Internet as part of their reasoning for the changes.

Voices of discord at VOA Russian service?

However, other VOA insiders speculate that the reorganization of the Russian service may in part have been due to a reputation that it developed in earlier times as having a myriad of internal personnel problems. Former USIA official William P. Kiehl, the Country Affairs Officer for the USSR and Baltic States from 1981-1983, said of the VOA Russian service,

Among those who worked with, but not in, the Russian Service of the VOA, it was known as ‘the snake pit’ because of the internecine warfare that was a constant among the staff. The Russian Service like many language services then and now reflected both the good and the bad of the societies that provided the native speakers–so in the case of the Russian Service you had Westernizers and Slavophiles, monarchists and socialists, Jews and anti-Semites, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Christians, people with all sorts of agendas, all working together in a high pressure situation under the supervision of a Russian speaking Foreign Service Officer from the ranks of the USIA or the State Department.

Clearly, the diverse staff of the VOA Russian-language service – a product of the Soviet Union’s own complicated legacy – must have been a difficult one to manage. But it produced programming that was listened to by millions of Soviet citizens during the Cold War, and remained popular after the breakup of the USSR. This legacy has been interrupted with the changes to VOA’s Russian service.

The future of the BBG

Currently there are four vacancies on the BBG Board out of a total of nine seats. Secretary of State Clinton holds one seat on the board, but generally speaking the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, currently designated to be Ms. Judith McHale, sits in for the Secretary. Board members can serve after their terms have expired until replacements are named. Currently, four members are serving in this status. While traditionally, four members have been named by the Senate Minority Leader, and four by the sitting president, it is now technically possible for President Obama to remake the Board in its entirety by himself.

The Obama Administration has not given any indication who it will appoint to the BBG or if it will even keep the BBG as an institution. In both 2007 and 2008 the Office of Personnel Management rated the BBG as having the worst employee satisfaction level of any government agency. So new appointees will have their hands full trying to fix it, and the abrupt decision taken in 2008 to end Russian-language service may be impossible to reverse. There continues to be a great deal of uncertainty surrounding much of VOA’s work. For example, the Uzbek language service was taken off the air, only to be switched back on in 2004-5. It is now again being threatened with closure.

It is quite possible that the Obama Administration views the BBG as an agency in need of an overhaul. The BBG was founded in the wake of the dismantling of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in 1999, a move which reshaped – not necessarily for the better – America’s public diplomacy. At that time, most of USIA’s programs were folded into the Department of State. But there was a fear that VOA, RFE/RL, and Radio Marti (which broadcasts to Cuba) would be unable to maintain their journalistic independence under the Department of State. The concept of a bi-partisan board with governors from both parties appointed by the president, with a spot reserved for a State Department official, arose as a solution to that problem.

Today, questions remain as to how international broadcasting operations should be managed. As a Senator, Vice President Biden was among those most involved in the discussion. How the Obama Administration will approach international broadcasting remains to be seen, but it is likely the BBG’s many perceived missteps are going to lead to some changes. In these challenging times, America can ill afford such tumult in its overseas broadcasting services.

“I accepted the invitation to join RFE/RL with an unhidden pride as I was becoming a part of a radio station with a glorious history,” she says. “From the very first day of my employment I got the task of covering the Bosnian war.” Before joining RFE/RL, this graduate of the Moscow State University worked for numerous media outlets in Armenia, including the UPI news agency, covering  local politics and the war in Karabakh.  At RFE/RL, she wrote feature stories, edited and  moderated newscasts and produced the daily programs. One of her regular weekly radio series was on the 1700 anniversary of Christianity in Armenia. Continuing to show pride and loyalty toward her former employer despite a sense of betrayal, she describes RFE/RL as an excellent school of journalism.

When Anna Karapetian was suddenly fired from her job two years ago even though her job performance was described as exemplary, this mother of three minor children discovered that non-American employees like herself, most of whom are journalists, are as unprotected against arbitrary decisions and discrimination by the RFE/RL management as their colleagues in the countries to which the radio station broadcasts programs about the importance of defending human rights.

“The methods are different but the results are virtually the same,” Anna Karapetian wrote in a letter to media freedom and human rights organizations in January 2009.  “In RFE/RL target countries the journalists are harassed, persecuted and forced into silence. At the Prague main office, they are harassed and left without means of livelihood and work prospects by arbitrary separations from the Radio.”

After RFE/RL terminated her employment, Anna Karapetian found out that unlike her American colleagues working at the RFE/RL headquarters in the Czech Republic, she did not have the protection of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the Federal Civil Rights Act, and many other U.S. anti-discrimination institutions and laws. The Czech government made sure that locally-hired Czech employees would have the full protection of the Czech labor law, but at the insistence of the BBG it allowed RFE/RL to exempt foreign journalists working for RFE/RL in Prague from the Czech labor standards. They were placed instead under a special Communist-era law, still on the books, which was used to facilitate the Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia after 1968. This special law allowed RFE/RL as a foreign employer to fire any third-country non-American journalist at any time without any reason.

This legal limbo for foreign-born journalists was specifically sought from the Czech Government by the BBG and RFE/RL to prevent court challenges by  non-American employees against adverse personnel actions. Shocked and angered by how she was treated by her U.S. taxpayer-supported American employer, Anna Karapetian wrote in an open letter to freedom of the press and human rights organizations that non-American and non-Czech RFE/RL employees working in the Czech Republic, who often come from semi-dictatorial countries of the former Soviet Union, have “about as much legal protection as the inhabitants of Guantanamo: not in the country of their origin, not in the place of their presence, nor in the United States.”

The Washington-based Broadcasting Board of Governors, which is responsible for these personnel policies, was rated by its own American employees in the most recent government-wide Office of Personnel Management survey, as the worst-managed U.S. Federal agency. The agency is run by a small group of political appointees representing both parties. (There are currently four BBG members plus Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who serves as an ex officio member.) The Board’s executive director, Jeffrey Trimble, is a former acting president of RFE/RL.

“On various solemn occasions different members of the BBG have been encouraging us with their speeches by stressing the mission we had – dissemination of free word and advocacy of human rights,” Anna Karapetian told FreeMediaOnline.org.  “I have come to realize that unfortunately there is now little or no difference between the BBG members, the RFE/RL management  and the pathos of Communist leaders’ speeches addressed to people with no rights.  I believe that the  people with no rights can’t have any sincere mission, thus it appears that the US Congress finances double standards of  the BBG and RFE/RL in the name of American foreign  policy.”

Snjezana Pelivan, who graduated from the University of Sarajevo, was employed by RFE/RL to facilitate the use of its programs by radio and television stations in countries still developing their democratic institutions and free media. Like Anna Karapetian, she feels betrayed by RFE/RL, the BBG, and the U.S. Government but still strongly believes in the importance of U.S. international broadcasting.

“In Munich and later in Prague, RFE/RL  — with its message of tolerance, rule of law, democracy, human rights – became for me not just an employer. I could identify with RFE/RL broadcasts supporting reconciliation and peace in my native Balkans and, in similarly war-torn, Caucasus.”

Pelivan came from a politically engaged family. When she left Sarajevo in 1992, her father, Jure Pelivan, was the first Prime Minister of independent Bosnia and Herzegovina. She became a refugee in Germany and later worked with relief organizations and accompanied deliveries of humanitarian aid to the camps of Bosnian refugees in Croatia.

“For me, it was not humanitarian mission only but also a personal and political one, ” she told FreeMediaOnline.org.   ”I am just sorry that the notions of human dignity, individual rights and fairness have a different meaning for the American bosses of that great radio station than for its employees. The bosses are not ‘living American values’, in the words of Hillary Clinton who has recently visited RFE/RL. They’re just selling them — but with less and less success. The salesmen are losing the trust of their own employees and the people to whom they try to sell their ideas.”

Neither Pelivan nor Karapetian see their cases as wrongful termination claims by individual employees but as a landmark lawsuit designed to put an end to a “shameful discrimination” that has affected many journalists at RFE/RL. They describe themselves as having the determination and the support of their friends, RFE/RL employees, and families to stand up to the radio station’s management and the BBG. Other journalists from Belarus, Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tatarstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, North Caucasus, and former Yugoslavia whose contracts were terminated could not afford to lose their severance pay by not signing a release agreement demanded by RFE/RL.

The agreement stipulates that “to receive a severance as a result of involuntary termination”,  they had to sign a letter of “General Release”, which states unequivocally: “In consideration of the payments and promises contained in this letter, you agree…” Then follows half a page of promises and obligations not to make any claims, demands, complaints, legal charges against RFE/RL, and to keep the whole matter strictly confidential. After signing such a letter, they receive severance pay for their work at the radio station. Often, it is a double-digit figure depending on number of years with RFE/RL. Anna Karapetian and Snjezana Pelivan did not sign it together with another former RFE/RL employee who later decided not to go to court.

While there may be legitimate reasons for RFE/RL and the BBG to make job reductions, the current practice does not protect foreign-born journalists from arbitrary terminations and retaliation by the management. Both Anna Karapetian and Snjezana Pelivan were considered outstanding employees and received excellent performance reviews. One former RFE/RL broadcaster told FreeMediaOnline.org that after landing on a street in Prague – with no job and no prospect to find one, no income, no language, no connections, no usable education and  experience but with a family, kids, sometimes other dependent relatives – it is no surprise that most people sign the release and take the ”shut up” money. This former RFE/RL journalist pointed out that Turkmen or Uzbek broadcasters who report on human rights abuses ”are not in high demand in  the Czech Republic or elsewhere, just in Turkmen and Uzbek prisons.”  The BBG and RFE/RL worked together to make sure that these journalists would have no access to legal protections or union representation that could safeguard them from unfair treatment. Read Broadcasting Board of Governors Rated Worst Than Ever By Its Employees and As One of The Worst Federal Agencies.

These policies of discriminating against journalists and other employees on the basis of national origin are directly linked to the BBG’s efforts over more than a decade to privatize U.S. international broadcasting. One of the main goals was to bypass many of the U.S. government personnel rules which apply to employees at the Washington-based Voice of America (VOA), which is also managed by the BBG. While the BBG kept outsourcing U.S. broadcasting jobs abroad and to private contractors, VOA  was being slowly dismantled. In the view of most BBG members, the U.S. government offered too many protections to employees and prevented the BBG from quickly implementing the previous Administration’s schemes for changing  the public opinion in the Middle East that turned out to be wateful and counterproductive.

Without understanding the special mission of U.S. international broadcasting and the special role of journalists engaging in human rights reporting to countries ruled by repressive regimes, BBG members want to treat them the same way as employees of U.S. commercial broadcasters. Unlike most of their foreign-born colleagues,  fired American journalists with job experience and degrees from American universities can compete for new jobs in the large and open U.S. media market. More importantly, they have rights that are being denied by the BBG to foreign-born journalists at RFE/RL and to journalists working for other BBG-managed private contractors. Lacking job security, they were less likely than their colleagues at VOA to question the BBG’s misguided ideas about increasing audience reach with entertainment programming. Fearful of losing their jobs, they were also less likely to resist the pressure to offer a platform to Holocaust deniers in the hope of winning approval among Alhurra’s viewers. 

There is an additional journalistic and security risk associated with this kind of treatment of vulnerable employees. FreeMediaOnline.org has warned that denying RFE/RL journalists basic rights and job security makes them and their families more vulnerable to intimidation by intelligence and security services of countries like Russia and Uzbekistan.

Embolden by the freedom to fire and hire journalists in Prague, the BBG executive staff has been trying to find ways to subject workers at the Voice of America to some of the personnel practices used against foreign-born employees at RFE/RL and at other private broadcasting entities under their management. This task is being accomplished largely through program and budget cuts designed to reduce the number of government employees protected by the union and Federal personnel rules.

In order to continue broadcasting to critical regions of the world, these budget and program cuts have forced the Voice of America to rely increasingly on independent contractors, called Purchase Order Vendors (POVs), who work without any job protections. In violation of existing U.S. laws, they perform all the functions of full-time government employees, but as in the case of foreign-born journalists at RFE/RL, they can be dismissed at any time without any reason.

Recently, a TV producer  in VOA’s Russian Service was abruptly fired after years of excellent and loyal service but cannot challenge her dismissal because she is not a government employee. The system imposed by the BBG prevents contract workers, who for all practical purposes are regular employees, form joining a union and protecting their rights. It also allows managers to fire older workers, often women, and replace them with friends and former associates.

VOA’s Russian Service has become the latest target of the BBG’s efforts to weaken and dismantle Voice of America broadcasting in favor of private radio stations such as Alhurra and RFE/RL.  In July 2008, the BBG eliminated all VOA on-air radio broadcasts to Russia just 12 days before the Russian military invasion of the disputed part of Georgia. As a direct result of  the BBG’s actions, VOA’s annual audience reach in Russia diminished by an unprecedented 98% in just one year, from 7.3% in 2007 to the estimated figure of just 0.2% in 2009.

Both Republicans and Democrats serving on the BBG have supported privatization of U.S. international broadcasting, limiting the rights of foreign-born journalists at RFE/RL, and dismantling of VOA broadcast services. The effort to eliminate all VOA Arabic-language programs and to create privately-run Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television wanted by neoconservatives in the Bush White House and the Pentagon was led by two prominent former Democratic BBG members: Norman Pattiz, founder of Westwood One radio syndicate, and Edward E. Kaufman, now a U.S. Senator from Delaware. Since their creation, there have been reports of numerous financial and editorial scandals at both of these stations, including charges of giving airtime to Holocaust deniers. A study by researchers for the University of Southern California, who conducted a review of Alhurra broadcasts, concluded that “the quality of Alhurra’s journalism is substandard on several levels.“ With only one BBG member, conservative radio host Blanquita Cullum voicing her concern, all others supported eliminating VOA radio broadcasts to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, India and a number of other countries. As a result of the decisions taken by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the Voice of America no longer has any Arabic-language programs. Read ProPublica.org: Report Calls Alhurra a Failure

Hillary Rodham Clinton did not join the BBG until she became the Secretary of State in the Obama Administration and was not involved in making these controversial decisions. Both Anna Karapetian and Snjezana Pelivan hope that a woman of her experience and stature would intervene to put a stop to some of the mismanagement and abuses for which they hold the BBG and its executive staff responsible.  Snjezana Pelivan had petitioned the Czech court to question Secretary Clinton about the BBG’s personnel policies because of her role as the Board’s ex officio member. There was very little chance, however, that a Czech court would take this step and in any case Hillary Clinton, as a foreign government official who enjoys diplomatic immunity, could not be compelled to give a testimony. As one former RFE/RL journalist ironically observed, in rejecting Snjezana Pelivan’s claim, the Czech court ruled that RFE/RL is in full compliance with a Communist law. When RFE/RL was based in Munich, Germany, its employees enjoyed full protection of German labor laws. When the radio station was moved to Prague in 1995, the BBG gladly took advantage of Communist-era Czech laws to limit the rights of RFE/RL journalists. Unless there is a settlement, the case will most likely be decided by the European Human Rights Court in Strasbourg.

Some of the current and former BBG members, including Norman Pattiz, Senator Kaufman, and D. Jeffrey Hirschberg have close ties to Vice President Biden and Secretary Clinton. It’s not clear whether these personal ties and the fact that these Democrats joined forces with neoconservatives in the Bush Administration will affect how Secretary Clinton the Obama White House deal with the reports of mismanagement at the  BBG.  Snjezana Pelivan hopes that the new Secretary of State might make a difference, but she is only cautiously optimistic after learning that Mrs. Clinton made no public comments about BBG’s personnel policies during her recent visit to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty headquarters in Prague:

“I admire Hillary Clinton, but I felt sorry for her when I was reading her address to RFE/RL journalists. She had to visit RFE/RL; it is “her” Radio now. But everybody there who listened to her knew about mine and Anna’s court cases; everybody knew that she was suggested as a witness against RFE/RL; and everybody knows that we are fighting not only for our but also for their rights and dignity.”

Snjezana Pelivan says that she plans to ask the Croatian Government to join her in her case against RFE/RL and the BBG at the European Court of Human Rights. Anna Karapetian may also ask the Armenian Government to join the suit. For more information about the case see the press release from ICCEE - Information Centre – CAUCUSUS EASTERN EUROPE. ICCEE, a non-governmental non-profit organization established in Prague in 1999, is the publisher of major Armenian magazine in Europe, Orer (Days).

Even some members of RFE/RL management are appalled by the personnel practices encouraged by the radio station’s former and current leadership and the BBG. One manager sent this letter to Ms. Pelivan:

“Dear Snjezana,

Forgive me for not being able to adequately express my feelings in this short e-mail. The news about your firing was too shocking and surprising. Yes, I’m deeply surprised by the fact that a professional like you was fired and by the way it was done. I don’t know the details of your cooperation with other services but on behalf of our service and its bureau I would like to express you our sympathy and gratitude for your very important job done with and for our service during last few years. It was a great pleasure to have you, an excellent teamworker, among us. I wish you all the best for the future. Best regards, (name withheld — SP)”

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. 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 FreeMediaOnline.org

FreeMediaOnline.org is a San Francisco-based nonprofit which supports media freedom worldwide. Founded in 2006, FreeMediaOnline.org reports on threats to media independence and assists journalists in media-at-risk countries.

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.

 FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog Commentary by Ted Lipien, March 25, 2009, San Francisco –  Miro Dobrovodsky, one of the best journalists who came to the U.S. from Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War to escape media censorship in their native countries, sent me an email pointing out that the process of silencing the Voice of America had started several years before the latest actions of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG)  aimed at further outsourcing and privatizing of U.S. international broadcasting.  His email was a reminder that Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine are only among the latest countries, to which VOA broadcasts were targeted by the BBG for elimination so that U.S. taxpayers’ money could flow more easily to private contractors and the private Alhurra Television network for the Middle East favored by BBG members, both Republicans and Democrats.

The BBG’s marketing strategy in the Muslim world has already been declared a failure in an academic study and by many independent journalists and Middle East experts. President Obama wisely avoided Alhurra in sending his first televised message to Arabic-speaking audiences. (Among other scandals, Alhurra Television gave extensive coverage to statements by Holocaust deniers who met at an international conference in Tehran.)

Miro reminded us that before the BBG took VOA radio broadcasts to Russia and Ukraine off the air last year — an action that in Russia caused an unprecendented 98% decline in annual audience reach from 10.3% in 2007 to 0.2% in 2009 (est.) –  the bipartisan board several years earlier had ended VOA broadcasts to the three Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia) and seven other Central and East European nations. They were among the first victims of the BBG’s intense dislike of the Voice of America and its mission of representing America to the world in a serious, objective and authoritative manner.

In their eagerness to please neoconservative ideologues ignorant and disdainful of Arab and Islamic culture, BBG members were not really concerned who would credibly speak for America in the Middle East or anywhere else, and if they were, they had absolutely no idea what works and what does not outside of their narrow Washington and commercial perspective. As a result of their actions, VOA could not offer a platform to present President Obama’s first message to the Arab audience because — as incredible as it may sound — the Voice of America no longer has any Arabic-language programs. BBG members made sure that all such VOA programs were eliminated. They should have known but were unable to comprehend that Alhurra, as designed by them, could not possibly be a credible news source in the Middle East.

The Voice of America became a target for the BBG because it was subject to far more stringent federal regulations and journalistic standards than the privatized broadcasters also being funded by U.S. taxpayers. Contractors and associates of BBG members could not only find better employment opportunities at these private entities than at the Voice of America but, with only some exceptions, these private broadcasters were also far less likely to resist simplistic marketing and propaganda ideas generated by the BBG members themselves.

Miro Dobrovodsky and other East European journalists at VOA got a bitter taste of the BBG’s strategies and marketing ideas several years before they were used against VOA services broadcasting to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and several other countries. This is what Miro wrote in his email:

“I’m sure some overactive bureaucrats will soon delete from VOA servers everything remaining from its past. They have already deleted almost everything on servers…, including some historically important files, both Czech & Slovak. And Polish. And Hungarian. And Baltic languages. And Slovene. Perhaps Russian and Ukrainian. You name it. …Norman Pattiz’s followers must look forward, not backwards. Amen.”

Norman Pattiz is a former BBG member who was instrumental in pushing for the creation of private broadcasting to the Middle East and the elimination of many VOA broadcasting services. Another former BBG member, Edward E. Kaufman, now a U.S. Senator from Delaware, led the effort to end VOA radio programs to Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia. Ironically, they are both Democrats and friends of Vice President Joe Biden. But the Republican BBG members, with only one exception, eagerly supported Mr. Pattiz’s vision of privatized broadcasting to the Muslim world and the assault on the Voice of America broadcasts. VOA Russian-language radio programs were taken off the air 12 days before Russia’s armed forces invaded Georgia last summer.

It is clear from this 2004 Voice of America report about Miro Dobrovodsky that journalists like him were not only highly respected by their overseas audiences but were also effective in establishing a dialogue with the local media and were able to accurately present American views and values. Many of the privatized broadcasters favored by the BBG are now based overseas.  Some of them, like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), operate now in part from a bureau in Moscow located within a close reach of the Kremlin’s secret police — a problem that the BBG has chosen to ignore when it made its decision to end VOA radio to Russia from Washington. Like Alhurra, RFE/RL is also trying to please its audience and the BBG’s executive staff which tells them to focus on generating higher ratings despite the Kremlin’s largely effective campaign to restrict rebroadcasts of RFE/RL, VOA, BBC, DW, and RFI programs in Russia and to silence journalists who dare to question some of the abuses of power by Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev. RFE/RL was criticized last year by a Russian human rights organization for giving extensive airtime to a Russian politician known for his racist views and verbal attacks on immigrants. The group warned that such broadcasts encourage violence.

Such compromises in pursuing higher ratings at the cost of journalistic and ethical values would have been unacceptable to VOA journalists like Miro Dobrovodsky.  I’m glad that this 2004 VOA report about his journalistic career has been saved from the delete button of the BBG bureaucrats. FreeMediaOnline.org was also able to save recordings of the last VOA on-air radio programs to Russia and Ukraine. We have also developed a Russian-language web site, GovoritAmerika.us, which offers news analysis from multiple U.S. government and nongovernment sources to compensate for the budget cuts and restrictions imposed on VOA by the BBG. The website is run by volunteers and receives no public funding.

 ГоворитАмерика.us – Всесторонний Анализ Новостей из США

The following is a Voice of America report.

Miroslav Dobrovodsky

 The Voice of America in late February [2004] ceased broadcasting in ten East European languages: Bulgarian, Estonian, Czech, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Rumanian, Slovenian and Slovak. Today on New American Voices, Miro Dobrovodsky, a journalist who spent 15 years directing VOA’s broadcasts to former Czechoslovakia and later to Slovakia, looks back on the work of his service, and on his own journey from Slovakia to America.

Miro Dobrovodsky, a big, burly man whose square face is framed by curly red hair and a greying red beard, says he has no doubt that VOA’s broadcasts contributed to the Velvet Revolution which brought down communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989.

Receiving VOA Excellence in Programming Awards

“Oh, definitely. Definitely. Everybody says so. We even got awards from Slovakia. I personally got the Silver Medal of Freedom from the Slovak President because of what the Voice of America did. We kept people aware that not only something different is possible, but there are people already working for it.”

In its broadcasts in Slovak to what until the so-called “Velvet Divorce” of 1993 was Czechoslovakia, Miro Dobrovodsky says VOA’s greatest contribution was providing news – news not only about what was happening in the world, but in the country itself. Under communist rule, the press was in the service of the state, and barred from reporting information about dissenting views or the activities of dissidents. So it fell to international broadcasters like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and others to provide the other side of the picture: the protests, the charters, the petitions in support of human rights and freedom.

Czech President and former dissident Vaclav Havel thanking VOA

“There were signatories for freedom. At that time, that was the kind of journalism… Under normal circumstances, it is not news if you are reading 25 names. But behind the Iron Curtain, if you read twenty-five names of people who had signed something against the regime, it was hot stuff, and a major story.”

To illustrate the importance of VOA’s news to the Slovak and Czech audiences, Mr. Dobrovodsky quotes a friend who returned from a visit to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, when it was still under the communist regime. His friend recalled that as he walked through the city night, a familiar tune – VOA’s old “Yankee Doodle” station I.D. – caught his ear:

As a young reporter in Bratislava, ca. 1966

“He said that he was walking in a new quarter of town, high-rises, you know, and at 9 PM he heard Yankee Doodle in stereo. And I said to him that we aren’t broadcasting in stereo. And he says, ‘No, no, no, but it’s August, every window is open, and when you hear it from a thousand windows, even quietly, it sounds like Yankee Doodle in stereo.’”

Journalism has been Miro Dobrovodsky’s life-long passion. He started writing at 13, and in his teens became the movie reviewer for a local weekly in northern Slovakia. His plans to study journalism were thwarted initially because his father was not a communist party member. Eventually he did graduate from Bratislava University’s Faculty of Journalism, and found a job in one of Slovakia’s foremost news magazines, Zivot. After some professional ups and downs, brought on by his own refusal to join the communist party, Mr. Dobrovodsky found himself again reporting for Zivot during what became known as the Prague Spring of 1968 – the short period of liberalization under Communist Party boss Alexander Dubcek.

“So we started very aggressively writing about subjects which over here, in the western world, are normal – to be critical even of the party, to be critical of local government. Until then it was taboo, this kind of subject.”

The Prague Spring ended on August 21, 1968, when Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia and brought liberalization to a bloody end. For two weeks, Mr. Dobrovodsky edited an underground newspaper, publishing news, pictures, and statements about what was happening in the country. He believed it was just a matter of time before the state police arrested him, so when the border to Austria opened, he fled to the West with his wife and three small children. Mr. Dobrodovsky spent several years as a refugee in Canada, where he found work as a photographer, in an oil refinery, on a car assembly line, and finally in the Slovak service of Radio Canada International. Eventually he was hired by the Voice of America and moved to Washington.

At VOA, Miro Dobrovodsky says, he found satisfying work in all aspects of journalism. He reported on news events, interviewed newsmakers, emceed programs, maintained contact with colleagues in Slovakia and other countries, participated in training a new generation of Slovak journalists, developed a network of affiliated FM stations in Slovakia that rebroadcast the VOA Slovak programs. And though he notes that the media situation in Slovakia and other East European countries has much improved, he still regrets VOA’s decision to end its broadcasts to this part of the world.

Interviewing Alexander Dubcek

“When one is following their newspapers, their journalism, they… as we all know, each story may have different pegs, or different ideas, I mean one story can illustrate many different points. And it’s still true. Nobody’s lying, not even them. For example, now when we’re talking about Iraq and Afghanistan and Al Qaeda and all that stuff, most of the stories over there they are going after casualties, and to put some, I feel, negative light on the United States. And not necessarily to pick up what is important from our point of view. In other words, we can write two lines, or seven lines, and completely differently – and this is what VOA was doing: adding to their story, our story. And it is not opinion, it is not propaganda, it’s just a different point of view, and a different mirror.”

Voice of America broadcaster Miro Dobrovodsky, who headed VOA’s Czechoslovak and later Slovak services during almost two decades of tumultuous and historic change in his native country.

But even the low figure of 2.5% does not reflect the whole severity of the decline since it represents VOA audience for the whole of 2008 and not VOA’s current reach in Russia. FreeMediaOnline.org, a San Francisco-based media freedom nonprofit,  estimates that the annual reach for VOA in Russia is now well below 1 percent.

According to FreeMediaOnline.org president Ted Lipien,  the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the agency in charge of VOA, is to blame for causing a 98% loss of audience in just one year. Lipien said that BBG’s actions have caused hundreds of thousands of U.S. taxpayer dollars to be wasted at a time when audiences in Russia are faced with increased media censorship and need access to objective news and opinions from the United States. 

With the elimination by the BBG of on-air VOA radio and TV for Russia in the second half of last year, FreeMediaOnline.org estimates the total audience since August/September 2008 to be not much higher than 0.2 percent. InterMedia — the firm which conducted the survey – reported 0.2% as past year’s reach of VOA Russian Service website. InterMedia also reported that only a very small percentage of former VOA Russian radio listeners and TV viewers are visiting VOA website.

From the InterMedia market media report: “International Broadcasting in Russia,”  December 2008:

VOA Russian [Service] stopped airing radio and TV programs by September 2008 (video and audio segments are still aired by a small number of local stations); Internet is Golos Ameriki’s [VOA Russian Service] principal focus for reaching audiences in Russia. This caused a drop in total annual reach for Golos Ameriki from 10.3 percent in 2007 to 2.5 percent in 2008. Past-year reach for VOA’s golosameriki.us Internet site was 0.2 percent.[Emphasis added by FreeMediaOnline.org.] Other international broadcasters were able to maintain their reach, with Radio Svoboda [Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)] reaching 1.0 percent of Russians weekly and 3.2 percent annually; BBC reaching 0.8 percent weekly and 3.3 percent annually; and DW [the German broadcaster] reaching 0.7 percent weekly and 2.0 annually. As with Golos Ameriki, [VOA Russian Service] only a very small portion of this reach can currently be attributed to the websites. 

In late July 2008, just twelve days before the Russian army invaded parts of Georgia in a territorial dispute,  the BBG took all VOA  Russian-language radio programs off the air and later canceled VOA Russian-language TV programs. These decisions were made without any public announcements and implemented despite protests from members of Congress, VOA journalists, and human rights organizations.

The subsequent tremendous drop in audience size (98% in just one year — an unprecedented loss of audience for an existing  media service in the history of international broadcasting) can be attributed almost entirely to decisions made by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a small group of presidentially-appointed officials representing both major political parties and their executive staff who manage U.S.-funded broadcasts for overseas audiences.  Critics of the BBG’s actions argue that these decisions have deprived VOA journalists of their ability to counter censorship in Russia by making it impossible for VOA to use multiple program delivery platforms and media products at a critical time.

VOA and other Western international broadcasters have experienced a steady loss of audience reach in Russia over a number of years as a result of the Kremlin’s restrictive media policies. But according to Ted Lipien, president of FreeMediaOnline.org, the sudden multifold  drop in 2008 was a direct result of actions taken by U.S. government officials and cannot be attributed to any new restrictions by the Russian authorities.  Also confirming that the BBG is to blame for the sudden loss of VOA audience in Russia  was an observation in the InterMedia report that ”other international broadcasters were able to maintain their reach” last year.

Former BBG chairman,  James K. Glassman – known for his neoconservative views, support for privatization of U.S. international broadcasting assets, and great enthusiasm for the use of Internet –  personally rejected urgent requests from VOA journalists who pleaded with him last August to allow them to resume radio broadcasts to Russia and the war zone in Georgia.

BBG officials justified their actions by claiming that VOA would be in a better position to overcome Russian government media censorship if it concentrated its programming efforts exclusively on the Internet. FreeMediaOnline.org and others repeatedly warned the BBG that this strategy was extremely naive and would reward Mr. Putin’s censorship of independent media. The same critics predicted a drastic drop in audience size for VOA if the BBG implemented its plan. They also pointed out that the BBG plan called for spending money on needless projects benefiting private Internet contractors while the Russian Service would be deprived of substantive Internet content previously generated from radio and TV programs.  Read FreeMediaOnline.org report “Model Interactive Website Touted As Replacement for Voice of America Radio to Russia Attracts No Comments from Users”

This is how in an internal memo “VOA Russian Options Paper,”  written in 2008, government bureaucrats inspired by the BBG’s marketing strategies, boasted about their ability to substantially increase VOA audience size in Russia using only the Internet:

Based on the situation in Georgia and the separatist territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, VOA has investigated options to reach audiences in Russia and neighboring countries. While options exists for reaching audiences through traditional broadcast methods — AM/FM, shortwave, and television — data indicate the growing market for reaching our target audience is in new media.

FreeMediaOnline.org sent a critique of the Internet-only strategy to the BBG, but a former BBG member, Edward E. Kaufman, who is now a Democratic Senator from Delaware, reportedly blocked an effort  by another Board member to hold a vote on resuming VOA radio broadcasts to Russia. Kaufman, another Board member Jeff Hirschberg, and the BBG executive director Jeffrey Trimble are believed to have initiated the move to deprive VOA of radio and TV presence in Russia in order to benefit Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Jeff Hirschberg and Jeffrey Trimble, who was formerly acting president of RFE/RL, have personal links with RFE/RL managers in Moscow and Prague, while Senator Kaufman may have supported the move because RFE/RL is incorporated in Delaware. His former boss, Vice President Biden, was also known to be a strong supporter of the private broadcaster during and after the Cold War. Trimble and most BBG members ignored warnings that by establishing a large presence in Russia after the Cold War, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has exposed its reporters, who are Russian citizens, to intimidation and blackmail by the Russian secret police. This was not seen as a problem immediately after the end of the Cold War but after Mr. Putin’s rise to power (he is a former KGB officer) is viewed as a serious threat to RFE/RL’s journalistic independence. Read FreeMediaOnline.org report Radio Liberty Russian managers put a positive spin on Putin’s comments about the murder of a pro-democracy journalist 

 VOA’s audience reach in Russia had been previously reduced over time due to the Russian secret police interference with the affiliate stations using VOA programs but never suffered a similar one-time loss, not even from major increases of jamming of shortwave radio signals during the Cold War.  FreeMediaOnline.org had warned that eliminating VOA radio and TV in Russia would be harmful to media freedom and would send a wrong signal to the Kremlin and human rights activists.

While all major Western international broadcasters have been increasing their Internet presence, none followed the BBG’s course on relying exclusively on the Internet in Russia and dropping both radio and TV. Ted Lipien said that a proper response to the growing media censorship in Russia should have been an expansion of the number of delivery platforms rather than their reduction to a single one. Before leaving public service, he was an acting associate director of the Voice of America. To compensate for restrictions and reductions in VOA output, FreeMediaOnline.org has launched a volunteer-run GovoritAmerica.us website, which compiles Russian-language news and analysis about the United States and U.S.-Russian relations.

Journalists working in the VOA Russian Service also don’t see BBG’s actions as designed to help them but rather as being part of the same strategy that resulted in the dismantling and eventual total elimination of VOA Arabic-language programs as well VOA broadcasts in other languages. After they had created Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television, BBG members made sure that VOA no longer had any Arabic-language programs. Some VOA Russian Service journalists suspect that the BBG executive staff purposely mislead the Board about the benefits of the Internet-only option in order to justify later a complete elimination of VOA broadcasts to Russia citing low audience ratings, which they knew would result from their actions.

One of many nonprofit foreign policy organizations, which believes the BBG has seriously mismanaged U.S. international broadcasting, is the highly-respected Public Diplomacy Council. The organization, which includes former diplomats, academics and other foreign policy experts, has called on President elect Obama and Congress to take urgent action in reforming publicly-funded U.S. international broadcasting. The Council blames the BBG for ignoring strategically important target areas such as Russia, the Balkans, India and the Western Hemisphere. The Council noted that the Broadcasting Board of Governors “has taken special aim at the Voice of America” by abolishing the VOA Arabic Service and reducing its broadcasts in English to the Middle East and other regions.  The Council also criticized the BBG’s decision to terminate all VOA radio broadcasts in Russian shortly before Russia’s military attack on Georgia last summer. Read FreeMediaOnline.org report: Public Diplomacy Experts Urge Obama to Stop the Broadcasting Board of Governors from Silencing the Voice of America

Many VOA journalists, NGO media freedom activists, and former U.S. diplomats believe that the BBG, dominated by an alliance of Republican neoconservatives and Democrats who joined forces in formulating and supporting ill-conceived outreach programs vis-a-vis the Muslim world such as Alhurra and Radio Sawa,  is determined to continue expanding privatization of U.S. broadcasting resources. The latest push, which affected Russia and Ukraine and threatened Georgia, came between July and December, in the waning months of the Bush Administration, and may have been purposely orchestrated and timed to present the Obama Administration with a fait accompli.

Not satisfied with killing VOA radio in Russia, on December 31, 2008, the BBG terminated VOA radio programs to Ukraine. This action was taken just hours before Russia stopped the flow of natural gas supplies through Ukraine when that country was on the verge of a major economic and political crisis. The Ukrainian crisis has since then gotten much worse and  now seriously threatens democratic gains and pro-Western foreign policy of the government in Kiev.

Critics have been warning for years that the Broadcasting Board of Governors is outsourcing vital journalistic and public diplomacy functions to private entities and contractors who – as a direct result of BBG’s marketing policies – are unable and unwilling to reflect American opinions and values and lack basic journalistic skills. (BBG-created private broadcaster Alhurra Television for the Middle East aired comments by Holocaust deniers and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty gave extensive airtime to extremist Russian politicians known for their racist views.)  A study by researchers for the University of Southern California, who conducted a review of Alhurra broadcasts, concluded that “The quality of Alhurra’s journalism is substandard on several levels.“

Critics also accuse the BBG of ignoring such problems with these private broadcasters and of deliberately trying to dismantle the Voice of America, which operates under strict U.S. government fiscal controls and enjoys journalistic independence under a Congressional Charter. The Charter requires VOA to adhere to high journalistic standards and to accurately and objectively represent a broad spectrum of American views. According to critics, BBG officials prefer to steer money to private broadcasters, such as Alhurra and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, because these stations can be more easily controlled. They can also be used to benefit their friends and supporters with high-paying positions and private contracts.

According to these critics, the BBG executive staff knew from previous market research that  VOA’s annual reach on the Internet for its Russian-language programs in Russia was well below one percent. (Weekly reach for VOA Russian website is far lower: 0.03%.) Despite of this data, BBG officials made widely exaggerated predictions and ignored obvious warnings that the Russian security services are fully capable of blocking and manipulating the Internet. RFE/RL was not ordered by the BBG to drop its shortwave radio broadcasts and managed to hold on to its radio audience, as did the BBC  and Deutsche Welle Russian-language services — another proof that the sudden 98% drop in VOA’s reach in Russia was orchestrated by the BBG and its executive staff.

Ted Lipien of FreeMediaOnline.org said that the actions of BBG officials that have obliterated VOA audience in Russia not only harm media freedom but represent  a monumental waste of U.S. taxpayers’ money. “In just one year, these BBG officials and their staff have completely wasted 98% of a VOA broadcasting service budget,  making a free gift of  hundreds of thousands of U.S. tax dollars to Mr. Putin and other enemies of democracy and free media in Russia,” Lipien said. Even if the BBG managed to increase VOA Russian-language website’s reach by 100% each year for the next few years,  — a highly unlikely prospect — it would take about a decade to go from 0.2 percent to the 2007/2008 level registered before the BBG’s single program delivery platform strategy was put into place.

As many critics have feared, there is also evidence that the BBG’s marketing policies may have started  a process of promoting censorship and self-censorship at the Voice of America, which would be a violation of the VOA Charter and U.S. law. In an apparent attempt to increase ratings similar to what seemed to have encouraged airing of statements by Holocaust deniers on Alhurra and giving airtime to racist politicians on RFE/RL broadcasts, VOA Russian Service journalists were reportedly confronted with the BBG-commissioned market research analysis and told to avoid topics that are “confrontational” to the Russian audience. They were also reportedly ”berated” for their “hostile” and “in your face” blogging and urged  not to express their opinions in blogs.

“They want VOA’s Russian Service toothless,” was the conclusion of one VOA journalist who remains defiant but is afraid that the BBG will succeed in destroying VOA Russian-language programs as they did earlier with VOA Arabic broadcasts and many other VOA vernacular and English services. “That is the only way to characterize their demands,” this VOA Russian Service journalist wrote, ”because most of our materials will not be liked by [the] Kremlin and its agents (how do we know that [market research] monitors are not Kremlin’s loyal servers?). Welcome to the new era at VOA’ Russian Service!”

The VOA journalist did not want to be identified for fear of retaliation. VOA employees have no confidence in the BBG’s ability to manage international broadcasting.  In a recent government-wide survey, they rated their employer as one of the very worst among U.S. government agencies. Read FreeMediaOnline.org report Broadcasting Board of Governors Rated Worst Than Ever By Its Employees and As One of The Worst Federal Agencies

More comments from a VOA Russian Service journalist:

I am reading the program review materials [annual evaluation of a VOA program] now and can’t help laughing at some things. For instance, it states that “given the unfavorable media climate in Russia today, characterized by increasingly strict government control, VOA Russian has embarked on a project to develop a multi-media, interactive web site that will allow the Service to circumvent the problem of government pressures which have led to the loss of most of its affiliates.”

Translation: VOA and IBB [IBB -- the International Broadcasting Bureau] is a technical arm of the BBG] closed Russian radio and TV programs and put all eggs in one basket at a time when Kremlin is following China’s steps to establish full control of Internet.

All VOA’s independent evaluators “related concerns about ongoing difficulties associates with the functionality of video files (on our site). One suggested that incompatibility between site formats and available local technologies ( in Russia and other former Soviet states) might exacerbate this problem.”

Translation: VOA management is clueless about media infrastructure in countries other then the U.S. and wastes money, resources and talent without achieving the goals of U.S. international broadcasting.

Senator Richard Lugar is right about past mistakes that had crippled U.S. public diplomacy, but new actions by the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors also continue to silence America’s voice abroad

Closed Down American Centers and Crippled Voice of America

In an insightful and candid article posted on the Foreign Policy magazine blog, Senator Richard R. Lugar, argues that the United States can only blame itself for not being able to properly explain America to the world. He pointed out that “reaching out to the man or woman on the streets of Jakarta or Caracas or Cairo is the practice of public diplomacy,” which, unfortunately — according to Senator Lugar — the U.S. government has not done very effectively in recent years. The closing down of American information and cultural centers abroad — the subject of Senator Lugar’s article — is, however, only one example of an American institution destroyed or severely crippled by political expediency and naivete of Washington bureaucrats. The Voice of America (VOA)  — international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. Government  — is another institution being dismantled by the very agency — the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) – set up to strengthen U.S. broadcasts to the world and to represent America abroad.  

In his article, the Republican senator from Indiana noted the continued existence of various U.S. public diplomacy initiatives, including the Peace Corps and the Fulbright academic exchange program. He also mentioned the Voice of America without offering any further comments about VOA. His overall conclusion, however, after analyzing other public diplomacy programs, was that the United States has been “waging the battle of ideas with one hand tied behind its back.”

Lugar’s criticism is focused on the dismantling of the United States Information Agency (USIA) by a joint action, taken by the Clinton Administration and the U.S. Congress, and the subsequent closing down of American information and cultural enters around the world. Senator Lugar wrote that the United States no longer has “a worldwide equivalent to what Britain and France have, namely, facilities in major world cities with libraries, reading rooms, outreach programs, unfiltered Internet access, film series, lectures, and English classes that enable people to meet with Americans of all walks of life and hold two-way conversations on issues of mutual interest.”

The central point of Senator Lugar’s article is that the U.S. government’s own actions and inactions have contributed to its inability to conduct effective public diplomacy overseas. But the closing down of American centers has not been the only action that was damaging to America’s image abroad in recent years. While Senator Lugar noted that the Voice of America still exists, many of VOA radio programs for overseas audiences have in fact been terminated by the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

BBG Ends VOA Radio to Russia Less than Two Weeks before Russia Invades Georgia

In an incredible show of bad judgment, this bipartisan board had taken VOA radio programs to Russia off the air just 12 days before the Russian invasion of Georgia last summer. The BBG also ended VOA radio broadcasts to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania just as Mr. Putin started to increase pressure on Russia’s neighboring states to make them follow the Kremlin’s foreign policy objectives. BBG members even wanted to terminate VOA radio broadcasts to the Republic of Georgia — one of the most vulnerable of the former Soviet republics – but the Russian invasion forced them to suspend their decision, at least temporarily. Earlier, the BBG also tried to reduce radio broadcasts to Tibet.  The Board only backed off when pro-independence demonstrations in Tibet were bloodily suppressed and a group of Tibetan monks staged a silent protest on Capital Hill.

In yet another show of incredibly poor judgment combined with bad timing and ulterior bureaucratic motives resulting in a major waste of U.S. tax dollars, the BBG had silenced Voice of America radio programs to Ukraine on December 31, 2008, just one day before Russia halted natural gas deliveries to Europe. Since then, Ukraine has sunk further into a major economic and political crisis, which is threatening its pro-Western foreign policy and democratic changes won during the Orange Revolution.

As a supporter of American Centers abroad who appreciates the value of teaching English and sharing American culture, Senator Lugar would probably also appreciate the damage of the BBG’s persistent efforts to reduce funding for Voice of America English broadcasts. (BBG claims that some of these VOA programs have small audiences and therefore should be terminated. But the BBG has done close to nothing to help market and distribute such programs. The agency instead poured millions of dollars into private entities and their contractors. As it turns out, the results in terms of audience size in many cases are not statistically significantly any better than what traditional VOA broadcasting was able to deliver at a much lower cost and with much greater credibility in representing America.)

Responding to these decisions, a union representing the Voice of America employees said on its website that the BBG has made “at least a half dozen mistakes in the past few months.” One of them resulted in the silencing of the Voice of America Hindi radio broadcasts just a few weeks before the terrorists attacks in Mumbai. ProPublica.org, a nonprofit investigative journalism website, and FreeMediaOnline.org, another nonprofit organization which supports media freedom worldwide, have also reported extensively on journalistic scandals and mismanagement at the BBG.

“America” As a Bad Word — Market Research without Political and Human Rights Context

BBG officials argue that their actions are based on solid market research. Theirs is the same argument used previously to justify the closing down of American information and cultural centers around the world, namely that radio — which comes as close to providing similar people-to-people contact with real Americans as American centers had done before they were eliminated — is not nearly as effective as the Internet, short video clips, and other impersonal but highly technological solutions.

The real story behind the BBG’s actions is a combination of incredible incompetence and the desire of BBG members to subcontract Voice of America work to private entities which can benefit their U.S.-based friends, supporters and constituents. Several years ago, BBG bureaucrats spent countless hours discussing names for  their new privatized broadcasting stations for the Middle East, making sure above all that no word “American” was used. Their market research showed that Muslim audiences did not approve of such verbal associations with America. We can only imagine what the Voice of America would have been named if the BBG had existed during World War II and had been able to conduct market research in Hitler’s Germany. Presumably, at that time most Germans also did not like the word “American.”

Dubious Market Research in Russia Results in Attempts at Censorship

More recently, BBG-commissioned market research in Russia revealed that panels of Russian media users don’t like to hear criticism of Mr. Putin’s authoritarian rule. Based on the previous BBG logic and actions, VOA journalists — who had been told to start blogging after the BBG eliminated their radio programs to Russia — are likely to be urged now to go easy on criticizing Mr. Putin and to hold back on expressing in their blogs their personal opinions about human rights abuses. Inside sources told FreeMediaOnline.org that such instructions have in fact been issued to the VOA Russian Service staff, although it’s unclear where within the BBG hierarchy they have originated. What’s quite clear, however, is that the BBG is responsible for creating a culture in which bureaucratic interests and poorly-understood and often patently compromised market research data take precedence over journalistic values, human rights concerns, and plain common sense.

It is unlikely that VOA Russian Service journalists, who are committed to journalistic freedom and objectivity and protected by the Congressionally approved VOA Charter, would comply with censorship orders. “They want VOA’s Russian Service toothless,” was a conclusion of one VOA journalist who remains defiant. Ultimately, however, their jobs as journalists are not protected if the BBG wants to get rid of those who do not play ball. Since VOA employees cannot be fired directly for their criticism, the way the BBG had dealt with such internal opposition it in the past was by eliminating programs which these employees produce and making them subject to reduction-in-force separation from government employment.

One of the reasons the BBG favors privatized broadcast entities over VOA is the ability to fire their journalists at will. The BBG even denies some foreign-based journalists basic protections of U.S. labor laws. BBG members may not even realize that this has serious implications for America’s image abroad and journalistic freedom. These abhorrent, un-American, and undemocratic BBG policies also make these foreign journalists insecure about their employment more vulnerable to intimidation and recruitment by the intelligence services of dictatorial regimes.

The Russian Service journalists, who were completely demoralized when the former BBG Chairman James K. Glassman personally refused their urgent pleas to allow them to resume radio broadcasts to the war zone in Georgia, have recovered much of their fighting spirit and seem unafraid to offer highly critical comments about Mr. Putin’s rule in Russia and the suppression of local independent media. BBG-ordered program cuts, however, severely limit their ability to provide in-depth multimedia coverage of human rights abuses and other critical issues.

BBG Market Research Encourages Airing of Racist Views on RFE/RL

A few years earlier, BBG-hired private consultants also cited market research to force programming changes at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) — a surrogate broadcaster with a splendid Cold War record completely mismanaged and set adrift by the BBG. Based on market research, RFE/RL journalists were strongly discouraged from sounding too critical about human rights abuses in Mr. Putin’s Russia. Those who resisted were silenced, fired or forced to resign. BBG consultants told RFE/RL reporters that Russian audiences want a more positive view of Russian society and politics and a more critical view of the West. 

About the same time, BBG member Jeff Hirschberg (D. Jeffrey Hirschberg), who has business links in Russia, and the Board’s executive director Jeffrey Trimble conducted secret negotiations with Russian officials to assure them that RFE/RL would practice only ”responsible” journalism. When human rights journalist Anna Politkovskaya was brutally murdered in 2006, their hand-picked managers in charge of RFE/RL operations Moscow and Prague expressed confidence in Mr. Putin’s leadership. Another change resulting from BBG market research in Russia was to allow Russian nationalists and other extremists access to Radio Liberty airwaves, causing a Russian human rights organization to issue a warning that comments by these individuals on a U.S. taxpayer-funded station promote acts of violence against immigrants, Blacks, and other minorities.

In criticizing Radio Liberty, the Moscow Human Rights Bureau said the station was guilty not only  of enabling such people “to spread their poisonous views,” but also of legitimizing their ideas “in the minds of many impressionable radio listeners.” The appeal, written by the organization’s head Aleksandr Brod, argues that stations, which “in their pursuit of higher ratings“ invite such “nationalist radicals,” are giving these enemies of democracy a larger audience and exacerbating ethnic tensions.

BBG Eliminated Voice of America Arabic Broadcasts

Because most VOA journalists would not blindly accept BBG’s directives, former and current BBG members had made sure earlier that the Voice of America would no longer have any Arabic-language broadcasts that would be immune to BBG-desired changes based on short-term trends identified by dubious market research. With strong encouragement and support from the Bush White House, BBG officials created instead Alhurra Television for the Middle East, making sure it has no cumbersome journalistic and financial standards used by VOA and no mandate to present a broad spectrum of American views and values that some Middle Eastern audiences might find objectionable.

While I’m not an expert on the Middle East and the Islamic world, I have studied propaganda and written extensively on this subject. My media contacts throughout Eurasia have been quite clear that they are not fooled by clever names for broadcasting entities thought up by the BBG and would prefer to receive American news and views from an authoritative American source clearly identified for what it is. BBG officials and the Bush White House should have known that propaganda techniques used during World War II and even during the Cold War — one of which was to try to obscure the identity of the originator of news and information — have no chance of success in the era of instant communications and the Internet.

Denying the Holocaust at U.S. Taxpayers’ Expense

BBG members acted surprised when Alhurra reporters gave extensive coverage to statements from a Holocaust deniers’ conference, held in Tehran, with absolutely no attempt to present balancing views. Yet these Alhurra reporters and TV anchors were not doing anything in this case that BBG’s own market research would not support.
Use this link to the ProPublica.org web site to view the Alhurra report with English subtitles: http://www.propublica.org/feature/alhurra-video

Misleading Administration and Congress

In answers to written questions from Senator Richard Lugar submitted during her Senate confirmation process, Hillary Clinton said 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. 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.

Before being confirmed as the Secretary of State, Senator Clinton obviously had no time to study closely U.S. international broadcasting or the BBG (of which she is now an ex officio member). In her answers to Senator Lugar, she most likely repeated information provided by the BBG staff. She also told Senator Lugar that “performance of America’s international broadcast entities has been quite successful in telling America’s story (largely the task of the VOA).”

I believe Secretary Clinton, along with most Americans, would be surprised to learn that the Voice of America does not have a single Arabic-language program. Neither does any other U.S. government-supported entity that has “American” in its name — thanks to the BBG’s strategy of privatizing U.S.  international broadcasting and using market research to make decisions that ultimately belong in the political rather than commercial sphere.

In carrying out its privatization of U.S. international broadcasting, the BBG has ignored and mislead Congress and high Administration officials and has tried to keep secret its mistakes and actions designed to weaken the Voice of America. BBG officials had refused to make public an independent study, which was highly critical of Alhurra, until they were forced to make it available on the Internet by the Obama transition team. The termination of VOA radio broadcasts to Russia was also done without any public announcement.  

Supporting Privatized Entities More Important to BBG than Representing America

Senator Lugar is right that, from the U.S. public diplomacy perspective, the elimination of American centers abroad was a damage self-inflicted by the U.S. Government (the Clinton Administration and the U.S. Congress). Also a self-inflicted damage was the elimination of the VOA Arabic Service by the BBG and the termination of VOA on-air radio programs to Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and many other countries.

The governments of most of these countries would have gladly allowed VOA to continue these radio broadcasts on local stations, thus assuring VOA access to a wide audience. The situation in Russia is drastically different, with the secret police actively prohibiting VOA rebroadcasts by private stations and keeping a close eye on the work of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) journalists in Russia who are Russian citizens and thus subject to Kremlin’s laws.

The intimidation of RFE/RL reporters in Russia makes the continuation of VOA radio programs from the safety of Washington even more necessary as a powerful political signal to the Kremlin’s secret security services, and equally to the segment of the Russian population that cares about democracy and human rights. BBG officials, however, refuse to admit that there is a security problem, since they justified the termination of Voice of America radio broadcasts to Russia by claiming that RFE/RL radio broadcasts would be sufficient. They also don’t want scrutiny of their earlier decisions to place significant RFE/RL facilities and other U.S. international broadcasting resources in Moscow within easy reach of Russia’s security services.

Naive About Mr. Putin’s Secret Police and Internet in Russia

According to information and documents obtained by FreeMediaOnline.org, BBG staff shows a high level of cluelessness about the ability of the new, post-Soviet KGB, now known as the FSB (Mr. Putin’s former employer), to control the Internet in Russia. Despite obvious signs that the Internet is great but not safe in times of serious crisis and not sufficient to reach the most vulnerable audiences, BBG bureaucrats remain widely enthusiastic about their Internet-only strategy for VOA’s Russian Service. With their American-only mindset, they assume that war zone victims, refugees, and the poorest and most repressed segments of world’s populations have high-speed  and uncensored access to the Internet just like they do in their Washington suburban homes.

It may have not even occurred to these BBG officials that the audience panels they commissioned in Russia at great expense to U.S. taxpayers are most likely controlled by the Russian FSB. Based on my own experience working for many years with owners of pro-democracy private radio and TV stations in Russia who had been harassed into silence by the FSB,  the Kremlin’s spy agency almost certainly has tried to skew BBG’s market research and RFE/RL reporting from Russia.

BBG Deserves Greater Scrutiny

While he did not address these problems, Senator Lugar should be applauded for speaking out candidly about past U.S. mistakes when it comes to public diplomacy. He, along with other members of Congress and the new Obama Administration, however,  now has a chance to save U.S. public diplomacy not only from past disasters but also the ones being currently perpetrated by the Broadcasting Board of Governors and its staff.

At the very least, the BBG members and senior officials deserve a much closer scrutiny of their decisions than they had received during the Bush Administration. During the past eight years, BBG members — both Democrats and Republicans — enthusiastically supported any ill-conceived public diplomacy initiative for the Middle East and came up with a few disastrous ideas of their own at a cost of millions of dollars to U.S. taxpayers. Only one BBG member, Blaquita Walsh Cullum, the only working journalist sitting on the Board, was said to have opposed program cuts to countries without free media and objected to hiring expensive consultants to beef up BBG’s public image in the United States.

Cullum is a Republican and was otherwise a strong supporter of the Bush foreign policy. Other Republican members, including the former BBG chairman James K. Glassman, unquestionably backed cutting of VOA radio broadcasts and privatizing U.S. international broadcasting. Ironically, all Democratic BBG members were just as enthusiastic in their support for the ill-conceived broadcasting initiatives for the Middle East as their Republican colleagues, if not more so.

In fact, the main architect of Alhurra and Radio Sawa was Norman Pattiz, a Democratic appointee and a personal friend and supporter of former Senator and now Vice President Joe Biden. Pattiz — whose company, America’s largest radio network Westwood One, is now in serious financial trouble — introduced commercial market research and commercial music formats at the BBG and pushed hard for eliminating Voice of America broadcasts to the Middle East and other regions. Pattiz worked closely with another former BBG member, Edward E. Kaufman, who is now a Democratic U.S. Senator from Delaware.

Other members of Congress, however, have taken notice of the waste and mismanagement at the BBG. One of the most severe critics of the BBG’s performance during the Bush Administration years was a Republican Senator from Oklahoma Tom Coburn, M.D.

Another U.S. Senator, Sam Brownback (R-KA),  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. 

Also, Patrick Leahy, a Democratic Senator from Vermont, has tried to stop the BBG from eliminating U.S. broadcasts in foreign languages. His request to the BBG not to end VOA radio Russia and other  media-at-risk countries was ignored. The BBG executive director Jeffrey Trimble, a former acting president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty,  implemented the cuts, reportedly after requesting and receiving advice and help from Senator Biden’s staff.

VOA employees, including journalists in the Russian Service, are hopeful that the Obama Administration, with its new message about America’s intentions around the world, will understand the public diplomacy value of the Voice of America news broadcasts and will not want to engage in deceptive marketing of news using privatized entities with purposely ambiguous names. Their optimism is tempered, however, by the knowledge that Senator and now Vice President Biden was a strong supporter of former BBG members, Norman Pattiz and Edward Kaufman.  Kaufman, who was at one time Biden’s chief of staff in the Senate, was described by a union leader at the BBG  as “no friend of Voice of America employees.” Biden’s support for the privatization of U.S. international broadcasting may be partly explained by the fact that some of the BBG’s private entities, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, are incorporated in Delaware, Biden’s home state.

Federal Human Capital 2008 Survey (FHCS)

One of the Worst Among U.S. Government Agencies Needs Reform

The BBG, which was rated by its own employees as being among the very worst U.S. government agencies, should be abolished — an action recommended by the highly-respected Public Diplomacy Council, a nonprofit organization which includes former diplomats, academics and other foreign policy experts. The PDC has called on President Obama and Congress to take urgent action in reforming publicly-funded U.S. international broadcasting.

The hundreds of millions of dollars that the BBG spends on the discredited and scandal-ridden Alhurra Television could not only pay for re-opening of some U.S. centers abroad and for restoring VOA radio broadcasts to the Middle East and to Russia. Some funds might even be left to offset the record budget deficit and to help with economic recovery. In any case, most Arabs view Alhurra as the Bush Administration’s propaganda tool.

President Obama apparently understands the credibility issue with Alhurra and probably would not want his name to be associated with a television station that welcomed comments from Holocaust deniers. Rather than going to Alhurra, President Obama gave his first televised message to the Arab world in an interview with the Al Arabiya television network.

The United States should be honest with its potential Middle Eastern audiences. Rather than hide behind ambiguous names like Alhurra and Sawa, it should restore Voice of America Arabic broadcasts and offer programs that truly reflect America’s diversity and values. Some of the privatized entities managed by the BBG have proven again and again that they are incapable of applying high journalistic standards. In their current setup under BBG’s marketing rules, they are also incapable of representing America to the Muslim world.

Another reason for urgent action are the financial scandals that have been a constant occurrence among the privatized broadcasting entities so strongly favored by the BBG. The agency has been largely left unsupervised during the previous two administrations. If Senator Lugar can get his Democratic and Republican colleagues in the Senate to support him and get the Obama White House and Secretary Clinton to go along, he may have a good chance of not only repairing U.S. public diplomacy but of making U.S. government more fiscally responsible and more efficient.

The BBG’s organizational chart looks even worse than the GM corporate structure with multiple non-American brands, multiple physical facilities, and multiple executive positions costing U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars in completely unnecessary and duplicative expenses. (BBG members should have asked themselves why the British Government was not trying to dilute the BBC’s brandname by hiding it under multiple non-British names.) Eliminating the BBG and consolidating almost all U.S. international broadcasting under one American brand, as proposed by the Public Diplomacy Council and others, could make America’s voice abroad once again strong, credible, effective and fiscally justifiable to American taxpayers.

…after the Cold War, the United States prematurely declared victory in the battle for hearts and minds, terminating the U.S. Information Agency, which ran the centers, and cutting the State Department’s public diplomacy budget. Many thought the Internet and global satellite TV would render irrelevant the people-to-people exchanges fostered by the centers. — Senator Richard R. Lugar

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.

Wojtyla's Women by Ted Lipien

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 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.

BBG officials initially had told the VOA Russian Service that their requests to resume radio broadcasts were a “non-starter” even after Russia invaded Georgia. Only after weeks of protests, including reporting by FreeMediaOnline.org, the BBG finally allowed VOA to produce a short audio program for the Internet, updated only Monday through Friday. This program is rather difficult to find on the VOA website. We made it available for easier access and listening on the GovoritAmerika.us website managed by FreeMediaOnline.org.

President Obama may have been surprised to find out that the Voice of America, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described as largely responsible for “telling America’s story” to the world, no longer has programs in Arabic of any kind due to actions taken by the Bush Administration and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG).

The lack of a trusted Arabic-language broadcast channel originating in the United States may explain why President Obama had to give a TV interview targeted for a Middle Eastern audience to a Saudi broadcaster. While there is one U.S. broadcaster, Alhurra Television, this particular network lacks credibility in the Middle East and has been mired in controversy.

FreeMediaOnline.org reprints the latest article by ProPublica.org writer Dafna Linzer about the U.S. government-funded Alhurra television network for the Middle East set up and managed by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). The article provides an in-depth analysis as to some of the reasons that may be behind President Obama’s decision to use a Saudi network for his first television interview. First, some comments from FreeMediaOnline.org president, Ted Lipien:

What? – No Voice of America in Arabic? – President Obama and U.S. Broadcasting in the Middle East

by Ted Lipien

There is no big mystery as to why President Obama would choose a Saudi-funded television network Al Arabiya over Alhurra. As surprising as this may be to many Americans, if one goes to the official web site of the primary U.S. international broadcaster, the Voice of America (VOA),  it no longer has any kind of news content in Arabic thanks to the BBG’s earlier decisions, which blocked VOA from communicating with Arab audiences in their own language. The BBG has also silenced VOA radio to Russia (12 days before Russia invaded Georgia) and to many other countries.

The Voice of America used to be a credible source of news and information from the United States for Arab speakers even if, due to the neglect from the BBG, it did not have transmission facilities to reach a wider audience. Instead of improving and strengthening America’s voice to the world, the BBG shut down VOA’s Arabic service and subcontracted U.S. broadcasting to private entities. They are widely seen in the Middle East as tools of the Bush White House propaganda. Since VOA journalists did not want to participate in propaganda experiments controlled by the White House and the BBG, VOA Arabic programs were silenced.

Both Republicans and Democrats (political allies and big business supporters of former Senator, now Vice President Joe Biden) were responsible for making these decisions. Even though the overall agenda was set by the neoconservatives in the Bush White House, BBG members representing the Democratic Party – Norman Pattiz of Westwood One and the recently appointed Senator from Delaware Edward E. Kaufman — helped to dismantle VOA programs and created Alhurra and Radio Sawa. 

Sawa and Alhurra not only did not have official credibility and American friendliness enjoyed by VOA radio hosts – perhaps the only attributes an American station can use to establish itself in the Middle East — but they also failed to achieve any kind of purpose and journalistic balance. They have been alternating between airing comments from apologists for the Bush Administration policies and  — to the great surprise of their neoconservative backers – airing unchallenged comments by Holocaust deniers and Islamist extremists. What they fail to tell their audience with any kind of credibility – something that Voice of America had done when it had Arabic programs – is what Americans of all political views and different social backgrounds think about the Middle East and the rest of the world. It would be inconceivable for the Voice of America to air unchallenged comments from Holocaust deniers as Alhurra had done. 

Considering  Alhurra’s journalistic performance and the fact that it has no real credibility with Arab audiences, it’s no wonder that President Obama did not want to be interviewed by the privatized American Middle East TV network.  Had he granted an interview to Alhurra, it would be a signal that the Obama White House wants to continue President Bush’s failed propaganda policies. This is one message President Obama did not want to send.

Working with Congress, the Obama  Administration should restore Voice of America Arabic programs and put an end to the waste of public money on supporting  Alhurra and Sawa. These station lack both identity and credibility,  and they are firmly associated with the Bush Administration propaganda. If the United States had one credible broadcaster reaching the Arab world, President Obama would not have to be ashamed of granting an interview to a radio or TV network supported by U.S. taxpayers, which I assume was his reason for going with Al Arabiya in addition to that station’s wide reach in the Arab world. Ted Lipien, FreeMediaOnline.org

Does Obama Snub of Alhurra Signal a Shift?

Left: Alhurra anchors on air Dec. 23, 2008, before the conflict in Gaza. Right: Anchors wore black after the fighting broke out on Dec. 27, 2008.

President Obama chose a Saudi-funded television network today for his first interview aimed at an Arab audience, passing over the U.S. government’s own heavily-funded Alhurra station.

Obama’s predecessor pumped more than $500 million into Alhurra, which has been plagued [1] by serious staff problems, financial mismanagement and long-standing concerns inside the U.S. government and Congress regarding its content.

The president’s decision to go with Al Arabiya [2]led several media watchers to wonder whether Alhurrawouldcontinue to receive the same kind of cash flow from the Obama administration as it enjoyed under former president Bush.

“I am curious whether the choice of Al Arabiya signals the administration’s abandonment of the U.S.-funded Alhurra satellite channel,” wrote Michael Rubin, in National Review Online [3].

Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University, wrote on Foreign Policy magazine’s Web site [4]that “Obama’s choice to give his ground-breaking interview to the Saudi Al Arabiya and not to the American Alhurra is as clear a statement as it is possible to make of Alhurra’s failure. It’s time to face the facts and clean house to recoup some of that investment,” he wrote.

The Bush Administration’s public diplomacy efforts have long drawn criticism from Democrats, and Obama signaled shortly after his election that he was contemplating major changes in that arena. “I think we’ve got a unique opportunity to reboot America’s image around the world and also in the Muslim world in particular,’’ Obama told reporters in early December.

Alhurra, and its sister radio station, Radio Sawa, were meant to showcase U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and compete with Al Jazeera and other networks such as Al Arabiya, which interviewed Obama Tuesday.

But Alhurra has come under Congressional scrutiny and has been unable to win a desired audience share.

Last month, news anchors at Alhurra swapped out brightly-colored outfits for black suits as a demonstration of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza who were under Israeli fire during weeks of fighting there. Alhurra broadcasts to the Middle East, but its Web site carried streaming video of the anchors, wearing black suits on air at their news desk and during reports on the fighting.

Two people with direct knowledge of the incident said Alhurra managers had instructed anchors to halt the practice at the beginning of the new year and were conducting an informal review of the incident.

Deirdre Kline, a spokeswoman for Alhurra, did not return phone messages or e-mails seeking comment. She also did not respond to requests for comment regarding a nascent inquiry by the State Department’s inspector general’s office regarding several complaints of financial mismanagement at Radio Sawa. Two people involved in the inquiry said it began after concerns were raised that money was missing from the station’s Baghdad bureau.

 Alhurra has cost U.S. taxpayers more than half a billion dollars in five years and has been the subject of an ongoing ProPublica investigation [1] that began in partnership with CBS News’ 60 Minutes last June. It sparked several Congressional inquiries and a State Department investigation of Alhurra’s parent company, The Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

Since then, a study commissioned by the U.S. government concluded that Alhurra has failed to meet basic journalistic standards.

The study by researchers connected to the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California [5]was based on a review of a full month’s broadcasts by Alhurra, the 24-hour news network.

“The quality of Alhurra’s journalism is substandard on several levels,” the researchers wrote. Its broadcasts “lack appropriate balance and sourcing,” and “relied on unsubstantiated information too often, allowed on-air expressions of personal judgments too frequently and failed to present opposing views in over 60 percent of its news stories.”

“Our diagnosis is that Alhurra is not performing at the level that it needs to reach to be successful,” the authors said.

After the study was completed, Obama chose the Dean of the Annenberg School, Ernest J. Wilson III [6], to review Alhurra and other U.S. government broadcasting efforts for the new administration.

Al-Jazeera, which the Bush administration publicly blamed for inflaming anti-American sentiment in the Arab world, remains the most popular news network in the Arab world. Al Arabiya is No. 2 for audience share. Viewership polls, including one conducted last year by the University of Maryland [7] found that Alhurra’s pan-Arab broadcast is one of the least viewed in the Middle East, with an audience share of just 2 percent across the region.

 FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog, January 22, 2009, San Francisco — Anna Karapetian, a journalist from Armenia who in radio broadcasts funded by the U.S. government reported on human rights abuses in her country, is one of many people around the world who see Barack Obama’s inauguration as a hopeful beginning of a new era of change in Washington.  Ms. Karapetian hopes that with Mr. Obama’s strong commitment to protecting workers’ rights, the new administration will end the policy of a U.S. government agency which can arbitrarily fire its foreign journalists working abroad and denies them many of the basic labor law protections available to Americans citizens and residents of other democratic countries.

The policy in question was instituted by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the Federal government agency which manages privatized U.S.-funded international broadcasting stations, such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and Alhurra Television. Ms. Karapetian became one of the victims of the policy when she was fired from her broadcasting job at RFE/RL in the Czech Republic after almost 12 years of employment, which she describes as “impeccable,” with “very good” and “excellent” performance reviews.

Legal cases against RFE/RL’s employment practices have been filed by the dismissed employees with the Czech Supreme Court,  the Czech Constitutional Court, and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Reports critical of their treatment have appeared in Czech media and included statements of support from Czech politicians. In yet another major embarrassment for the BBG, one of the most respected world statesmen, former Czech president and human rights activist Vaclav Havel, promised to personally monitor the cases of the fired employees. 

The PR problem created by these cases and the damage to America’s image abroad can be traced back to the actions of a relatively small group of unelected U.S. government officials. Less than ten men and women, selected by the leadership of their political parties, appointed by the President and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, serve at any one time on the bipartisan Broadcasting Board of Governors. Most of them are political loyalists and private businessmen without much foreign policy and human rights advocacy experience.

During the eight years of the Bush Administration, the BBG, which is responsible for RFE/RL’s personnel policies, greatly intensified its efforts to subcontract U.S. international broadcasting operations to privatized institutions. One of the major attractions of subcontracting was the realization by BBG members that unlike U.S. government employees, foreign workers hired abroad can be easily dismissed at any time and for any reason, or no reason at all, under the so-called “employment-at-will” doctrine. At the same time, the BBG was eliminating programs and terminating employment of American journalists working at the Washington-based Voice of America, which it also manages, while transferring Federal funding to these privatized stations.

After her employment was terminated by RFE/RL, Anna Karapetian, mother of three minor children, found out that unlike VOA journalists employed in Washington, D.C., and unlike her American colleagues working at the RFE/RL headquarters in the Czech Republic, she did not have the protection of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the Federal Civil Rights Act, and many other U.S. anti-discrimination laws. The Czech government made sure that locally-hired Czech employees would have the full protection of the Czech labor law, but at the insistence of the BBG it allowed RFE/RL to exempt foreign journalists working for RFE/RL in Prague. They were placed under the Communist-era law, still on the books, which was used to facilitate the Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia after 1968.

The influential Czech, quite pro-American newspaper, “Lidove noviny” wrote in an editorial:

“Prague headquarters of RFE/RL, which pretends to be a messenger of freedom, democracy and the rule of law, behaves as an employer in such a way as if the principles it heralds are relevant “just” for the whole planet but not for what is going on inside that estimable organization itself.” Read Anna Karapetian’s Open Letter.

This legal limbo was specifically sought by the BBG and RFE/RL to prevent court challenges by foreign-based journalists against adverse personnel actions. Shocked and angered by how she was treated by her U.S. taxpayer-supported American employer, Anna Karapetian wrote in an open letter to freedom of the press and human rights organizations that non-American and non-Czech RFE/RL employees working in the Czech Republic, who often come from semi-dictatorial countries of the former Soviet Union, have “about as much legal protection as the inhabitants of Guantanamo: not in the country of their origin, not in the place of their presence, nor in the United States.”

While the BBG’s actions now appear to many as wrong and hypocritical, during the Bush Administration, both Republicans and Democrats serving on the BBG, became convinced that it would be easier for them and better for the White House’s war on terror to manage U.S. international broadcasting as a series of private businesses exempt from many U.S. government laws and regulations. These political appointees consistently eliminated programs at the Voice of America, where journalists enjoy significant independence and strong legal protections against arbitrary actions by management and were viewed as being opposed to the BBG’s and Bush Administration’s plans to transform U.S. international broadcasting. While BBG members claimed that their strategy would result in greater effectiveness and savings of taxpayers’ money, they have created multiple broadcasting units with multiple executive and administrative positions, which independent studies and media reports described as wasteful and lacking proper programming and fiscal accountability. ProPublica.org: Report Calls Alhurra a Failure

The fact that the neoconservative privatization agenda was led and implemented by a number of prominent Democrats on the BBG, including at least two  former members with close links to Vice President Biden, may not bode well for Ms. Karapetian’s hopes for significant reforms at the BBG and at RFE/RL during the Obama Administration. As a U.S. Senator, Vice President Biden was a major patron of a former BBG member, Norman Pattiz, founder of the now failing U.S. radio syndicate Westwood One, who pushed hard for the elimination of VOA broadcasting services, including its Arabic Service, and was the primary force behind the establishment of privatized stations, such as Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television for the Middle East. Many RFE/RL and VOA journalists still hope, however, that President Obama and his close advisors will pay attention to media reports of mismanagement at the BBG. According to the latest Federal Human Capital Survey (FHCS), the employees of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) have recently given the BBG Board members and the officials of the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) the worst ever rating for good management and placed the BBG at the very bottom of Federal agencies. Broadcasting Board of Governors Rated Worst Than Ever By Its Employees and As One of The Worst Federal Agencies

During the last months of the Bush Administration,  Edward E. Kaufman, another former Democratic BBG member who is now a U.S. Senator from Delaware and was previously Joe Biden’s chief of staff, worked closely with BBG’s former Republican chairman, neoconservative Bush appointee, James K. Glassman, who later became the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. They agreed to terminate VOA radio broadcasts to Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, and India. Thanks to highly effective coordination behind the scenes by the BBG executive director, Jeffrey Trimble, who was formerly acting president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Board succeeded in taking VOA radio programs to Russia off the air just 12 days before the Russian military forces attacked Georgia last summer and then refused to resume them.

On December 31, 2008, the BBG also ended VOA radio program to Ukraine just hours before Russia cut off the flow of natural gas supplies to Ukraine and the rest of Europe. Only one BBG member, Blanquita Walsh Cullum, the only working journalist serving on the Board, was reported to have voted against these program cuts and reportedly also opposed many of the management practices supported by other BBG members. The other current BBG members are: Joaquin F. Blaya, D. Jeffrey Hirschberg, and Steven J. Simmons. The BBG web site still lists Condoleezza Rice as an ex-officio member, even though she is no longer the Secretary of State and therefore no longer sits on the Board.

Ted Lipien, president of San Francisco-based media freedom nonprofit FreeMediaOnline.org, said that while privatized U.S.-funded broadcasting to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was highly effective at times during the Cold War, “this so-called ’surrogate’ broadcasting model turned out to be totally outdated and inappropriate for providing news to the Middle East and the former Soviet republics under drastically different conditions.” Lipien pointed out that for most of the Cold War, RFE/RL journalists, who were based in West Germany, enjoyed far greater legal protections, as well as being protected from intimidation by communist security services, than the current RFE/RL journalists based in Prague and elsewhere behind the former Iron Curtain.

In addition to eliminating U.S. jobs and severely limiting the rights of overseas-based foreign journalists, the privatization of U.S. international broadcasting during the Bush Administration also produced major fiscal and editorial scandals at the newly established private stations and at RFE/RL. Both Republican and Democratic BBG members hoped that these private entities would be far more effective than the Voice of America in delivering programs against Islamist extremism. But the loosening of programming and fiscal controls and employment protections for journalists combined with the BBG’s marketing policy designed to maximize audience size regardless of local media conditions led to numerous editorial failures at the privatized entities. At the same time,  as a result of BBG’s actions, some of them taken within the last few weeks, the Obama Administration found itself without radio broadcasts by the Voice of America from the United States to many countries around the world.

Unlike VOA journalists,  many broadcasters at the privatized stations do not have extensive experience in reporting news about the United States and American politics. Some broadcasters, especially at Alhurra Television and Radio Sawa, have been accused of lacking basic journalistic training. U.S. and international media outlets reported that Alhurra aired unchallenged statements by Holocaust deniers and RFE/RL was criticized by a Russian human rights organization for giving extensive airtime to a Russian politician known for his racist comments about ethnic minorities, Jews, and Blacks. FreeMediaOnline.org reported that the BBG also failed to protect RFE/RL journalists and other employees who are Russian citizens and work in Russia. There is strong evidence that these employees are subject to blackmail and other forms of intimidation by the Kremlin’s secret police. “U.S. Taxpayers Pay for Spreading Racist Views on Radio Liberty in Russia: What Would Barack Obama Say If He Knew…”   Use this 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

Ms. Karapetian points out in her open letter that foreign journalists employed by RFE/RL face serious risks from security services of local dictators when they work in their own countries and lack legal protections if they work at RFE/RL headquarters in the Czech Republic. But despite her accusations of mistreatment, she defends RFE/RL as a journalistic organization with a distinguished history that is still much needed by audiences in countries without free media. She also expressed concern that the personnel policies applied to foreign journalists at RFE/RL are damaging U.S. reputation abroad and give encouragement to authoritarian leaders in the former Soviet republics. According to Ted Lipien, the lack of basic job security and legal protections makes foreign journalists employed by RFE/RL far more vulnerable to threats from the security services of the countries to which they broadcast. Their family members who live in those countries are also subject to intimidation.

Ms. Karapetian ended her letter with an appeal to press freedom and human rights advocates to contact the current RFE/RL president, Jeffrey Gedmin, and urge him to put into action a statement from his recent speech that “We have as RFE/RL our intellectual and moral compass… We also need to lead by example…”. Anna Karapetian is hoping that being true to President Obama’s promise of change,  his administration will show greater respect for the rights of foreign journalists employed by U.S.-funded international broadcasters. (Some media reports use “Karapetyan” as the spelling of her last name.)

Despite the reported failures on the part of the BBG, RFE/RL continues to play a vital role in many countries and, according to Ted Lipien of FreeMediaOnline.org, can be more effective in other countries if some of the failed policies of the Board of Broadcasting Governors are reversed. The ability to tell America’s story to the world in Voice of America broadcasts, however, has been largely destroyed by the privatization policies of the BBG during the past eight years. Journalists at VOA and RFE/RL hope that the Obama Administration will institute quick reforms in the use of “soft power” in communicating with the world. America’s image abroad would be improved by restoring Voice of America broadcasts and by putting an end to the shameful practice of restricting rights of foreign journalists who work on behalf of the United States, Lipien said.

The Obama Transition Team official responsible for international broadcasting is Ernest J. Wilson III, Dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. His email address is: ernest.wilson@usc.edu.

If you wish to protest or comment on the treatment of foreign journalists working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Broadcasting Board of Governors, you may also send emails to:

Jeffrey Gedmin, RFE/RL President,  addressed to Mr. Martins Zvaners, Associate Director of Communications: zvanersm@rferl.org

Jeffrey N. Trimble, BBG Executive Director,  addressed to the BBG Office of Public Affairs, publicaffairs@bbg.gov

 FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog Commentary by Ted Lipien, January 13, 2009, San Francisco – 

State Department videos embarrass the U.S. among audiences abroad while the Department’s top promoter of Public Diplomacy 2.0 pushes to eliminate Voice of America radio journalism in favor of TV and Internet propaganda advertising and broadcasting based on Cold War models.

While I was an elementary school student in Poland in the 1960s, we had to write compositions why communism was the world’s best political system and what made Lenin the greatest man who has ever lived. Communist media in Poland was full of similar propaganda, although admittedly it was not nearly as naive as what the Soviet media was offering at the time. Most people in Poland were both offended by and laughed at such crude efforts to promote communism. They listened instead to radio broadcasts by Radio Free Europe (RFE) and the Voice of America (VOA). Everybody knew that these two station, financed by the U.S. government, represented a particular political point of view against communism, but we appreciated the fact that they offered generally accurate news and sophisticated journalistic analysis rather than crude propaganda.

Since then, communism had collapsed and international consumers of media news have become even more skeptical and discerning. And yet a number of recent U.S. State Department political appointees responsible for public diplomacy and officials in charge of U.S. international broadcasting have enthusiastically embraced propaganda advertising  as the primary solution to the problems of how the Bush Administration and the United States are perceived abroad.

These efforts have been in line with the general desire of neoconservative Bush Administration officials to subcontract much of public diplomacy and international broadcasting to private corporations and institutions, thus limiting fiscal controls, transparency and input from professional State Department diplomats and Voice of America journalists who could question and possibly block outlandish and counterproductive ideas. Instead of responsible and balanced journalism by Voice of America, foreign audiences are now being offered short propaganda videos and entertainment-rich programs produced by private contractors.

A similar effort to replace journalism with questionable marketing and advertising concepts has been underway for a number of years at the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which is responsible for U.S. international broadcasts. Even though this is a bipartisan board, its Democratic members joined forces with neoconservative Republicans in slashing Voice of America journalistic programs and creating private broadcasting entities, such as Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television for the Middle East, with the stated goal of “marrying the mission to the market,” (BBG’s own slogan.)

BBG members and their private consultants had told these privatized entities to play music, offer programs that audiences agree with, and to make every other effort to attract more listeners and viewers. Not surprisingly, Muslim viewers dismissed Alhurra as an American propaganda station, even though in its misplaced desire to please the audience the station aired reports expressing sympathy with those who deny that six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis during the World War II Holocaust.

Use this 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 

Voice of America is the only U.S. Congress-funded international broadcaster that has tried to resist BBG’s marketing strategy, but “Marrying the Mission to the Market” and  Public Diplomacy 2.0, which in their current form can only be described as Propaganda 2.0, have largely replaced objective journalism in U.S. efforts to communicate with foreign audiences. One of the first Voice of America broadcasting units eliminated by the BBG was the VOA Arabic Service, which was highly-respected in the Middle East for independence and the quality of its radio programs.

More recently, the current public diplomacy chief at the State Department, James K. Glassman, the neoconservative co-author of the book DOW 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market, (Yes, in 1999 Glassman was just as enthusiastic in predicting that the U.S. stock market would soon reach this level as he is now about his vision of Public Diplomacy 2.0.) ordered the termination of VOA radio broadcasts to Russia just 12 days before the Russian military attacked Georgia in August 2008. Glassman had also wanted to eliminate all VOA radio programs to Georgia and Ukraine. He personally rejected pleas from VOA Russian Service journalists to allow them to resume radio broadcasts to the war zone in the Caucasus during the height of the Russian-Georgian conflict.

Glassman apparently became convinced that even war refugees and war combatants can get their news from the Internet, and if they can’t, they probably do not matter as an audience since more often than not these groups are not statistically significant. His other assumption was that the Internet requires vast sums of money (for private consultants and contractors), and therefore VOA cannot possibly do both radio and Internet to Russia at the same time, even though many other private and public broadcasters are combining the Internet with radio and TV without much difficulty.  It’s hard to tell what Mr. Glassman thinks about the people in Russia and elsewhere who cannot afford the Internet, but he definitely ignores the power of direct communication between American journalists and their  international audience that has always been crucial, especially in times of serious political crises, and he dismisses concerns about the documented ability of Russia’s secret services to block and sabotage the Internet.

At first, the BBG would not even consider restoring VOA radio to Russia, but after protests by FreeMediaOnline.org and others, it allowed the Russian Service to produce a much reduced 30 minute radio program Monday through Friday, which has no current newscasts but does offer more in-depth coverage of critical current issues than what is available from other formats.  Despite BBG’s decision to spend large sums of money on outside Internet consultants and contractors, the Russian radio program is difficult to find on the VOA web site and its audio is often not updated regularly, thus leaving site visitors to hear the same outdated program over a number of days.

Voice of America Russian radio program is made available for easier access and listening on the GovoritAmerika.us web site managed by FreeMediaOnline.org

ProPublica.org, a nonprofit investigative journalism web site, has uncovered major financial and editorial irregularities related to private contractors hired under the rules set up by the BBG. Some of them were confirmed by an independent study prepared by the Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School, University of Southern California. Commissioned by the U.S. government,  the study’s authors concluded that Alhurra, Arab-language television to the Middle East managed by the Broadcasting Board of Governors fails to meet basic journalistic standards and is seen by few.

It was beyond the scope of the USC study to point out that the money to operate Alhurra has been taken from VOA broadcasting to such strategic countries as Russia, China (including Tibet), and India.  As millions of dollars were being spent and wasted on Internet propaganda videos at the Department of State and on programs at scandal-ridden private broadcasting entities, such as Alhurra, the Broadcasting Board of Governors also made a decision to stop VOA Ukrainian radio broadcasts. This happened just hours before Russia shut off the flow of natural gas supplies to Ukraine and the rest of Europe.

Only five members serve currently on the Board: Joaquin F. Blaya, Blanquita Walsh Cullum, D. Jeffrey Hirschberg, Steven J. Simmons, and Condoleezza Rice (ex officio). One prominent former BBG member Edward E. Kaufman, recently appointed as a U.S. Senator from Delaware, (He had been Senator Biden’s chief of staff and replaces him in the Senate.) joined other Democrats and Republicans in voting to end VOA radio programs to Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, and India — each time shortly before a major news emergency affecting these countries, which included the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

In making these cuts, the majority of BBG members completely disregarded warnings and requests from the U.S. Congress, human rights NGOs, and the union of journalists and broadcasting technicians working for the Agency. BBG members have also ignored advice from professional diplomats and media experts familiar with foreign cultures. Neither Kaufman nor Biden seemed concerned that silencing VOA radio while RFE/RL operations in Russia are vulnerable to intimidation by the Russian secret police presents a serious risk. RFE/RL is incorporated in Delaware.

Most BBG officials treat their jobs as giving them carte blanche to support their pet projects.  Democrats on the Board became enthusiastic supporters of the Bush Administration’s plans for privatized broadcasting to the Middle East. The chief architect and implementer of these plans at the BBG was a Democratic appointee, Norman Pattiz, founder of the U.S. radio syndicate Westwood One. According to FreeMediaOnline.org sources, only one BBG member, a Republican appointee, was reported to have opposed VOA programming cuts to media-at-risk countries, angering both former BBG Republican Chairman Glassman, and Ted Kaufman, former top Democratic member. Leaders of the union representing BBG employees have called for the Board to be eliminated as did the highly respected Public Diplomacy Council, whose members come from diplomacy, the armed forces, nonprofits and academia. Most BBG members are successful businessmen (often in domestic broadcasting industry) with strong political connections, but they lack substantive experience in foreign policy, public diplomacy, international broadcasting, or international human right advocacy.

This is a link to “I Am America” video in Russian on the State Department’s web site that truly qualifies as a historical exhibit in a propaganda museum. It is described on YouTube as a video “presented to the U.S. State Department by Business for Diplomatic Action” that “will be played in U.S. embassies and consulates.” The images of America  are spectacular, but the message is crudely propagandistic and naive. Anybody with even basic political education, which describes much of today’s world, knows that the people in the video do not run U.S. foreign policy and had elected George W. Bush twice as their president before changing their minds about the direction the country should take in dealing with the world. A one-sided view of America will be dismissed as propaganda regardless of how many dollars are spent on a clever advertising packaging.  

In fact, millions of taxpayers’ dollars have been spent on these highly embarrassing videos, which are prominently featured on the State Department web site. A single VOA radio or television report about President Elect Barack Obama’s family background and foreign policy plans could not only help repair some of the damage done by these propaganda videos but would also have a long-term positive impact on how America will now be perceived abroad. Unfortunately, for ideological and bureaucratic reasons, the BBG has put VOA on its chopping block, and the  Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy is still determined to replace a substantive dialogue with foreign audiences with short and clever video messages and apparently wants to hold on to his job after the Obama Administration takes over.

Another propaganda video commissioned from private contractors by the State Department public diplomacy 2.0 team announces a worldwide contest for submitting privatelly-produced videos about the meaning of the word ‘democracy.’ View it here. The prize is “an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, New York and Hollywood to attend special screenings of the winning videos, gain exposure to the U.S. film and television industry and meet with creative talent, democracy advocates and government leaders.” The contest has been prominently featured on the State Department’s official web site, but the YouTube page, where contest videos must be submitted, has received less than 160,000 views despite being available for several months. A popular Voice of America radio program can attract many more listeners in single day and offer a journalistic view of American democracy that is far more substantive and credible.

The Internet does offer enormous opportunities for U.S. public diplomacy and international broadcasting but not in the hands of propagandists, or  private contractors who have no journalistic and foreign policy experience and care primarily about their own profits. Most of the members of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (James K. Glassman was its most recent chairman) have done great harm to journalism and to the U.S. image abroad. The current Bush Administration’s public diplomacy chief at the Department of State does not seem to realize that many types of Internet activities are not appropriate or credible when done by government officials and are better left to truly independent NGOs and individual bloggers.

For people placed in charge of U.S.-funded journalistic entities, most BBG members have shown remarkable indifference to the concept of journalistic independence. In their misplaced desire to chase after higher audience ratings, they have allowed Russian-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reporters to be intimidated by the Kremlin’s secret police and tolerate giving extensive airtime to Russian politicians known for their racist views. This is the same marketing-first/journalism-second approach advocated by the BBG that had encouraged Alhurra, another privatized broadcaster, to air comments by Holocaust denies.

Radio Liberty, which during the Cold War had played a highly effective role as a surrogate broadcaster, providing in-depth domestic news coverage for listeners in the Soviet Union, has become a virtual hostage of the BBG strategy of favoring privatized surrogate broadcasting. Mr. Putin’s repressive but sophisticated media policies call for an entirely different approach, and yet the BBG insists that RFE/RL should have a large presence in Russia and rejects VOA radio broadcasts from the United States as unnecessary. But the idea of keeping many private broadcasting entities fits well with the desire of individual BBG members, both Democrats and Republicans, to keep as much control over U.S. international broadcasting for themselves and to reward their friends with well-paid positions and lucrative contracts.  James K. Glassman was reported to have tried to hire Paula Zahn, formerly of CNN, as the BBG’s high profile spokesperson at about the same time when the BBG executive director Jeffrey Trimble, formerly acting president of RFE/RL, was implementing the plan to stop VOA radio broadcasts to Russia. Paula Zahn had wisely declined the offer perhaps after realizing that her job might be to explain why a group of Tibetan monks staged a silent protest on Capital Hill against the BBG’s plans to reduce U.S. radio broadcasts to Tibet. Thankfully, at least in this case the BBG backed down.

Contrary to what BBG members believe, including its most recent chairman, traditional independent radio and television journalism can be successfully merged with Web 2.0 concepts and can achieve high audience ratings without resorting to questionable management techniques, marketing practices and crude propaganda.

They could have learned much about the use of “soft power” from reading a recently published book by Ambassador Patricia Gates Lynch, Thanks for Listening: High Adventures in Journalism and Diplomacy, with the foreword by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. For many years Ms. Gates had been a host of the highly popular VOA Breakfast Show. She made millions of friends for America around the world without resorting to propaganda simply by telling her audiences about America and broadcasting interviews with exceptional and ordinary Americans. Later named  by President Reagan as U.S. Ambassador to Madagascar and the Comoros Islands, Pat Gates also worked briefly as a public relations representative for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty at the time when that organization practiced truly independent surrogate journalism while Voice of America offered a mix of American news, American commentaries, as well as reports on political and human rights situation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. There was no BBG at that time, and both VOA and RFE/RL were managed by journalistic professionals and distinguished Americans, people like NBC anchor John Chancellor and Malcolm Forbes, Jr. Political appointees serving now on the BBG do not want people with ideas and much greater accomplishments to tell them how to practice broadcast journalism.

Ironically, even as the Cold War ended, neoconservative Republicans and  internationally naive but politically ambitious Democrats serving on the BBG chose the very earliest surrogate broadcasting model developed when Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation (later Radio Liberty) were still financed and run by the CIA. This model, which was completely outdated and inappropriate for skeptical and hostile audiences in the Middle East (audiences in Easter Europe during the Cold War were highly sympathetic to the message in American-funded radio broadcasts) nevertheless gave BBG members and the White House maximum control over truly uncooperative and potentially uncooperative journalists.

While surrogate broadcasting was effective during the Cold War, even then it faced some serious problems, which BBG members chose to ignore when they developed their grandiose broadcasting plans for the Middle East. They could have learned about these problems and how to avoid them from an exceptionally honest account by former RFE/RL manager James Critchlow. In his book, Radio Hole-in-the-Head: Radio Liberty: An Insider’s Story of Cold War Broadcasting, Critchlow describes some very serious policy and editorial errors committed by naive political operatives, incompetent bureaucrats, and uninformed journalists who had worked at RFE/RL between 1953 and the end of 1980s. 

At least during the Cold War, RFE/RL journalists were based in Munich, West Germany, and were relatively safe from intimidation by the KGB. Serious editorial problems were usually uncovered and corrected until the BBG took over. The BBG placed most of RFE/RL Russian Service reporters in Russia and kept them there even after former President Putin and the KGB’s successor agency, the FSB, nearly completely took control over the local broadcast media using force and intimidation.

Unwilling to give up or significantly scale down RFE/RL’s large bureau in Moscow, BBG members and their staff, some of whom had business and personal links to Russia, began negotiating with members of the Putin regime while BBG-hired consultants told RFE/RL journalists to make their programs less critical of the political and social realities in Russia.

Independent Russian Journalist Anna Politkovskaya Who Was Murdered in Moscow in 2006

Shortly after independent Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow in an execution-style hit in 2006, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty managers made public statements strongly suggesting an attempt on their part to appease Mr. Putin. In an apparent effort to protect their presence in the country, the head of RFE/RL Moscow bureau, Elena Glushkova, said in an on-air discussion in October 2006 that the work of Radio Liberty journalists cannot cause Russia any harm. She insisted that RFE/RL reporters respect and love Russia. She also pointed out that all Radio Liberty reporters who work in Russia are Russian citizens and said that her optimism despite the murder of Ms. Politkovskaya is based in her belief in “the common sense of the current Russian leadership.” Maria Klain, Russian Service director at the RFE/RL home office in Prague, also expressed confidence that the radio’s future in Russia looks good. These comments surprised and offended pro-democracy activists in Russia who were still in mourning after Anna Politovskaya’s murder.

More recently, a Russian human rights organization, the Moscow Human Rights Bureau, has criticized Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) for giving an entire hour of airtime to a Russian politician known for his racist views and verbal attacks on Blacks and other ethnic and racial minorities.  For the new U.S. administration headed by the first African-American president, this is not a very encouraging sign that the BBG’s marketing and programming strategies have been successful. View FreeMediaOnline.org report: “U.S. Taxpayers Pay for Spreading Racist Views on Radio Liberty in Russia: What Would Barack Obama Say If He Knew…”   

One would think that in light of such developments and statements by RFE/RL managers in Russia, the BBG would want Washington-based Voice of America journalists to expand their Russian broadcasts. The BBG’s policy, however, has been not only to dismantle the Voice of America radio services but to make sure that  even the names of the privatized entities designed to replace them did not have any references to the U.S. in an naive belief that this would make them more credible with skeptical and hostile audiences.

By placing much of the work and operations of these privatized entities in countries like Russia and in the Middle East and relying on locally-hired staff, the BBG created no safeguards to make sure that local reporters would not be blackmailed by foreign security and intelligence services. At the same time, the BBG denied locally-hired employees the protection of U.S. labor laws, damaging U.S. reputation in countries like the Czech Republic and drawing attention and criticism from local politicians, including the highly respected former Czech President Vaclav Havel. Link to FreeMediaOnline.org report Radio Free Europe or Radio Free Putin? Did BBG End U.S. Surrogate Broadcasting in Russia on Radio Liberty in an Attempt to Appease Mr. Putin and Pursue Its Marketing Strategy?

The new Obama Administration has a chance to completely reform U.S. public diplomacy and international broadcasting. Millions of U.S. taxpayers’ money are still being wasted by the BBG in financing multiple privatized broadcasting entities — a veritable GM-like corporate model – with multiple executive positions and duplicate administrative structures. None of these entities is set up to present America’s story to the world.

The Voice of America, the only journalistic organization that knows how to do this job without propaganda and with some measure of credibility, desperately needs protection from the incompetent political appointees at the BBG and from the Bush Administration’s public diplomacy chief. If nothing is done, propaganda will triumph over journalism and America’s reputation abroad will be further diminished. Public Diplomacy 2.0 designed by ideologues, propagandists, and profit-seeking private contractors is an embarrassment. The Obama Administration would do well by sending these State Department videos to a museum as a warning to future government officials in charge of public diplomacy and U.S. international broadcasting who might again be tempted by the allure of propaganda.

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 broadcasts to Russia and Ukraine.

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.

 FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog, January 7, 2009, San Francisco – In yet another show of incredibly poor judgement combined with bad timing and ulterior bureaucratic motives resulting in a major waste of U.S. tax dollars, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a bipartisan body responsible for U.S. international broadcasts, had silenced Voice of America (VOA) radio programs to Ukraine one day before Russia halted natural gas deliveries to Europe.  In a similar move just a few months earlier, the BBG had terminated VOA radio programs to Russia and had stopped VOA Hindi radio to India shortly before the recent deadly terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

As a major energy and political crisis was about to hit Eastern and Western Europe, the last Voice of America Ukrainian radio program aired on December 31. The BBG was aware of the Kremlin’s threat to cut off gas supplies to Ukraine as of January 1, 2009 but decided to eliminate the VOA Ukranian program anyway and leave the Obama Administration with another fait accompli.

Listen to the last Voice of America  (VOA) radio broadcast to Ukraine. These radio programs were eliminated by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) on Dec. 31, 2008, one day before Russia halted natural gas deliveries to Ukraine and Western Europe, precipitating a major crisis. Earlier, the BBG  had eliminated VOA radio to Russia 12 days before the Russian military attack on Georgia and took VOA Hindi programs off the air shortly before the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. The BBG also wanted to reduce radio programs to Tibet, also shortly before major pro-independence demonstrations in the region, which were brutally suppressed by the Chinese authorities. 

In July 2008, the BBG had halted Voice of America radio programs to Russia just 12 days before the Russian military forces attacked Georgia. The former BBG chairman, neoconservative Republican  James K. Glassman, who now serves as the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, ignored urgent requests from the Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy (VT) who on behalf of the Senate Appropriations Committee had directed the BBG not to terminate broadcasts to Russia and other countries without free media.

Glassman formed an alliance with the BBG’s liberal Democratic members, including Edward E. Kaufman and D. Jeffrey Hirschberg, who were equally eager to dismantle Voice of America radio programs to Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine in order to bolster privatized broadcasting by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which is based in Prague and  Moscow. The closing down of VOA Russian radio was implemented by the BBG executive director Jeffrey Trimble, a former RFE/RL acting president, who worked closely with Glassman, Kaufman and Hirschberg and reportedly received advice from Senator Biden’s staff. Only one BBG member was reported to have voted against cutting VOA radio programs.

BBG officials claim that VOA Ukrainian TV programs and the VOA Ukrainian web site, which have not been eliminated, are sufficient to present American news and opinions. They made the same claim with regard to Russia even though many people in the region, especially in the conflict areas, do not have access to the Internet. There is also overwhelming evidence of the ability of the Russian security services to block and sabotage Western news and human rights web sites.  

The most recent BBG chairman, James K. Glassman, however, is well known for his boundless enthusiasm for the Internet and pro-democracy online video contests, which he describes as Public Diplomacy 2.0. He is equally enthusiastic about the use of private consultants to carry out U.S. government operations, including public diplomacy,  and several years ago he co-authored a book “DOW 36,000,” predicting that the U.S. stock market would be at that level by now.  Glassman ignored warnings from both Democrats and Republicans on the Hill who urged him not to discontinue Voice of America radio broadcasts.  U.S. lawmakers were especially concerned about countries without free media and countries subject to pressure from aggressive neighbors and vulnerable to attacks from terrorist groups.

Another former BBG member, Senator Kaufman (D-DE), who had previously served as Senator Biden’s chief of staff and was appointed to replace him in the U.S. Senate, has been a strong supporter of steering money to RFE/RL, which is incorporated in Delaware. Both Kaufman and Vice President elect Biden were supporters of the Bush Administration’s Middle East broadcasting policy focused on marginalizing the Voice of America and  using privatized entities and private consultants rather than U.S. government employees.

Despite the BBG’s bipartisan structure, moving forward with the privatization of US international broadcasting has been part of the strategy of the Board’s Democratic members and their neoconservative Republican colleagues ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The BBG has enthusiastically embraced the Bush Administration’s plan to outsource  broadcasting to private entities, many of them based overseas. Their strategy also called for the elimination of Voice of America services based in Washington, D.C. These VOA broadcasting services provided more balanced news with an American perspective and were subject to much stricter editorial and fiscal controls than the new privatized stations.

Acting on advice of the BBG’s most prominent former Democratic member Norman Pattiz, founder of the now seriously ailing U.S. radio syndicate Westwood One, and with strong encouragement from the White House and the Vice President Cheney’s office, the bipartisan Board shut down VOA’s highly-respected Arabic radio service and created two privatized Middle East broadcasting entities,  Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television. Both are increasingly viewed by U.S. diplomats, foreign policy experts and NGOs as a major propaganda blunder, contributing to the growth of anti-Americanism rather than improving U.S. image in the region.

Privatized broadcasting entities managed by the BBG have been plagued with financial and editorial scandals. The nonprofit investigative journalism web site ProPublica.org has uncovered  major financial irregularities at Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television and reported on the lack of editorial controls that have resulted in giving airtime to Ismalist extremists and Holocaust deniers.  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.

The BBG’s privatized corporate structure looks very similar to the General Motor’s panoply of automotive brands, but — except for the rapidly disappearing Voice of America — it does not offer any sign of representing the United States. As with the ailing U.S. automotive firms, the structure created by the BBG includes multiple and duplicate executive positions. It offers BBG members, their staff, contractors and employees of the privatized entities plenty of opportunities for international travel at taxpayers’ expense between Washington and such desirable overseas locations as Prague, Dubai, and Hong Kong.

In a major waste of taxpayer resources, the BBG spends millions of dollars on separate office facilities for each station, even in Washington, D.C. Ted Lipien, president of media freedom nonprofit FreeMediaOnline.org, whose reporting on the Holocaust deniers conference in Teheran led to the investigations of Alhurra Television’s programming, suggested that another investigation, this time of the Broadcasting Board of Governors’ management practices, should become a priority for Nancy Killefer, President Elect Barack Obama’s appointee as the White House Chief Performance Officer.

The Public Diplomacy Council, a nonprofit organization which includes former diplomats, academics and other foreign policy experts, has also called on President Elect Obama and Congress to take urgent action in reforming publicly-funded U.S. international broadcasting. The PDC 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.”

There is also growing evidence of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s inability to carry out its journalistic mission in Russia and in other countries where free media is at risk. FreeMediaOnline.org has been reporting that as a result of strategic decisions made by the BBG,  RFE/RL journalists based in Russia are subject to blackmail by the Kremlin’s secret police. The BBG not only ignored these warnings but also prevented VOA journalists based in the relative safety of Washington, D.C. to broadcast radio news to the war zone during the height of the Russian-Georgian conflict last summer. A Russian human rights organization has accused RFE/RL of giving extensive airtime to an extremist Russian politician known for making racist comments about Jews, Blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities.

FreeMediaOnline.org president Ted Lipien has urged the Obama transition team to restore Voice of America radio broadcasts to Russia and Ukraine. Lipien said that VOA journalists should be allowed to serve as a credible voice of the American people and be able to give overseas audiences a responsible, accurate and objective view of American values and the goals of the new Obama Administration. Otherwise, radio and TV audiences in the Middle East may think that the U.S. agrees with Holocaust deniers and Russians may believe that Americans, who have elected the first African-American U.S. president, are happy to pay for giving airtime to racist Russian politicians on a U.S. taxpayer-funded radio station, Lipien said.

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, first introduced by former BBG member Norman Pattiz. The marketing approach imposed by the BBG and its private consultants 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 or private funding and is managed by volunteers. It is also hosted on LiveJournal.com.

 FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog, December 30, 2008, San Francisco – FreeMediaOnline.org has been reporting in recent months on the intimidation of Radio Liberty (Radio Svoboda) journalists in Russia and the unwillingness of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) to address this issue. Years after Mr. Putin has destroyed nearly all independent broadcast media in Russia, the BBG, which manages Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), still insists that the station is a surrogate broadcaster and its journalists based in Russia can do their jobs without being subject to blackmail by the Russian security services. The bipartisan Broadcasting Board of Governors controls all U.S. civilian international broadcasting, including the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia (RFA), Radio and TV Martí, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN)—Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television. Its current members are: Joaquin F. Blaya, Blanquita Walsh Cullum, D. Jeffrey Hirschberg, Steven J. Simmons, and Condoleezza Rice.

Comments by Radio Liberty managers in Russia and current program content suggest, however, that the station tries to stay on the good side of Mr. Putin in order to protect its bureau in Moscow and a large team of local reporters who are Russian citizens. It is difficult to determine exactly how widespread this problem has become for RFE/RL journalists based in Russia. Local RFE/RL employees must observe Russian laws regarding internal security, including a ban on revealing that they may be victims of intimidation by the secret police.

As Radio Liberty’s Russian radio programs were becoming more innocuous in recent years due to pressures from the BBG to make them sound more acceptable to anti-Western Russians in the interest of pursuing the questionable marketing goal of “marrying the mission to the market,” Voice of America journalists based in Washington have tried to offer more hard-hitting news and comments and thus serve the role of a surrogate radio broadcaster that RFE/RL is no longer able to play in Russia. This year, however, the BBG made good on its threat to end all VOA Russian radio broadcasts and implemented its decision just 12 days before the Russian military attack on Georgia last summer. When the war started, the Voice of America was prevented by the BBG from broadcasting Russian radio programs. The two now former BBG members who were most responsible for this public diplomacy and foreign policy blunder were James K. Glassman, the BBG’s most recent neoconservative chairman who is now the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, and liberal Democrat, Edward E. Kaufman, who was subsequently appointed to succeed Vice President elect Joe Biden as a U.S. Senator from Delaware.

The original BBG marketing strategy was developed in the early years of the George W. Bush Administration by another liberal Democrat Norman Pattiz, founder of the U.S. radio syndicate Westwood One, who was the architect of privatizing U.S. broadcasting to the Middle East and terminating Voice of America radio services. His vision produced similar programming scandals at Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television. Only one BBG member was reported to have voted against ending VOA radio broadcasts to Russia.

In a letter to U.S. Senator Sam Brownback, Lev Roitman, a former Radio Liberty Russian service broadcaster, has described a recent example of how Radio Liberty continues to fail in its mission to expose Mr. Putin’s anti-democratic rule. Mr. Roitman’s wife, Snjezana Pelivan, is one of the two two foreign RFE/RL female employees (the other employee, Anna Karapetyan, is the mother of three minors) who are suing RFE/RL for violations of their labor, civil and human (national equality) rights when their were dismissed from their jobs in the Czech Republic, where RFE/RL has its headquarters.

A national Czech newspaper described the RFE/RL’s treatment of its foreign employees as offering them “equality with preconditions” and engaging in a practice that “contradicts ideals” of American democracy. Former Czech president Vaclav Havel has promised to follow this case as a human rights issue. RFE/RL has its headquarters in the Czech Republic. Senator Brownback has sponsored a bill that would reform U.S. public diplomacy and eliminate the Broadcasting Board of Governors. The BBG is ultimately responsible for RFE/RL’s policies with regard to its employees in the Czech Republic and in Russia and for the content of Radio Liberty’s Russian broadcasts.

From Lev Roitman’s letter to U.S. Senator Sam Brownback:

In 1973 I emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States. I worked for RFE/RL over thirty years in New York, Munich and Prague until my retirement as a senior commentator four years ago. I was with this Radio when the Soviets and their satellites jammed our broadcasts without having a lunch break, and I lived through the heady days when the Soviet jazz stopped and WE effectively contributed to the fall of that indeed evil empire.

I was always proud to contribute to RFE/RL mission of furthering the goals of American foreign policy. However, when five years ago BBG came up with the idea “to marry mission to the market”, I stopped being proud.

Step dancing on air still goes on. The results in the remaining traditional target areas of RFE/RL, in Russia, Ukraine and other countries of the former Soviet Union, are devastating:

shrinking disinterested audiences;

loss of disappointed rebroadcasting affiliates

(do not be mistaken or mislead: this loss is only partially attributable to the attitudes of local officialdoms);

loss of human rights emphasis (“unmarketable”);

lip service to U.S. foreign affairs (“unpopular”);

fear of sustained critical analysis of local politics (“unpatriotic”), etc.

Just to give you one (but not the only one) example of the level where the married to the market RFE/RL is today. On November 17, its Russian service polled the audience with the following questions posted on its site Svobodanews.ru (I translate from Russian):

“Why the democratic parties in Russia had fallen into decay?

They simply finished their life cycle,

They lost competition against the adepts of power politics,

Their leaders suffered [from] moral bankruptcy,

Western leaders defamed in the eyes of Russians the very idea of democracy,

All of the above” Period.

No other actionable choices were offered. Say,

 “They were barred from access to mass media”,

“They were stripped of financial resources”,

“Their leaders and members were harassed by authorities”,

“Media that was to them sympathetic, had been silenced by physical and/or political repression”, etc.

One is left to wonder if it is Radio Free Europe or Radio Free Putin — at the U.S. tax[payer's ]expense.

In the process of privatizing U.S. public diplomacy and international broadcasting, both Republicans and Democrats serving on the BBG were eager to destroy the Voice of America (VOA) Arabic Service, which followed far stricter journalistic standards of accuracy and balance and was required by law to represent the entire spectrum of American opinions. Dr. Snow is right in pointing out that Alhurra was not just a creation of fabulously incompetent and ideologically-driven neoconservatives. Alhurra may be therefore difficult to get rid of precisely because Democrats were just as guilty of supporting this enterprise as were neoconservative Republicans.

But if the Obama Administration wants to have a fresh start in the Middle East, it should reverse the privatization of U.S. international broadcasting. Alhurra should be abolished or completly redesigned despite the leading role in supporting this failed experiment played by the staff of Senator Joe Biden and his former chief of staff, the newly appointed U.S. Senator from Delaware Edward E. Kaufman (one of Alhurra’s strongest supporters on the BBG).  Alhurra’s godfather on the BBG was Norman Pattiz, founder of the U.S. radio syndicate Westwood One. He is another prominent Democrat and one of Biden’s financial backers.

Mistakes by both Democrats and Republicans led to the current problems in U.S. international broadcasting and public diplomacy. The elimination of the United States Information Agency (USIA), which launched in earnest the privatization of U.S. public diplomacy, was the initiative of the Clinton Administration. At the time, the dismantling of USIA had strong bipartisan support. The creation of Alhurra was the Bush Administration’s initiative, which also received bipartisan Congressional approval. As with the Iraq war, the initial decisions were based on false analysis and empty promises and are now regretted by many who had supported them.

Unfortunately, the misguided privatization of U.S. international broadcasting has not been limited only to the Middle East. In an attempt to bring even more money for Alhurra, the BBG engaged in the process of eliminating or reducing Voice of America broadcasts to a number of strategically important countries and regions, including China, Tibet, Russia, and India. Jobs of U.S. journalists who could have stopped propaganda and bias were eliminated in favor of hiring private contractors who were not subject to the same rules as those followed by the Voice of America.

In a major public diplomacy and foreign policy blunder, Edward E. Kaufman and D. Jeffrey Hirschberg, another liberal Democrat, joined ranks with James K. Glassman, the BBG’s most recent neoconservative chairman, in voting earlier this year to terminate yet another  critical Voice of America program. The BBG ended VOA radio broadcasts to Russia while ignoring strong opposition from many concerned Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress who warned them not to proceed with these cuts.

VOA Russian radio broadcasts went off the air just 12 days before the Russian army attacked Georgia. The BBG refused to reverse its decision, ignoring desperate pleadings from VOA journalists to allow them to resume their job of broadcasting radio to the war zone. James K. Glassman personally told VOA employees that these broadcasts would not continue. Yet this incredible fiasco did not stop Glassman’s friends from calling on the Obama transition team to allow him to keep his current State Department post of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.

One of the reasons neoconservative Republicans joined forces with Democrats in an effort to silence VOA Russian radio was to help Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), another private broadcasting entity which is incorporated in Delaware. Shortly before the summer war in the Caucasus and the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the same group of Democrats and Republicans on the BBG also voted to eliminate VOA radio broadcasts to Georgia, Ukraine, and India. When terrorists struck in Mumbai, VOA no longer produced radio programs in Hindi to India. By a miracle, VOA radio broadcasts to Georgia and Ukraine were temporarily saved because the BBG staff did not act fast enough to end them before the Russian attack on Georgia.

It should not be a surprise that privatization of U.S. international broadcasting would lead to decisions which harm U.S. national security interests and result in major journalistic failures. Some of these failures, which were highlighted in the study prepared the Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School, University of Southern California, are described at length by Dr. Snow. It’s also no surprise that the BBG wanted to keep the study secret even from members of Congress.

As Dr. Snow points out, there were plenty of earlier warnings which the Broadcasting Board of Governors chose to ignore.  Fortunately for media freedom and journalistic ethics, a news event — a conference in Teheran which gathered those who deny the reality of the Holocaust — became an unexpected test of the BBG’s privatization and marketing strategies and eventually led to investigations which exposed both journalistic and financial abuses.

Reporting by FreeMediaOnline.org, a San Francisco-based media freedom nonprofit, which had dealt with international media and NPR reporting on the conference in Teheran, was responsible for the initial inquiries on how Alhurra and other BBG-run entities covered various statements by Holocaust deniers.

According to ProPublica.org, another nonprofit investigative journalism website, one Alhurra Television report that had particularly upset lawmakers was from an Iranian reporter who told viewers that there was no proof that 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II. Use this link to the ProPublica.org web site to view the Alhurra report with English subtitles:  http://www.propublica.org/feature/alhurra-video

View  FreeMediaOnline.org report:  “Holocaust conference in Iran: Al Jazeera offers more balance than National Public Radio (NPR) reporter; objective coverage from most other international media”     (In response to criticism, NPR later aired a number of reports to correct its initial reporting. The BBG has been silent about such mistakes and attempted to limit journalistic inquiries.)

Reports which violate basic U.S. journalistic standards became common on the U.S. broadcasting entities privatized by the BBG, as the Alhurra study demonstrates. The Voice of America could not provide a more balanced reporting to counter such abuses because its programs have been reduced or eliminated by the Board and the Bush Administration.

In addition to the effects of privatization and the lack of sufficient oversight, BBG’s marketing strategies, introduced by Norman Pattiz, also contributed significantly to biased reporting and journalistic failures. Political interference with journalistic program content was made part of the BBG’s strategy of “marrying the mission to the market.” Private consultants hired by the BBG were telling Alhurra and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) not to focus too much on human rights issues since such an emphasis might offend highly nationalistic audiences and lead to lower ratings. Norman Pattiz and his consultants also told BBG broadcasters that they can improve their audience reach through music and entertainment programming.

One reason privatization became a major focus for the BBG was the inability of the Board members to force VOA journalists to take orders and compromise their journalistic ethics. Saving jobs of private contractors overseas while eliminating U.S. positions at the Voice of America also became a priority for BBG members and their staff.

In the case of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, D. Jeffrey Hirschberg and BBG’s executive director Jeffrey Trimble wanted to maintain a large private contractor presence in Russia despite strong evidence that the Kremlin’s secret police has been busy intimidating and blackmailing RFE/RL journalists who are Russian citizens and are subject to Russian laws. (Russian law prevents these contract employees from disclosing to RFE/RL and the BBG that they might have been approached by the FSB, the successor agency of the KGB.) To protect their bureau in Moscow from being closed down, Radio Liberty managers put a positive spin on Putin’s comments about the murder of independent Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.  View FreeMediaOnline.org report.

  
More recently, a Russian human rights organization, the Moscow Human Rights Bureau, has criticized Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) for giving an entire hour of airtime to a Russian politician known for his racist views and verbal attacks on Blacks and other ethnic and racial minorities. View FreeMediaOnline.org report: “U.S. Taxpayers Pay for Spreading Racist Views on Radio Liberty in Russia: What Would Barack Obama Say If He Knew…”   

Many independent experts and organizations, including the Public Diplomacy Council, have called for a major reform of U.S. public diplomacy. The Obama Administration should show that it wants U.S. public diplomacy to have a fresh start by abolishing the Broadcasting Board of Governors and un-privatizing Alhurra Television. The new Administration has no need for private  U.S. propaganda radio and TV operating without proper supervision and accountability. 

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. He is founder and president of FreeMediaOnline.org, a San Francisco-based nonprofit which support media freedom worldwide, and 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.

The White House statement issued to commemorate Human Rights Day and the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 included a claim that “U.S. international broadcasters funded by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) are overcoming censorship by gathering news from citizen journalists with cell phones, reporting the facts via SMS feeds and targeted e-mails, and encouraging citizens living in repressive regimes to join the information revolution with open discussions on radio and TV call-in shows and blogs. The BBG now offers diverse Internet products in all 60 broadcast languages, ranging from basic text to complex video and audio and live streaming.” The wording of the White House statement may suggest to some that the BBG is paying for these initiatives when in fact U.S. taxpayers’ money appropriated by Congress is being used.

Such self-serving statements are more interesting not for what they include but for what they leave out. For nearly eight years, the BBG has supported the neoconservative agenda of privatizing and outsourcing U.S. international broadcasting, resulting in  an unprecedented failure and a waste of U.S. taxpayers’ dollars. Incredibly,  some of the biggest supporters of this privatization effort have been liberal Democrats serving on the bipartisan Board, including Edward E. Kaufman, the newly appointed U.S. Senator from Delaware, and Norman Pattiz, founder of the U.S. radio syndicate Westwood One.

One of their staunchest neoconservative allies has been James K. Glassman, the BBG’s most recent chairman who is now the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. The record of the failed public diplomacy policies under his leadership has not prevented the BBG or the White House from claiming success. Glassman’s allies have even launched a campaign to help him hold on to his position in the new Obama Administration. His friend of 30 years, syndicated columnist Morton Kondracke, wrote recently in Roll Call, the Capital Hill newspaper, that “keeping on a conservative Republican like Glassman – formerly based at the American Enterprise Institute – may be a hard swallow for Democrats eager to occupy plum jobs. … But before they oust him, they ought to listen to him, take his recommendations for beefing up the U.S. global communications infrastructure and – for sure – maintain his innovations.”

Privatization of U.S. international broadcasting produced this report by the BBG-funded Alhurra Television for the Middle East. To pay for Alhurra, the BBG terminated all Voice of America Arabic broadcasts, which were produced by American-trained editors and were subject to strict editorial oversight.

Glassman, Kaufman and Pattiz may try to present themselves as experts who have uncovered the benefits of privatization of U.S. international broadcasting and the use of the Internet, but most outside experts agree that their innovations have been responsible for the steepest decline in the positive indicators of U.S. image abroad in recent history.

The core of the BBG strategy has been the dismantling of the Voice of America (VOA), the official yet journalistically independent U.S. broadcasting organization, which is subject to U.S. laws and strict fiscal accountability, and replacing it with a number of private broadcasters and contractors, some of them based overseas. Neoconservatives like Glassman were engaged in this effort primarily for ideological reasons, while liberal Democrats like Pattiz and Kaufman who unquestionably supported these ideas also saw benefits accruing to private consultants and contractors who have been linked to them through their business and political connections. As international public opinion surveys, U.S. government audits and reports by investigative journalists show, their efforts were a fiscal and editorial fiasco which turned overseas audiences against the United States.

• Glassman and Kaufman were among the majority of the BBG members responsible for shutting down Voice of America radio broadcasts to Russia just 12 days before the Russian army attacked Georgia. They also voted to terminate VOA radio broadcasts to Georgia and Ukraine.
• The BBG ignored appeals from the U.S. Congress not to eliminate radio broadcasting to countries without free media. On July 17, 2008, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT ) specifically warned the BBG not to stop or reduce broadcasts to Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tibet and to the Balkans, saying that “freedom of speech remains restricted and broadcasting is still necessary” in these countries.
• Glassman, Kaufman and other BBG members voted to end VOA radio broadcasts in Hindi to India. These broadcasts went off the air just a few weeks before the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
• The American Federation of Government Employees, Local 1812, which represents VOA broadcasters, said after the Mumbai attacks that it would take at least a half dozen eggs “to cover the faces of those BBG Board members who voted in favor of ending the VOA shortwave radio broadcasts in Hindi.”
• Despite Putin’s crackdown on independent media in Russia, the BBG removed Voice of America Russian radio program from an AM frequency in Moscow. They restored a much shortened broadcast only after protests from FreeMediaOnline.org and other media freedom organizations.
• After the Russian attack on Georgia, Kaufman and Glassman refused to allow VOA to resume radio broadcasts in Russian that could be heard on shortwave in the war zone. Under Secretary Glassman personally rejected appeals from VOA Russian Service journalists to allow them to restart radio broadcasts during the Russian-Georgian conflict.
• The BBG eliminated a call-in radio show by the Voice of America Russian Service which was popular with independent journalists and human rights activists in Russia and in other former Soviet republics.
• A statement issued by the leadership of the Voice of America employees’ unions, AFGE Local 1812 and AFSCME Local 1418, said that the Broadcasting Board of Governors “has been responsible for one blunder after another — to the point that its actions have compromised U.S. strategic interests.” Saying that “the elimination of Russian and Georgian radio broadcasts should be the last straw,” the VOA employees’ union leaders called on Congress to act immediately to dissolve the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Their letter also said that the BBG, “unilaterally and in contravention of the express language of the Congress, closed the Voice of America Russian Radio Service.” “In effect, we are deaf, dumb and blind in Russia,” the union letter said.
• The Public Diplomacy Council, a nonprofit organization which includes former diplomats, academics and other foreign policy experts, blamed the BBG for ignoring strategically important target areas such as Russia, the Balkans, India and the Western Hemisphere. The Council noted that the Broadcasting Board of Governors “has taken special aim at the Voice of America” by abolishing the VOA Arabic Service and reducing its broadcasts in English to the Middle East and other regions. The Council also criticized the BBG’s decision to terminate all VOA radio broadcasts in Russian shortly before Russia’s military attack on Georgia last summer.
• At the urging of James Glassman, the BBG unsuccessfully tried to hire Paula Zahn, formerly of CNN, as its high-profile spokesperson while cutting or reducing programs to countries like Tibet and Russia.
• In its push for privatization, the BBG ignored warnings that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalists who are Russian citizens and are based in Russia are subject to intimidation and blackmail by the Kremlin’s secret police. View FreeMediaOnline.org report: Radio Liberty managers put a positive spin on Putin’s comments about the murder of independent Russian journalist
•  Russian human rights organization, the Moscow Human Rights Bureau has criticized Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) for giving an entire hour of airtime to a Russian politician known for his racist views and verbal attacks on Blacks and other ethnic and racial minorities. View FreeMediaOnline.org: U.S. Taxpayers Pay for Spreading Racist Views on Radio Liberty in Russia
• The BBG spent millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars on private foreign contractors and building construction in the Czech Republic, Russia, and the Middle East while cutting U.S. based jobs and denying U.S. labor law protections to its overseas based employees. View The Herald News: New administration must undue RFE/RL’s anti-diplomacy abroad
• Articles highly critical of the BBG’s actions in the Middle East and Russia have been published by the independent journalism web site ProPublica.org. They point out that despite many major editorial and financial scandals, the BBG still favors the privatized broadcasting entities, such as Alhurra, over VOA. Investigative journalists at ProPublica.org, a non-profit led by former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger, reported that a guest invited to participate in an Alhurra program had called for killings of American soldiers in Iraq. The network also aired a report on a Holocaust deniers conference in Tehran. According to ProPublica.org, “the reporter who covered the conference told viewers that Jews had provided no scientific evidence of the Holocaust.”
• ProPublica.org uncovered major financial abuses at Radio Sawa and Alhurra.
• The BBG has refused to make public an independent study commissioned last year from the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School to review the network’s content because the study is reportedly highly critical of Alhurra and the BBG.

The privatization of U.S. international broadcasting was based on a naive premise that overseas audiences will not associate such names as Alhurra and Radio Sawa with the U.S. government.  The surrogate broadcasting model from the Cold War, embraced by both neoconservatives like Glassman and liberal Democrats like Kaufman, is neither effective nor forward-looking. Their current strategy is to present themselves as innovators of the Internet age. In reality, their neoconservative surrogate propaganda broadcasting policies are responsible for destroying the credibility of the U.S. message abroad have delayed new media innovation by at least eight years.

Under Secretary Glassman is still pushing for further cuts in radio broadcasting by the Voice of America to pay for his latest ideas such as using online contests to promote democracy. He and his former and current colleagues on the BBG fail to see that overseas audiences want serious news that reflect rather than advertise American policies and values — something unlikely to be generated by private contractors working without proper supervision. The Obama Administration should not be fooled by the BBG’s and Under Secretary Glassman’s newly-found enthusiasm for new media.

It might be worth remembering that not too long ago this neo-conservative Republican was just as enthusiastic about the U.S. stock market. Glassman co-authored a book DOW 36,000,  confidently predicting that the stock index would soon reach that level. He now believes that Internet solutions, which bloggers have been successfully using for a long time at practically no cost, require millions of dollars in spending on private consultants and contractors.  Norman Pattiz, whose business ideas and entertainment-based programming for Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television delighted the fabulously incompetent neoconservative BBG members, is now trying to save his own radio company Westwood One from bankruptcy. Westwood One announced on Nov. 18 that it will be suspended from trading on the NYSE as a result of its failure to maintain a minimum $25 million market capitalization level. Its stock now trades at about 5 cents a share.

Unfortunately for the American people and the cause of press freedom abroad, the BBG has been a refuge for political loyalists, U.S. businessmen lacking international sophistication, and ideologues of both parties with no  real experience in foreign policy, human rights activism, and new media journalism. The Obama Administration would be  well-advised to ignore the BBG-generated propaganda and take advice from independent experts with no link to political appointees, consultants and contractors who have exposed U.S. public diplomacy to international ridicule.  Almost all independent experts, including those connected with the well-respected Public Diplomacy Council, have called for reversing the unregulated and completely misguided privatization of U.S. international broadcasting.

This commentary may be republished on the web or in print 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. He is founder and president of FreeMediaOnline.org, a San Francisco-based nonprofit which support media freedom worldwide, and author of Wojtyla’s Women: How They Shaped the Life of Pope John Paul II and Changed the Catholic Church (O-Books – June 2008).

VOA Hindi radio broadcasts became the victim of a highly unusual political alliance. James K. Glassman, the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs – a neoconservative Republican who was the BBG’s most recent chairman – joined forces with liberal Democrats led by  Edward E. Kaufman, newly appointed  to the U.S. Senate from Delaware, in an attempt to terminate VOA radio programs to countries from Russia to India.  They succeeded in silencing VOA radio in Russia just 12 days before the Russian army attacked Georgia and have refused to restore Russian radio programs to the previous levels. The BBG also wanted to terminate VOA radio to Georgia and Ukraine, but the events in Georgia forced them to temporarily suspend those plans.  They did, however, put an end to VOA Hindi radio in India, brushing aside appeals and protests from members of Congress and press freedom organizations.

Members of Congress, human rights organizations, and foreign policy experts have condemned the BBG actions as major public diplomacy blunders. The American Federation of Government Employees, Local 1812, which represents VOA broadcasters, said after the Mumbai attacks that it would take at least a half dozen eggs “to cover the faces of those BBG Board members who voted in favor of ending the VOA shortwave radio broadcasts in Hindi.”

No more proof of their keystone cops-like decisions was necessary but the tragic events in Mumbai this past weekend highlight once again the failed policy of the BBG.  That policy -the elimination of VOA shortwave radio broadcasts  and their stubborn refusal to admit their mistakes- is once again demonstrable.

The situation between India and Pakistan is not likely to result in a handholding kumbaya songfest any time soon and the United States claims both as allies.  In this situation the U.S. needs a trusted voice to clearly articulate its policies.  The only solution is to reinstate the VOA Hindi shortwave radio broadcasts.

The VOA employees’ union was one of the many groups and individuals who had earlier warned the BBG not to terminate VOA radio broadcasts to countries like Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, and India. Most Republicans and Democrats serving on the BBG were united, however, in their desire to privatize U.S. international broadcasting, which meant dismantling the official Voice of America broadcasts while steering money to Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television.

Despite being supported by neoconservatives, these two privatized stations were a brainchild of Norman Pattiz, a liberal Democrat who is the founder of U.S. radio syndicate Westwood One and a financial supporter of Vice President elect Joe Biden.  Edward E. Kaufman was also an ethusiastic advocate for Sawa and Alhurra. He once served as Senator Biden’s chief of staff and will be taking his place in the U.S. Senate. Some of the privatized broadcasting entities are incorporated in Delaware, which is Biden’s and Kaufman’s home state.

James Glassman, their neoconservative ally and author of the book DOW 36,000, which forecast an unstoppable growth of the U.S. stock market, believes not only in the privatization of U.S. international broadcasting but has also become an enthusiastic proponent of the Internet. His actions while serving with the BBG have deprived radio listeners in war zones and in impoverished regions of access to American news from Washington. Prior to Glassman’s appointment to the BBG,  Kaufman voted with other neoconservative Republicans to eliminate VOA Arabic radio service. They created Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television, the  two scandal-ridden privatized broadcasting entities which lack VOA’s strict fiscal and editorial controls and are not viewed in the Middle East as a credible and authoritative voice of the U.S. government and the American people.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors had been warned repeatedly not to cut VOA radio broadcasts to countries like Russia and India. Shortly before the BBG implemented some of the program cuts, FreeMediaOnline.org, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, published an article arguing that it was a wrong time to give up Hindi broadcasts to India.

In September 2008, the two Co-Chairmen of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), wrote a letter to the BBG , in which they pointed out that over 70% of the Indian population lives in rural villages, many with no access to TV or the Internet. They expressed surprise that the BBG wants to terminate VOA  Hindi radio at the time when the United States is expanding its strategic partnership with India. The BBG ignored their appeal to allow VOA Hindi radio broadcasts to continue just as they had ignored Congressional warnings not to terminate Voice of America radio broadcasts to Russia.

Ted Kaufman, who had previously served as Senator Joe Biden’s chief of staff, was appointed in 1995 to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a bipartisan body which oversees U.S. government-funded international broadcasts, including those by the Voice of America. Although he is a liberal Democrat,  Kaufman and another former BBG member, Norman Pattiz of the U.S. radio conglomerate Westwood One, formed an alliance with a few of the Board’s most famously incompetent  neoconservative Republicans. Kaufman, Pattiz and their neoconservative allies including James K. Glassman, the current Under Secretary of State for Public Affairs, worked together to outsource much of U.S. international broadcasting to private contractors such as Alhurra Television and Radio Sawa network for the Middle East. These new networks were created based on the outdated Cold War-era surrogate broadcasting concepts and Norman Pattiz’s domestic U.S. radio business models. To pay for them, Kaufman and his allies began a process of closing down Voice America language services, which were financially and editorially  more accountable to American taxpayers but also more difficult to be managed by the BBG in any way the Board members saw fit.

Ted Kaufman was the primary force behind the shutting down of many Voice of America radio broadcasts, including programs to Russia, a secretive action taken last summer only days before the Russian army attacked Georgia. Even when after the Russian move against Georgia Kaufman’s foreign policy and public diplomacy blunder became obvious, the future U.S. Senator from Delaware prevented the BBG from voting on restoring the Russian-language radio programs that could reach Russia and the war zone in the Caucasus on shortwave. Shortly before the start of the Georgian conflict, Kaufman also voted to eliminate VOA radio to Georgia and Ukraine on the assumption that even poor, desperate and displaced people in conflict areas will be able to get their news and information from the Internet.

While the BBG praises its own and Ted Kaufman’s achievements, the Board has numerous critics and no major outside defenders. Many have called for its abolition, including the highly-respected Public Diplomacy Council, a Washington nonprofit think-tank on public diplomacy, which accused the BBG of taking “special aim at the Voice of America.” The PDC has recommended that the Broadcasting Board of Governors should be replaced by a new nonpartisan oversight commission. It blamed the BBG for silencing VOA Russian radio and ignoring subsequent appeals to restore it.

The BBG, which had tried unsuccessfully to hire Paula Zahn, formerly of CNN, as its high-profile spokesperson to improve its public image while cutting or reducing programs to countries like Tibet and Russia, issued a statement on the appointment of Ted Kaufman to the U.S. Senate describing him as “a dedicated guardian of the journalistic independence of our broadcasters and a passionate advocate of the Agency’s mission.” It also said that “Mr. Kaufman understands the impact of international broadcasting and has always been quick to credit the brave reporters in the field and dedicated employees behind the scenes who are essential in providing reliable news and information to audiences suffering censorship and lack of press freedom.”

Many VOA employees dispute such statements by the BBG spokespersons as public relations hype hat has no basis in reality. They point out that in addition to terminating VOA radio to Russia, a country where censorship is widely practiced and independent journalists are frequently murdered, the BBG had tried also to reduce radio broadcasts to Tibet. In that case, the BBG was forced to cancel its threat after protests by Tibetan monks on Capital Hill and letters from outraged members of Congress.

A letter issued last summer by the leadership of the Voice of America employees’ unions, AFGE Local 1812 and AFSCME Local 1418, said that the Broadcasting Board of Governors “has been responsible for one blunder after another — to the point that its actions have compromised U.S. strategic interests.” Saying that “the elimination of Russian and Georgian radio broadcasts should be the last straw,” the VOA employees’ union leaders called on Congress to act immediately to dissolve the Broadcasting Board of Governors.  Their letter also said that the BBG, “unilaterally and in contravention of the express language of the Congress, closed the Voice of America Russian Radio Service.”  “In effect, we are deaf, dumb and blind in Russia,” the union letter said.

Upon learning of Ted Kaufman’s appointment to the U.S. Senate, a high-ranking Union leader told FreeMediaOnline.org that ”Ted Kaufman was no friend to the employees of the VOA.” A former VOA Union member and manager said that the statement by the BBG spokeswoman Letitia King describing Kaufman as “the kind of person who expresses sincere appreciation for the person on the front line,”  is as hollow “as any statement could possibly be.”  The former VOA employee said that Kaufman never sought input from the rank-and-file and kept himself ”behind the closed doors of the BBG fortress. ” 

Journalistic blunders and financial abuses during Ted Kaufman’s watch at the BBG have been well documented by the independent journalism web site ProPublica.org, a non-profit led by former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger. ProPublica.org investigative journalists reported that a guest invited to participate in an Alhurra program had called for killings of American soldiers in Iraq. The Alhurra network also aired a completely unbalanced report on a Holocaust deniers conference in Tehran. According to ProPublica.org, “the reporter who covered the conference told viewers that Jews had provided no scientific evidence of the Holocaust.” ProPublica.org has also uncovered major financial abuses at Radio Sawa and Alhurra. The BBG has refused to make public an independent study commissioned last year from the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School to review the network’s content because the study is reportedly highly critical of Alhurra and the BBG.

Such public diplomacy,  journalistic and financial  blunders would be unlikely to occur on a vast scale if Ted Kaufman and Norman Pattiz had not become liberal allies of equally incompetent neo-conservative spenders of U.S. taxpayers’ money who wanted to outsource U.S. international broadcasting to private contractors. Many Voice of America employees are thankful that Ted Kaufman is finally gone from the Broadcasting Board of Governors along with people like James Glassman, who in 1999 co-authored a book DOW 36,000 predicting an unstoppable growth of U.S. stocks, and Norman Pattiz, whose radio programing company’s shares sold at 3 cents on Wednesday and will stop trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Despite Kaufman’s close links with Biden and Biden’s links with Pattiz, who has been one of Biden’s major financial backers, some VOA employees are also optimistic that in managing U.S. international broadcasting and public diplomacy, President Obama will be true to his promise of rewarding  foreign policy experience and competence above political loyalty. They also hope that as a junior Senator from Delaware, Ted Kaufman can do less damage to U.S. international broadcasting than he would have if he had stayed at the BBG. As one former VOA broadcaster, manager and Union leader put it, Ted Kaufman was a big fish in a small BBG pond, but he will be a mere guppy in a mammoth Senate sea.

This commentary may be republished on the web or in print with attribution to the author.  Ted Lipien is a former Voice of America acting associate director and 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. He is founder and president of FreeMediaOnline.org, a San Francisco-based nonprofit which support media freedom worldwide, and author of Wojtyla’s Women: How They Shaped the Life of Pope John Paul II and Changed the Catholic Church (O-Books – June 2008).

 FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog September 16, 2006, San Francisco — In a show of bipartisanship, two powerful members of Congress sent a letter to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) demanding that the BBG reverse its decision to terminate Voice of America (VOA) radio programs in Hindi to India. The BBG is a bipartisan body which manages VOA and several other taxpayer-funded U.S. international broadcasters.

The two Co-Chairmen of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans, Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), stressed in their letter to the BBG that over 70% of the Indian population lives in rural villages, many with no access to TV or the Internet. They expressed surprise that the BBG wants to terminate VOA  Hindi radio at the time when the United States is expanding its strategic partnership with India. They asked the BBG to allow VOA Hindi radio broadcasts to continue.

Chances are slim, however, that the Broadcasting Board of Governors will reverse its decision on India or other countries, to which VOA programs have been terminated or will soon cease, unless the whole Congress acts to force the Board to give up these programming cuts.

Unfortunately for radio listeners in India and concerned Indian Americans, the BBG enjoys strong support on this issue from Senator Joe Biden, Jr. (D-DE), Senator Barak Obama’s vice presidential running mate and a powerful member of the U.S. Senate.

Edward “Ted” E. Kaufman, Senator Biden’s former chief of staff who now works on his vice presidential campaign, blocked attempts last week to resume Voice of America (VOA) radio programs to Russia and other countries, including India. As a Democratic member of the BBG, Ted Kaufman was responsible earlier with other Democrats and some Republican members for terminating VOA Russian-language broadcasts just 12 days before Russia attacked Georgia on August 8. He had also voted for ending VOA broadcasts to India and a number of other countries, including Georgia.

Last week, a Republican BBG member, radio journalist Blanquita Cullum, had requested a vote on resuming VOA broadcasts in Russian and suspending plans to stop broadcasts to other countries. India was one of the countries named in Cullum’s proposal. Ted Kaufman was one of the key BBG members who refused to put the proposal to a vote, rejecting arguments that the earlier decision to terminate the broadcasts was wrong and that their resumption would send a strong message to Mr. Putin.

Ted Kaufman and others on Senator Biden’s staff  seem to be hoping that the mainstream media will not pay attention to this issue during the presidential election campaign, thus allowing them to play politics with U.S. international broadcasting to the benefit of the senator’s constituents and longtime friends.

Taking away radio broadcasting to Russia from VOA benefits another BBG-managed broadcaster,  semi-private Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which is incorporated in Delaware, Senator Biden’s home state.

Senator Biden has been a strong supporter of his billionaire backer Norman Pattiz. Founder and chairman of media empire Westwood One, Pattiz had served on the BBG from May 2006 until March 2006. He pushed for the elimination of many Voice of America services to fund his news and entertainment broadcasting projects for the Middle East: Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television, which have attracted much controversy.

Even after Norman Pattiz resigned from the Board in March 2006, Senator Biden’s former chief of staff continued to vote for eliminating or reducing VOA radio broadcasts to India, Russia, Tibet and other countries while supporting expanding broadcasts to the Middle East, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

Indian Americans and other supporters of U.S. international broadcasting and media freedom can contact Ted Kaufman through the BBG executive director Jeff Trimble: jtrimble@ibb.gov. 330 Independence Avenue, SW, Washington, DC 20237, Tel: (202) 203-4400, Fax: (202) 203-4585.

Send a copy of your email to the BBG Public Affairs officer Tish King, publicaffairs@bbg.gov, and request specifically that it be forwarded to Mr. Kaufman.

You may also wish to contact the Obama-Biden campaign staff, Tel. (866) 675-2008, and the Senate offices of  Senator Biden, Tel: (202) 224-5042 Fax: (202) 224-0139, and Senator Obama, Tel: (202) 224-2854 Fax: (202) 228-4260.

THIS POST CAN BE REPUBLISHED with attribution to FreeMediaOnline.org.

FreeMediaOnline.org is a 501 (c) 3 media freedom nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, CA. Contributions to FreeMediaOnline.org are tax-deductible. Please support our work in defense of media freedom worldwide.

 FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog September 15, 2006, San Francisco — A top aide to Senator Biden has sent a message to Mr. Putin that politics can be placed ahead of human rights and media freedom if there is little risk of a public outcry.  Edward “Ted” E. Kaufman, Senator Biden’s former chief of staff who now works on his vice presidential campaign, blocked attempts last week to resume Voice of America (VOA) radio programs to Russia. As a Democratic member of the bipartisan Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which  manages VOA, Ted Kaufman was responsible earlier with other Democrats and some Republican members for terminating VOA Russian-language broadcasts just 12 days before Russia attacked Georgia on August 8. He had also voted for ending VOA broadcasts to Georgia, which the BBG later allowed to continue temporarily.

Last week, a Republican BBG member, radio journalist Blanquita Cullum, had requested a vote on resuming VOA broadcasts in Russian and suspending plans to stop broadcasts to other countries, including Georgia and Ukraine. Ted Kaufman was one of the BBG members who refused to put the proposal to a vote, rejecting arguments that the earlier decision to terminate the broadcasts was wrong and that their resumption would send a strong message to Mr. Putin.

Ted Kaufman and others on Senator Biden’s staff  seem to be hoping that the mainstream media will not pay attention to this issue during the presidential election campaign, thus allowing them to play politics with U.S. international broadcasting to the benefit of the senator’s constituents and longtime friends.  Taking away radio broadcasting to Russia from VOA benefits another BBG-managed broadcaster,  semi-private Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which is incorporated in Delaware, Senator Biden’s home state.

Many other members of Congress of both parties, including Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), have been strongly opposed to cutting VOA radio broadcasts to Russia, but Senator Biden’s staff was said to have worked with Ted Kaufman and the BBG  staff on quietly implementing the cut before others in Congress could stop it.

In addition to his role on the BBG, Ted Kaufman is also president of Public Strategies, a political and management consulting firm based in Wilmington, Delaware. He is a trustee of Christiana Care Corporation and a member of the Board of Directors of Children and Families First. He worked in various technical, financial, and marketing positions with the DuPont Company. Ted Kaufman appeared in a recent CNN profile of Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

In trying to help RFE/RL at the expense of VOA, Kaufman and members of Senator Biden’s staff  have ignored warnings that RFE/RL has lost much of its previous independence and effectiveness it had during the Cold War when it was based in Munich, West Germany. Most of  RFE/RL Russian broadcasters now live in Russia with their families. According to media freedom nonprofit FreeMediaOnline.org, RFE/RL journalists in Russia are closely monitored and subject to intimidation by Mr. Putin’s secret police. FreeMediaOnline.org also reported that several years ago the RFE/RL management in Moscow and Prague demanded that stations in Russia rebroadcasting their programs register with the Russian authorities. This action, apparently taken to protect the status of RFE/RL’s Moscow bureau, helped the security services to move faster in tracking down RFE/RL and VOA affiliates and forcing them to stop rebroadcasts of Western news programs.

In a sign that the secret police intimidation is working, the head of RFE/RL Moscow bureau expressed confidence in the common sense of the current Russian leadership and the head of RFE/RL Russian service in Prague said that the future of RFE/RL in Russia looks good. These statements were made in late 2006 shortly after the brutal murder of independent Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Many former and current VOA journalists viewed these comments by RFE/RL managers as offensive to the memory of the slain Russian journalist, as did human rights activists in Russia. Earlier this year,  a Moscow-based human rights organization criticized RFE/RL for giving extensive airtime to an extremist Russian politician known for his racist and anti-immigrant views.

Voice of America broadcasters, who are based in Washington, D.C.,  are seen as far less vulnerable to intimidation that could limit their criticism of  Mr. Putin.  Senator Biden’s staff’s role in terminating VOA radio broadcasts to Russia is likely to be well received in Moscow as a sign that business as usual would be possible with the Obama-Biden administration.  U.S. international broadcasting plays an important role in explaining America to the world and in helping to overcome press censorship in many countries but is not high on the agenda for most Americans — something Ted Kaufman may have counted on in blocking the resumption of VOA radio news broadcasts to Russia. Mainstream U.S. media has not reported on this story.

 FreeMediaOnline.org

Jeff Trimble was said to have worked with Senator Biden’s  Senate staff over the summer to quickly and quietly implement the shutting down of VOA radio to Russia in late July without alerting other members of Congress. Many in Congress have been strongly opposed to this move on national security grounds and see it as a blow to media freedom in Russia. 12 days after the VOA program went off the air, Russian troops attacked Georgia. Since then, Vice President Cheney visited both Georgia and Ukraine. President Bush announced a $1 billion aid package to Georgia.

Jeff Trimble is a former acting president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which would benefit from the shutting down of VOA Russian-language and Ukrainian-language programs. RFE/RL is incorporated in Senator Biden’s home state. One of the BBG members, Edward E. Kaufman, was formerly Senator Biden’s chief of staff. 

Jeff Trimble and another BBG member, Jeff Hirschberg, who is also a director of the U.S.-Russia Business Council, had traveled to Russia in previous years and conducted negotiations with Russian officials and associates of President and now Prime Minister Putin. They reportedly discussed the status of RFE/RL large news bureau in Moscow, which still operates despite the closing down of most independent Russian broadcasters. Most of the major electronic media outlets in Russia are now in the hands of Mr. Putin’s associates and other media is subject to secret police monitoring and intimidation.

FreeMediaOnline.org president Ted Lipien has warned that  Prague and Moscow-based RFE/RL cannot be a replacement for VOA Russian-language radio broadcasts from Washington, D.C. The Moscow Human Rights Bureau, a pro-democracy NGO, has recently criticized Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for giving extensive airtime to an extremist politician who is known for making racist comments about immigrants and other groups. Last year, shortly after the murder of independent Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the head of RFE/RL bureau in Moscow had  publicly expressed  her confidence in “the common sense of the Russian leadership.” Human rights activists also criticized RFE/RL for airing these comments shortly after the brutal murder the most prominent journalist who was critical of Mr. Putin.

Ted Lipien has also warned that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalists working and living in Russia are subject to intimidation by the Russian secret police and that their  safety and their work has been put in  severe jeopardy by the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Lipien has called for immediate restoration of VOA Russian-language radio broadcasts as a matter of great urgency for U.S. national security and public diplomacy.

According to FreeMediaOnline.org president, if the BBG vote takes place on Thursday as expected, the BBG members will be on record as either supporting or opposing the restoration of VOA radio programs at a time of growing nationalism and militarism in Russia.  They will have a chance to reverse their earlier decisions made before the Russian attack on Georgia. If they don’t, the shutting down of VOA Russian radio broadcasts could become an election campaign issue because of Senator Biden’s presumed role in that decision, and is likely to be examined in Congressional hearings this fall.

FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog Commentary by Ted Lipien, September 10, 2008, San Francisco — Websites tell their tales, and the newly redesigned, flashy website of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) tells a tale of hubris, waste, and reduced access to uncensored radio news for those who are the poorest and the most repressed by authoritarian regimes.

Why Buddhist Monks?

The BBG, which manages U.S. taxpayer-funded broadcasts to countries without free media, has just launched its new website, which shows on its “Home” page a picture of Buddhist monks, a flashy promotional video, and the slogan: “Bringing News and Information to People Around the World in 60 Languages.”

For those who are familiar with the BBG’s record of foreign policy blunders and are concerned about media freedom, the Buddhist monks picture tells a tale that is greatly at odds with the advertising look of the new government website. The same bipartisan body of two women and four men — three Democrats and three Republicans, including the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – had tried earlier to reduce the Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) news radio programs to Tibet and China. These two stations are funded by the U.S. Congress and managed by the BBG.

These prominent, politically well-connected and business-oriented Americans — who, however, have no experience of living under a totalitarian regime, are not practicing journalists (with one exception), and have no record of significant activism in support of human rights –  had decided to reduce radio programs to Tibet about a year before the pro-autonomy demonstrations, which erupted there and were violently suppressed by the Chinese government in Beijing. They then refused to rescind their decision until a group of Tibetan monks went to the Capitol Hill and staged a peaceful protest. The U.S. Congress finally forced the BBG to back down on the program reductions to Tibet and China.

A Government Agency That Places A High Priority on Itself Tries to Hire Paula Zahn

The BBG claims that shortwave radio program cuts and reductions allow it to invest more in the development of their Internet program delivery strategy. They did use a picture of Buddhist monks, but to what purpose? The new expensive website does not offer any help to the impoverished Tibetans in cities and in rural areas, or to other groups around the world caught up in wars and conflicts and without access to the Internet. The same BBG also wanted to hire American television newscaster Paul Zahn, formerly of CNN and ABC, to be their public relations guru. She had turned them down.

Just 12 days before the Russian military attacked Georgia on August 8, the Broadcasting Board of Governors completely shut down all on-air Voice of America radio programs to Russia and to all other area were Russian is spoken. This included parts of the war zone in Georgia.

Senator Biden’s Staff Reportedly Helped to Kill VOA Radio to Russia

The Senate staff of the new Vice Presidential Democratic Party nominee, Senator Joe Biden, was said to have helped the BBG members implement this decision. It was carried out in great secrecy because of the widespread opposition to these program cuts among the rest of the members of Congress.

Extremists Invited by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Alhurra Television

Senator Biden was said to have favored program cuts at the Voice of America because they would benefit Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a semi-private entity, which is incorporated in his state. RFE/RL, which is also managed by the BBG and broadcasts in Russia, was recently criticized by the Moscow Human Rights Bureau for giving extensive airtime to an extremist Russian politician who is known for “chauvinist and racist views,” including comments about dark-skinned immigrants. Another BBG-managed private broadcaster, Alhurra Television to the Middle East, gave air time to a militant who called for the death of American soldiers in Iraq. The BBG claims that  radio program cuts to Tibet, and countries like Georgia and Russia, help to pay for Alhurra television and the expansion of its new technology infrastructure, including the Internet.

When the Russian troops entered deeply into the Georgian territory on August 8, the BBG was also about to shut down all Voice of America radio programs to Georgia and to Ukraine — the two countries under pressure from Russia, which Vice President Dick Cheney visited last week. Also last week, President Bush announced a $1 billion aid package to Georgia. But even these developments have had little if any effect on the BBG. The Board announced that the Voice of America Georgian radio programs will continue, but only for “the foreseeable future,” and described demands from its own journalists for reversing the other program cuts, including those to Russia and Ukraine, as “a non-starter.”

A Great New Promotional Website at Taxpayers’ Expense With Not Too Much Emphasis on Human Rights

The new BBG website looks very much like a  combination of a news and promotional site, even though the BBG itself was not created by Congress as a news organization or told to promote its own work to the American public. As a body called to guide and oversee the work of real broadcasters, it has no reason to glorify itself at U.S. taxpayers’ expense, much less hire Paula Zahn to do its public relations. The U.S. government-funded news organizations, managed by the BBG, already have their own news sites and public affairs departments. 

The Broadcasting Board of Governors is required, however, to promote respect for human rights through U.S. international broadcasting.  Interestingly, there are no permanent references to human rights on the new website’s “Home” and “About the Agency” pages. One has to search deeper through the site to find any permanent direct mention of human rights and media freedom.

In a twist of irony, however, on September 10, barely a month after the Voice of America radio programs to Russia were cut, the BBG sponsored a workshop — “New Media vs New Censorship: The Authoritarian Assault on Information.” By announcing the workshop on its Home page, the BBG made  at least an indirect and temporary reference to its human rights mission.

For more information about FreeMediaOnline.org and articles dealing with the BBG and U.S. international broadcasting, go to: http://www.freemediaonline.org.

 Listen To The Last Voice of America Russian Radio Broadcast

Listen here to the last Voice of America on-air Russian radio broadcast delivered on July 26, 2008, just twelve days before Russia attacked Georgia.

 

The BBG members who have supported cutting VOA programs to Tibet, China, Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine are: Joaquin Balaya, chairman of Balaya Media Inc.; Jeff Hirschberg, a partner of in Kalorama Partners, a consulting firm that deals with corporate governance and risk assessment and a director of the U.S-Russia Business Council; Edward E. Kaufman, Senator Biden’s former chief of staff who is now president of Public Strategies, a political and management consulting firm based in Wilmington, Delaware; and Steven J. Simmons, chairman and CEO of Patriot Media and Communications, LLC.

 

Three seats on the Board currently are empty, after the recent departure of former BBG Chairman James K. Glassman, who also favored program cuts at VOA. Glassman is now the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. According to FreeMediaOnline.org sources, Glassman was responsible for proposing to hire Paula Zahn. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice does not attend the BBG meetings and is usually represented by  James Glassman.

 

FreeMediaOnline.org learned that only one BBG member, radio broadcaster Blanquita Cullum, questioned the decision to hire a media celebrity while radio programs to countries without free press were being cut. She was reported to have said that if the rest of the Board proceeded with hiring a new high profile spokesperson, “it would be over my dead body.” Cullum, who is a Republican, is also said to be the only member of the bipartisan Board who has consistently opposed  U.S. radio programming cuts to countries without free media.

View FreeMediaOnline.org Online Presentation SAVE VOICE OF AMERICA BROADCASTS

View FreeMediaOnline.org Online Presentation in support of saving Voice of America broadcasts to Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Tibet and other media-at-risk countries.

 

 

Call or email the Broadcasting Board of Governors to register your protest: Tel: (202) 203-4400; Fax: (202) 203-4585; E-mail: publicaffairs@bbg.gov. CONTACT YOUR MEMBERS OF THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES AND THE U.S. SENATE and tell them about the BBG’s actions affecting U.S. support for freedom of the press and human rights and the use of your tax dollars. 

 

 

A statement issued recently by the leadership of the Voice of America employees’ unions, AFGE Local 1812 and AFSCME Local 1418, said that the Broadcasting Board of Governors “has been responsible for one blunder after another — to the point that its actions have compromised U.S. strategic interests.” Saying that “the elimination of Russian and Georgian radio broadcasts should be the last straw,” the VOA employees’ union leaders called on Congress to act immediately to dissolve the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

 

 

 

FreeMediaOnline.org is a 501(c)3 nonprofit media freedom organization based in San Francisco, CA.

FreeMediaOnline.org

The same small group of now five Americans (not counting Condoleezza Rice who is an ex officio member of the BBG)  had tried earlier to reduce VOA radio broadcasts to Tibet and to a number of other countries without free media. They justify these moves as designed to save money for other projects, including the mismanaged broadcasting to the Middle East and the expansion of news websites.  Sources have told FreeMediaOnline.org, however, that the BBG was planning to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on enhancing its public relations efforts, including the beefing up of its own promotional website, which they launched today. The BBG, which is a bipartisan body, is responsible for making sure U.S. taxpayers’ money is spent wisely on international broadcasts.

According to FreeMediaOnline.org sources, the BBG has consistently put a high priority on itself while cutting and reducing U.S. broadcasts to people around the world who are deprived of free access to information and live under repressive regimes. Most of the BBG members are successful  U.S. businessmen and political operatives with no experience of life under dictatorship or significant activism in defense of human rights.  These Democrats and Republicans are appointed by the President and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

Inside sources have told FreeMediaOnline.org that Paula Zahn had good sense to decline the job offer. No reason for her refusal was mentioned, but she may have learned of the outrage among the human rights activists after the BBG  had announced plans to reduce VOA and Radio Free Asia (RFA) programs to Tibet. After protests by the Tibetan monks on Capital Hill, the U.S. Congress, which was opposed to any reduction of programming to Tibet, stepped in and forced the BBG to reverse its decision.

The same sources also told FreeMediaOnline.org that only one BBG member, radio broadcaster Blanquita Cullum, questioned the decision to hire a media celebrity while radio programs to countries without free press were being cut. She was reported to have said that if the rest of the Board proceeded with hiring a new high profile spokesperson, “it would be over her dead body.” Cullum, who is a Republican, is also said to be the only member of the bipartisan Board who has consistently opposed  U.S. radio programming cuts to countries without free media.

FreeMediaOnline.org reported earlier that the Senate Staff of Senator Joe Biden worked with some of the BBG members and their executive director to help them take VOA radio programs to Russia off the air despite strong opposition to this move from most of the other members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats. Shutting down VOA Russian-language broadcasting is seen as helpful to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) – a semi-private station also managed by the BBG — which is incorporated in Delaware, Senator Biden’s home state. RFE/RL has also been steeped in controversy. A human rights organization in Russia has recently criticized  RFE/RL for giving airtime to an extremist Russian politician known for expressing racist views about immigrants.

Other critics have suggested that airing of such programs by RFE/RL journalists, who are Russian citizens working and living in Russia with their families – where they are exposed to intimidation by the Kremlin’s secret police – makes RFE/RL unsuitable to be the only radio voice of American taxpayers in Russia and to reflect American values. The Voice of America programs to Russia, which were cut by the BBG, were produced by journalists based in Washington, D.C.

The BBG members who supported cutting VOA programs to Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, and Tibet are: Joaquin Balaya, chairman of Balaya Media Inc.; Jeff Hirschberg, a partner of in Kalorama Partners, a consulting firm that deals with corporate governance and risk assessment and a director of the U.S-Russia Business Council; Edward E. Kaufman, Senator Biden’s former chief of staff who is now president of Public Strategies, a political and management consulting firm based in Wilmington, Delaware; and Steven J. Simmons, chairman and CEO of Patriot Media and Communications, LLC.

Three seats on the Board currently are empty, after the recent departure of former BBG Chairman James K. Glassman, who also favored program cuts at VOA. Glassman is now the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. According to FreeMediaOnline.org sources, Glassman was responsible for proposing to hire Paula Zahn.

A statement issued recently by the leadership of the Voice of America employees’ union, AFGE Local 1812, said that the Broadcasting Board of Governors “has been responsible for one blunder after another — to the point that its actions have compromised U.S. strategic interests.” Saying that “the elimination of Russian and Georgian radio broadcasts should be the last straw,” the VOA employees’ union leaders called on Congress to act immediately to dissolve the Broadcasting Board of Governors. The BBG announced that Wednesday, September 10, it is sponsoring  a workshop on “New Media vs. New Censorship: The Authoritarian Assault on Information.”

The newly redesigned BBG website, launched at a considerable cost to U.S. taxpayers a few weeks after cutting VOA radio to Russia, says that the Board’s mission is “to promote freedom and democracy.” That statement, however, does not appear on the “Home” page or “About the Agency” page; it can only be found by searching the site. At least 292 journalists have been murdered or have disappeared in Russia since 1990. The Reporters Without Borders, a media freedom nonprofit organization, said in its 2008 annual report on Russia that “the government and security forces did all they could to stop the media reporting on Putin’s opponents.”

FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog, September 7, 2008, San Francisco — Political jamming originating in Washington rather than Soviet-style electronic jamming of radio signals made it impossible for the Russian speakers in the war zone in Georgia and in Russia itself to hear Voice of America (VOA) news broadcasts during the recent crisis in the Caucasus. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union resorted to electronic jamming of VOA radio broadcasts each time a major conflict erupted between Washington and Moscow.

But during the most recent emergency caused by Russia’s attack on Georgia, the jamming of VOA radio was done not by the Kremlin but by the U.S. Government’s own agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). The Soviet-era  jamming of radio signals was only partially effective, as determined radio listeners were usually able to fine tune their receivers to overcome the electronic interference with the radio program. This time, bureaucratic jammers in Washington completely silenced Russian-language news broadcasts from the Voice of America just as hostilities in the Caucasus region were about to flare up.

Twelve days before the crisis erupted, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, an independent bipartisan body which manages all U.S. Government-sponsored civilian broadcasts, put an end to all on-air Voice of America radio programs in Russian. The BBG was also about to stop all VOA radio programs to Georgia and Ukraine, the two countries under pressure from Russia. Both of these countries were visited this week by Vice President Dick Cheney who said in Tbilisi that Americans “stand in solidarity with the people of Georgia” and assured the Ukrainians of America’s “unwavering determination to strengthen the bonds between our countries — not just now, but for the long term.”

[Read Vice President Cheney's Comments in Georgia and in Ukraine.]

 

BBG’s political jamming of the Voice of America radio to Russia resulted in silencing of VOA broadcasts. Here you can listen to Soviet-style jamming.

 

You can also hear the first Voice of America Russian-language radio broadcast to the Soviet Union on February 17, 1947. The last broadcast was on July 26, 2008. Russia attacked Georgia on August 8, 2008.

Also this week, President Bush announced  a $1 billion aid package for Georgia. By closing down the VOA Georgian service, the BBG wanted to save a few hundred thousand dollars. According to FreeMediaOnline.org sources, the BBG wanted more money to expand its public affairs operation and intended to hire a U.S. media celebrity as its spokesperson. Neither President Bush nor Vice President Cheney have made any references to the BBG-funded broadcasts during the current crisis with Russia. [Read President Bush's Statement on Georgia.]

Senator Joe Biden’s Staff Said To Have Helped Take VOA Off The Air

The President had no reason to praise the BBG because, in an incredible twist of Washington politics, the Senate staff of Senator Joe Biden was said to have worked against the wishes of most members of Congress by helping the BBG bureaucrats to achieve their longtime goal of shutting down VOA Russian broadcasts — a move made by the BBG in late July without any public announcement, just days before Russia attacked Georgia. Most members of Congress have been strongly against ending VOA radio broadcasts to media-at-risk countries, including Russia and Ukraine, and in previous years managed to stop the BBG from implementing some of the proposed program cuts.

Senator Biden was said to be in favor of closing down Voice of America Russian radio from Washington to benefit another U.S. government-funded broadcaster, the semi-private Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which is based in Prague and Moscow. RFE/RL is incorporated in Delaware, Senator Biden’s home state. President Bush and the White House staff were, however, equally at fault for the bureaucratic jamming of the Voice of America when they did not question the BBG’s recommendations to cut programs to Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Tibet, and several other countries.

Former U.S. presidents, including President Reagan, frequently mentioned and praised the work of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcasters during various crises in relations with Moscow. The decisions made by the BBG left no room for presidential praise during the most recent crisis over the Russian military intervention in Georgia.

 

After silencing the Voice of America radio to Russia and being aware of its decision to end VOA radio broadcasts to Georgia and Ukraine, the BBG has shown very little activity, issuing just one press release long after the Russian attack on Georgia.

 

The press release, carefully crafted by the BBG staff involved in shutting down VOA broadcasts, reminded the remaining four* VOA Georgian broadcasters in Washington D.C. that while their programs might continue “for the foreseeable future,” “the Administration’s FY 2008 budget, as approved by Congress, provided that all BBG broadcasting to Georgia was to be done by RFE/RL after September 30, 2008.” The press release failed to mention that most members of Congress would have opposed VOA programming cuts if they were put to a vote.

 

*The Voice of America Georgian service, which the BBG wanted to close down, was reduced to six persons. When the war started, two broadcasters were on leave in Georgia. The remaining four were fighting exhaustion and worked with hardly any days off. They barely managed to double their airtime from 30 minutes to one hour daily. In similar previous news emergencies before the BBG was put in charge of U.S. international broadcasting, VOA had sufficient resources and was able to significantly increase airtime to Russia, Poland, and other countries.

Exposure To Secret Police Intimidation

The BBG’s preference for overseas-based private broadcasters rather than Washington-based and Congressionally-chartered Voice of America has also put American broadcasting resources at risk in a number of countries in Eurasia by exposing them to pressures from local regimes and  local stations rebroadcasting U.S. sponsored programs, which are usually under tight regime control. By operating safely from Munich in West Germany during the Cold War, RFE/RL engaged in highly effective ”surrogate broadcasting” to Russia and was largely protected from reprisals by the KGB. But as a result of decisions made by the BBG, most of RFE/RL Russian radio programs now originate in Russia. The majority of Radio Liberty Russian broadcasters are Russian citizens who live in Russia with their families.

Despite the murders and disappearances of at least 292 journalists in Russia since 1990, the Broadcasting Board of Governors continued to support the expansion of RFE/RL operations in Russia and its large Moscow bureau, while reducing and eventually eliminating all Voice of America Russian radio broadcasts from Washington. This policy continued even as Russian President and later Prime Minister  Vladimir Putin kept closing down Russian media outlets critical of his policies, and more independent journalists were being killed.

Radio Liberty Managers Put A Positive Spin On The Murder Of A Pro-Democracy Journalist

Shortly after independent Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow in an execution-style hit in 2006, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty managers made public statements strongly suggesting an attempt on their part to appease Mr. Putin. In an apparent effort to protect their presence in the country, the head of RFE/RL Moscow bureau, Elena Glushkova, said in an on-air discussion in October 2006 that the work of Radio Liberty journalists cannot cause Russia any harm. She insisted that RFE/RL reporters respect and love Russia. She also pointed out that all Radio Liberty reporters who work in Russia are Russian citizens and said that her optimism despite the murder of Ms. Politkovskaya is based in her belief in “the common sense of the current Russian leadership.” Maria Klain, Russian Service director at the RFE/RL home office in Prague, also expressed confidence that the radio’s future in Russia looks good. These comments surprised and offended pro-democracy activists in Russia who were still in mourning after Anna Politovskaya’s murder.

BBG Members Ignore Risks in Authoritarian States

Earlier, BBG member Jeff Hirschberg, a Washington lawyer who is a director of the U.S.-Russia Business Council, negotiated with Russian officials to keep the RFE/RL Moscow bureau operating while other media outlets in Russia were being taken over on the orders from the Kremlin by Mr. Putin’s associates. Mr. Hirschberg is one of the Democrats on the current Board, as is Edward E. Kaufman, who was formerly Senator Biden’s chief of staff and also a long time supporter of RFE/RL. The BBG executive director, Jeff Trimble, was formerly acting president of RFE/RL.

Most of the Republicans on the Board also voted for the elimination of  VOA radio broadcasts to Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine.The only BBG member who spoke up against these cuts and questioned the BBG strategy in Russia was said to be Blanquita Cullum, who is also the only woman and the only working broadcaster on the current Board. (Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is an ex officio BBG member but does not attend BBG meetings.) Other BBG members have experience in commercial U.S. broadcasting and communications industry. They have no substantive experience in journalism, broadcasting to media-at-risk countries, or human rights activism.

Surrogate Broadcasting Under Secret Police Pressure Does Not Work

Ted Lipien, president of media freedom nonprofit FreeMediaOnline.org, said that the combination of the BBG policies and the pressure and intimidation from the FSB, the secret police agency which replaced the KGB (Mr. Putin’s former employer), put U.S. government broadcasting resources in Russia and RFE/RL journalists in severe jeopardy. Lipien said that the comments RFE/RL managers made after Ms. Politkovskaya’s murder are a clear proof that the BBG strategy for broadcasting to Russia has affected RFE/RL programming. There is no reason to believe, Lipien said, that RFE/RL journalists in Russia can be safer from the secret police than any other Russian journalist. If anything, they would be prime targets of the FSB operations, Lipien said.

Lipien was formerly acting VOA associate director and helped to place BBG-funded radio and TV programs on stations in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries in the region. He also wrote a book about Pope John Paul II in which he discussed the attempts by the Polish communist secret police and the KGB to spy on the Polish pontiff and feed disinformation to Western journalists. He also described how communist agents tried to infiltrate U.S. radio stations broadcasting to audiences behind the Iron Curtain.

BBG’s Preference For Ratings-Driven Privatized Broadcasting Results In Giving Airtime to Racist Politicians

In a recent report posted on the Free Media Online Blog, Lipien wrote that the BBG policies in combination with the risks of operating within close reach of the Kremlin’s secret police have made RFE/RL more like a local Russian media outlet than a surrogate broadcaster the American taxpayers would expect it to be. Recently, the Moscow Human Rights Bureau has criticized RFE/RL for giving an entire hour of airtime to a former Russian Parliament deputy Andrey Savel’yev. The Russian human rights organization said that Mr. Savel’yev’s  “chauvinist and racist views are well-known.”

In criticizing Radio Liberty for giving airtime to Mr. Savel’yev, the Russian human rights organization said Radio Liberty was guilty not only  of enabling such people “to spread their poisonous views,” but also of legitimizing their ideas “in the minds of many impressionable radio listeners.” The appeal, written by the organization’s head Aleksandr Brod, argues that stations, which “in their pursuit of higher ratings” invite such “nationalist radicals,” are giving these enemies of democracy a larger audience and exacerbating ethnic tensions. Lipien said that it seems inconceivable that a broadcasting entity, which works under the watchful eye of Mr. Putin’s secret police and gives airtime to extreme nationalists who promote racism, should from now on be the only on air radio voice of the American people in Russia.

Can U.S. Broadcasting Be Saved?

There is some hope that the crisis in relations between Washington and Moscow may force the BBG to modify its preference for private surrogate broadcasters and reverse some of its policies and programming cuts.  FreeMediaOnline.org president Ted Lipien said that in light of Vice President Cheney’s visists to Georgia and Ukraine and President Bush’s announcement of a $1 billion Georgian aid package, the positions taken by the BBG are hopelessly out of sync not only with the U.S. Congress but also with the White House and are unsustainable.

Others have also criticized the Broadcasting Board of Governors and called for putting an end to the dismantling of the Voice of America.

 

Read The World Still Needs the Voice of Americaby Helle Dale, The Heritage Foundation.

 

The Sound of Silence: The Decline of the Voice of America in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia by Helle C. Dale and Oliver Horn, The Heritage Foundation.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors is scheduled to meet next week. The question of whether to lift the bureaucratic jamming of the Voice of America Russian radio broadcasts, as well as the future of VOA broadcasts to Georgia and Ukraine, are expected to be discussed. 

 Listen To The Last Voice of America Russian Radio Broadcast

Listen here to the last Voice of America on-air Russian radio broadcast delivered on July 26, 2008, just twelve days before Russia attacked Georgia.

View FreeMediaOnline.org Online Presentation SAVE VOICE OF AMERICA BROADCASTS

View FreeMediaOnline.org Online Presentation in support of saving Voice of America broadcasts to Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Tibet and other media-at-risk countries.

 

Several people contributed information and ideas for this article.

The BBG spokesperson denies that Senator Biden’s staff played any special role in supporting the elimination of VOA radio broadcasts to Russia, which was described by a media freedom nonprofit, FreeMediaOnline.org, as a foreign policy and public diplomacy blunder.  In 2005, a CNN news report accused Senator Biden of playing politics with U.S. international broadcasting.

According to the BBG spokesperson, the cuts resulted from a careful analysis of audience ratings which show a declining international radio listenership in Russia. Current and former VOA employees have told FreeMediaOnline.org, however, that the BBG prefers to have all U.S. broadcasting to Russia done by the semi-private Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), based in Prague and Moscow. RFE/RL is incorporated in Delaware, Senator Biden’s home state. A BBG member, Edward K. Kaufman, was formerly Senator Biden’s chief of staff. The BBG’s current executive director, Jeff Trimble, formerly served as acting president of RFE/RL. Another Board member, Jeff Hirschberg, is a director of the U.S.-Russia Business Council. He and Jeff Trimble conducted negotiations with Russian officials with links to former President Putin to keep open RFE/RL’s large bureau in Moscow.

A BBG source told FreeMediaOnline.org that the BBG sought and received from Senator Biden’s staff a go-ahead for Voice of America radio cuts not only to Russia and Georgia but also to Ukraine, Serbia, Macedonia, India, and for programs to Africa in Portuguese. The BBG spokesperson Tish King told FreeMediaOnline.org that Senator Biden’s office did not play a significant role, but she did not deny that there were exchanges with his staff on VOA program cuts. 

The BBG spokesperson insists that Congress was “on board” with the cuts. But when the VOA employees’ union made a Freedom of Information request for any documents showing Congressional approval for the cuts, the BBG responded that ”the document(s) requested cannot be provided as it does not exist.” The BBG took VOA Russian radio off the air without any public announcement that could raise alerts in Congress.

FreeMediaOnline.org has learned that based on promises of support from Senator Biden’s office, the BBG decided to implement the cuts, despite warnings from many other members of Congress and human rights organizations that these cuts would harm U.S. public diplomacy and  U.S. support for media freedom. FreeMediaOnline.org president, Ted Lipien, who had worked previously for the BBG as an acting VOA associate director and regional media marketing director, said that there is plenty of evidence that poor political judgment, politics and special bureaucratic interests – not audience ratings – played a primary role in the BBG’s decisions.

FreeMediaOnline.org president said that the BBG should be made to understand the practical and symbolic value for the United States to be able to broadcast directly from Washington under the Voice of America brand to conflict areas and countries such as Russia, where most of the broadcast media is under government control.  The BBG should stop using “the false and dangerous logic, which says that since Mr. Putin was successful in closing down RFE/RL and VOA affiliates in Russia with the subsequent drop in  radio audience ratings, he should be rewarded by shutting down of VOA Russian broadcasts,” Lipien said.

Lipien also said that the BBG is playing dangerous politics with U.S. international broadcasting by giving all radio resources to RFE/RL, whose managers and reporters in Russia face intimidation from the secret police and where journalists, who had criticized Mr. Putin, have been severely beaten up or killed by assailants who to this day remain unknown and at large.  Ted Lipien’s recently published book about Pope John Paul II describes how the Polish communist secret police and the KGB used blackmail and  recruited agents among journalists to spy on the pope and influence RFE/RL and VOA reporting during the Cold War.

Senator Biden and the BBG have been accused before of playing politics with U.S. international broadcasting. In 2005, Senator Biden held hostage the uncontroversial Bush Administration nomination of Dina Habib Powell as the State Department officer to be in charge of public diplomacy to improve U.S. relations with Muslims in the Middle East so that his billionaire backer Norman Pattiz, founder and chairman of Westwood One radio empire, could be reappointed to the BBG. Mr. Pattiz, who eventually resigned from the BBG in 2006, was the main force behind the creation of Radio Sawa music and information station and Alhurra Television for the Middle East. Mr. Pattiz supported cuts at VOA to pay for his initiatives, which since have been criticized for waste of taxpayers money and giving airtime to extremists calling for killings of American soldiers in Iraq.

Unlike VOA broadcasters most of whom are U.S. government employees, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Sawa, and Alhurra are staffed by U.S. based and foreign based contractors and reporters. The BBG maintains that programs outsourced to these private broadcasters are highly effective and enjoy high ratings, but a Moscow based human rights group has criticized recently Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for giving significant airtime to racist extremists in Russia.

Despite Mr. Putin’s repression aimed at independent media in Russia, key RFE/RL Russian managers have expressed confidence in the common sense of the current Russian leadership. Human rights activists criticized them for making these comments only days after the murder of independent Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. The Voice of America, which is guided by the Congressionally approved Charter, has been relatively free of such criticism.

According to a source within the bipartisan but Bush-appointed Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which manages VOA and other government sponsored U.S. broadcasting, Senator Biden’s staff has worked behind the scenes with the BBG staff to kill VOA Russian radio broadcasts and almost succeeded in closing down VOA radio service to Georgia.

The Senate staff of Senator Biden,  whom Senator Obama selected primarily because of his strong foreign policy experience, is said to have told the BBG staff that it would be safe to terminate VOA broadcasts to Russia and to say that the Congress was “on board” with this decision.  Other than Senator Biden, most members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, however, have been strongly opposed to the BBG-proposed  Voice of America radio and television programming cuts to media-at-risk countries.

On July 17, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) warned the BBG and the Bush Administration not to stop VOA radio broadcasts  to Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tibet and to the Balkans, “where freedom of speech remains restricted and broadcasting is still necessary.” The BBG ignored his warning and terminated VOA radio to Russia on July 26 without making any public announcements. Russian tanks rolled into Georgia on August 8.

According to FreeMediaOnline.org, a media freedom non-profit, Senator Biden’s staff  is said to have worked with a few members of the BBG and the board’s executive director, Jeff Trimble, to deprive the Voice of America of resources to broadcast on-air radio to Russia in favor of a semi-private entity, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which is based in Prague, the Czech Republic, and has a large news bureau in Moscow staffed by Russian citizens. RFE/RL is incorporated in Delaware, Senator Biden’s home state. Senator Biden’s former chief of staff, Edward E. Kaufman, is a BBG member. Another BBG member, Jeff Hirschberg, also a Democrat, is a director of the U.S.-Russia Business Council, according to the BBG website. The BBG’s executive director was formerly acting president of RFE/RL.

FreeMediaOnline.org president, Ted Lipien, a former acting VOA associate director who had worked also for the BBG, placing VOA, RFE/RL, and other BBG-sponsored programs in Russia, Bosnia, Afghanistan  and Iraq, said that stopping VOA radio to Russia is seen as a “gift to Mr. Putin for his crackdown on independent media.” Lipien wrote a book about Pope John Paul II, in which he described communist secret police attempts to spy on the Vatican and influence Western media reporting. He warned that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalists, whom he described as having a great record of fighting press censorship during the Cold War and still doing an outstanding job in some places and in individual cases, have now been exposed as a group working in Russia to intimidation by the Russian secret police.

Lipien blamed the BBG for putting RFE/RL in a dangerous position in Russia and in several other media-at-risk countries. He said that the Board’s action, in which Senator Biden’s staff is said to be involved, has seriously undermined the ability of the American people to communicate with the Russian people in peacetime and in any future crisis.

Since the Russian attack on Georgia, the BBG has agreed to continue VOA radio broadcasts to Georgia “for the forseeable future” but, according to FreeMediaOnline.org sources, it has refused as “a non starter” urgent pleas from VOA journalists to resume broadcasts to Russia. Due to budget restrictions ordered by the BBG, only four VOA Georgian broadcasters were left to respond to the crisis. FreeMediaOnline.org reported that they have been working with hardly any days off to produce an expanded 60 minute daily broadcast.

Since the official announcement today by Senator Obama that Senator Biden will indeed be his vice-presidential running mate, I have revised the story and posted it on Blogger News Network. I hope the story will help in getting a clarification from Senator Biden on the future of the Voice of America Russian radio broadcasts and might convince the BBG to reconsider their recent decisions and actions taken by their staff.

When Russia attacked Georgia on August 8, VOA Russian radio programs were already off the air. Since then, the BBG is said to have dismissed urgent pleas from VOA journalists to resume these broadcasts in response to the war as “a non-starter.” Because of the BBG ordered cuts, only four (4) broadcasters remained at the VOA Georgian service to respond to the crisis. They have been working without hardly any days off since the invasion on a one hour daily broadcast.

After several days of complete public silence as the Russian military action in Georgia continued, the BBG issued a statement on Tuesday agreeing to let  the VOA Georgian staff to broadcast “for the foreseeable future.”  Rather than using the term “indefinitely,” which would have been more appropriate if the BBG wanted to send a strong message to former President, now Prime Minister Putin, the BBG press release instead reminded VOA Georgian broadcasters that all BBG broadcasting to Georgia was to be done by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a privatized BBG-run entity, after September 30, 2008. The press release offered no words of thanks for their hard work.

The Senate staff of Senator Biden,  who primarily because of his strong foreign policy experience is reported to be one of the top candidates to become Senator Obama’s vice-presidential running mate, is said to have told the BBG staff that it would be safe to terminate VOA broadcasts to Russia and to say that the Congress was “on board” with this decision. The “on board” term was used by  BBG spokesperson Tish King, as reported by ProPublica.org, a non-profit engaged in investigative journalism. Most members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, however, have been strongly opposed to the BBG-proposed radio and television programming cuts.

The BBG staff, headed by Jeff Trimble, a former  acting president of RFE/RL, apparently wanted to terminate Voice of America radio to Russia as quickly as possible to avoid being stopped by any  new action in Congress, which had previously reversed similar cuts sought by the BBG and the Bush Administration.  The BBG wants Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, based in Prague, with much or its Russian broadcasting originating in Moscow, to become the only on-air radio voice of the American people in the Russian language, with VOA being reduced to producing a website. The website has no significant number of users in Russia and, in a crisis, can be easily blocked by the Russian security services. 

Critics of the BBG, including Ted Lipien, a former VOA journalist who is now president of media freedom non-profit FreeMediaOnline.org, pointed out that Moscow-based RFE/RL broadcasters, most of whom are Russian citizens living in Russia, have been accused by a local human rights organization of giving airtime to racists and ‘ultra-right’ extremists. Lipien also said that it was “an act of complete foolishness to place significant  U.S. broadcasting resources within easy reach of Prime Minister Putin’s secret police and intelligence services. The Russian leader had used  the secret police to destroy independent media in Russia.” Lipien warned that RFE/RL journalists in Russia are open to “similar intimidation and their broadcasts  can be quickly shut down by the secret police or worse.” 

Shortly after the murder in Russia of independent journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, the head of RFE/RL Moscow bureau, Elena Glushkova, said in an on-air discussion that she believes in the common sense of the current Russian leadership. Maria Klain, Russian Service director at the RFE/RL home office in Prague, also expressed confidence that RFE/RL’s future in Russia looks good. Many members of Congress and numerous foreign policy and human rights experts have since expressed alarm at increasing repression by the Russian government. Lipien has recently published a book in which he describes how the Polish communist secret police and the KGB tired to infiltrate spies into the Vatican to report on Pope John Paul II and how both intelligence agencies tried to undermine the work of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Voice of America journalists.

The extent of Senator Biden’s direct personal involvement in the discussions with the BBG staff has not yet  been determined, but he has been for many years a strong supporter of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.  RFE/RL is incorporated in Delaware, his home state. His former chief of staff, Edward E. Kaufman, is now one of the BBG members who are in favor of reducing Voice of America programs to boost broadcasting by semi-private entities, such as RFE/RL and the Middle Eastern Alhurra Television. The latter has been accused by critics of giving airtime to extremists who have called for killings of American soldiers in Iraq.

Another BBG member who strongly favors giving VOA radio mission to RFE/RL is Jeff Hirschberg, also a Democrat, who is a director of the U.S.-Russia Business Council.  Of the six current BBG members, only one Republican member, radio host Blaquita Cullum, is said to have spoken strongly against program cuts to Russia, Tibet and other media at risk countries.

The VOA employees’ union has accused  the BBG of spending money on itself while U.S. international broadcasting is being privatized and given away to scandal-ridden contractors. BBG members, their support staff, and members of Senator Biden’s office have made frequent trips to Prague, where they are hosted by RFE/RL, which is not subject to the same strict programming or  financial controls on entertainment as the Federally-run Voice of America based in Washington, D.C.

Some  current and former VOA staffers, including those who said they are Obama supporters, have expressed fear that if Senator Biden is selected as Obama’s running mate and the Democratic ticket wins in November, Biden would support the dismantling of the Voice of America in favor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. They also fear that he might bring back Norman Pattiz, a former BBG member and founder and chairman of Westwood One radio empire, also a Democrat.  Pattiz was the primary force behind Alhurra Television, and Radio Sawa to the Middle East with its Britney Spears-type music format, and was reported to have supported closing down as many VOA services as possible to pay for these initiatives.

Senator Biden’s staff is said to have assisted Jeff Trimble in carrying out the wishes of the Board members, but in an apparent effort to keep the news of the termination of Voice of America Russian radio from other members of Congress and  the U.S. media, the BBG staff and VOA director Dan Austin, a Republican who takes orders from the Board and can be fired by them, implemented the Russian program cut without issuing any announcements to the American public.  Earlier warnings from members of Congress, foreign policy experts, and human rights organizations apparently convinced the BBG staff of the need for quick action and secrecy.

A few day before the BBG acted to terminate VOA Russian radio on July 26, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) specifically warned them and the Bush Administration not to stop Voice of America broadcasts  to Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tibet and to the Balkans, “where freedom of speech remains restricted and broadcasting is still necessary.” The BBG ignored his warning. Russian tanks rolled into Georgia on August 8.

While any direct role Senator Biden may have played in shutting down VOA radio broadcasts to Russia still needs to be clarified, it is unlikely that he was completely unaware of the nature of the contacts between his staff and the BBG.  According to FreeMediaOnline.org president “as someone who claims strong experience and sophistication in foreign policy matters, Senator Biden should have known and agreed with many of his colleagues in the Senate and the House of Representatives, both Democrats and Republicans, that stopping VOA radio to Russia would be seen as a gift from the U.S. government and the American people to Mr. Putin for his crackdown on the independent media. Senator Biden also should have known that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is now more vulnerable to intimidation by Russia’s secret police than it was even during the Cold War, and that it cannot possibly be the voice for the American people to the people in Russia,” said Lipien. 

Lipien pointed out that U.S.-based Voice of America journalists are American citizens or U.S. residents and  as such are directly accountable to Congress and to the American people. Media freedom nonprofit representative suggested that  in order to preserve his credibility as a foreign policy expert, Senator Biden should explain the actions of his staff and join his Congressional colleagues in condemning the Broadcasting Board of Governors for “seriously undermining America’s ability to communicate with foreign audiences in a time of crisis.”

After Russia’s attack on Georgia, it took the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) days to say something about U.S. broadcasting to the war zone. Shortly before the attack and without any public announcement, the BBG stopped all VOA on air radio broadcasts to Russia. It also planned to close down VOA’s Georgian Service within weeks. Advised by its executive director Jeff Trimble, who before 2007 was an acting president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), BBG member Jeff Hirschberg, a Democrat who is a director of the U.S.-Russia Business Council, and with assistance from the staff of Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) – the bipartisan BBG quietly terminated VOA Russian radio broadcasts on July 26 and proceeded with its plan to make RFE/RL the primary radio voice of the American people to audiences in Russia. According to FreeMediaOnline.org sources, only one BBG member, radio broadcaster Blanquita Cullum, a Republican, spoke out strongly against the cuts. Russia attacked Georgia on August 8. 

On Tuesday, the BBG said that  it had “approved continuation of VOA Georgian surge broadcasts for the foreseeable future” — not “indefinitely,” which would have been a proper term to use if the BBG wanted to send a strong message to former President, now Prime Minister Putin and assure VOA Georgian broadcasters that their work is valued and should continue. The press release, drafted by the BBG staff,  reminded instead VOA Georgian broadcasters that all BBG broadcasting to Georgia was to be done by RFE/RL after September 30, 2008. There was not a single word of thanks for their heroic efforts to keep VOA broadcasts on the air. Reduced by the BBG cuts to only a four-person team, they have fought exhaustion, working without any days off since the crisis started. 

The BBG is a bipartisan entity charged with overseeing U.S. taxpayer-funded international broadcasts. As such, it controls the allocation of resources between broadcasting services, such as VOA, RFE/RL, and Alhurra Television and Radio Sawa for the Middle East, as well as requests for funding amounts.

The BBG was ready to cut VOA broadcasts to  Russia, Georgia and several other media-at-risk countries despite warnings from many members of Congress, other than Senator Biden,  and from media freedom organizations, that this would be an ill-advised and dangerous move, considering Mr. Putin’s successful campaign to silence independent media voices in Russia. Senator Patrick Leahy specifically warned the BBG not to stop Voice of America broadcasts  to Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tibet and to the Balkans, “where freedom of speech remains restricted and broadcasting is still necessary.”

FreeMediaOnline.org has learned, however, that Senator Biden’s staff had told the BBG staff it would be safe to stop VOA Russian broadcasts and beef up Prague and Moscow-based RFE/RL. RFE/RL is incorporated in Delaware, Senator Biden’s and Mr. Hirschberg’s home state, while Jeff Trimble has for years been trying to preserve the future of the semi-private RFE/RL, his former employer, at the expense of the Congressionally chartered Voice of America. Still, to avoid any bad publicity, the BBG staff suggested that the decision be carried out without any public announcement from the BBG or VOA, and set the termination date for late July, when most members of Congress are away from Washington. Voice of America director Dan Austin carried out the BBG order. Previous VOA directors who had opposed BBG directives were either fired or had to resign.

RFE/RL has a splendid record of reporting uncensored news, but much of its past effectiveness has been destroyed by the BBG, ironically by wasting millions of taxpayers money to beef up its vast administrative and reporting operation in Russia within close reach of Mr. Putin’s secret police. The BBG also forced RFE/RL journalists in Prague to adopt a more Russia-patriotic and less political tone to appeal to a Russian audience and increase ratings. This process was started by  a former BBG member Norman Pattiz, a Democrat, founder and chairman of Westwood One radio empire. Pattiz’s orders were carried out by media consultants with business links in Russia who were hired based on his recommendations. This process of placing ratings ahead of content still continues and helps authoritarian leaders like Mr. Putin undermine media freedom at home and weaken the impact of U.S. international broadcasting.

Mr. Pattiz, who served on the Broadcasting Board of Governors from May 2000 to March 2006, was also responsible for extensive use of music and entertainment programming, and accordingly high pricetags, at Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television. According to FreeMediaOnline.org sources, during his tenure at the BBG he tried to close down as many Voice of America services as possible to pay for his pet projects.

The more successful Mr. Putin and other authoritarian leaders were in threatening affiliate stations carrying VOA and RFE/RL programs, with the subsequent drop in ratings for both, the easier it was for BBG members like Mr. Pattiz to demand closing down of VOA radio and TV services under the excuse that their ratings were down. The BBG did nothing to help VOA improve its programs and program delivery, which would have been an appropriate response to the growing press censorship. On the contrary, as repression in Russia and in former Soviet republics increased, the BBG reduced VOA airtime, took away frequencies, and cut budgets. Ironically, VOA’s combined radio and TV ratings in Russia have been higher than RFE/RL’s, and the difference between the two in radio ratings was not statistically significant, even though RFE/RL spent much more money on radio and had many more broadcast hours than VOA.

The change in approach to international broadcasting, initiated by  Mr. Pattiz and largely supported by a former BBG chairman, Ken Tomlinson, a Republican, have had a profound effect on journalism at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. RFE/RL’s new president Jeff Gedmin, a neo-conservative Republican, has tried to reverse this process to some degree after Jeff Trimble had left Prague in 2007 and moved to Washington, D.C. to work for the BBG.

The damage to RFE/RL, however, had already been done. A Moscow-based human rights organization has recently criticized Radio Liberty for giving “air time to racists and ‘ultra-right’ extremists.”

Mostly U.S.-based, Voice of America journalists, whose journalistic independence and standards are protected and set by the Congressionally-approved  VOA Charter, are seen as more careful and  more responsible, although sometimes more resistant to desirable changes in technology and protected from being fired by political appointees. The BBG, however, still favors the privatized broadcasting entities, such as RFE/RL and Alhurra, despite many scandals. Investigative journalists at ProPublica.org, a non-profit led by former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger, reported, for example, that a guest invited to participate in an Alhurra program had called for killings of American soldiers in Iraq.

FreeMediaOnline.org reported that in October 2006, shortly after the murder of independent Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Russian Service managers insisted that the Kremlin will allow them to report and broadcast in Russia despite President Putin’s’ crackdown on the local independent media and international broadcasters. RFE/RL Moscow bureau chief, Elena Glushkova, said in an on-air Radio Liberty discussion that her optimism was based on her belief in the common sense of the current Russian leadership. Maria Klain, Radio Liberty Russian Service director at the RFE/RL home office in Prague, also expressed confidence that Radio Liberty’s future in Russia looks good. Many members of Congress and numerous foreign policy and human rights experts have since expressed alarm at increasing repression by the Russian government.

The BBG members supporting cuts are Joaquin Balaya, chairman of Balaya Media Inc.; Jeff Hirschberg, a partner of in Kalorama Partners, a consulting firm that deals with corporate governance and risk assessment; Edward E. Kaufman, president of Public Strategies, a political and management consulting firm based in Wilmington, Delaware; and Steven J. Simmons, chairman and CEO of Patriot Media and Communications, LLC. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice serves as an ex officio member. 

Three seats on the board currently are empty, after the recent departure of former Board Chairman James K. Glassman, who also favored program cuts at VOA. Glassman is now the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.

BBG members also put a high priority on themselves. They want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their own public relations operation and to hire a U.S. media celebrity to speak on their behalf. They have been travelling to Prague every year, stay at five-star hotels, and are entertained by RFE/RL with lavish dinners at U.S. taxpayers’ expense. Washington-based VOA, which is run by Federal government employees and is subject to strict government controls, cannot compete with RFE/RL in terms of a desirable foreign destination or  lavish hotel accommodations and entertainment.  U.S. taxpayers are also paying tens of millions of dollars to build new headquarters for RFE/RL in Prague. Despite the high pricetag, the U.S. government will not own the building.

Trimble and Hirschberg have also made frequent trips to Moscow, where they negotiate with Russian officials and businessmen who claim to have close links to Mr. Putin. Incredibly,  in 2005 Mr. Hirschberg assured the BBG after one of his visits to Moscow that Mr. Putin would not close down any more Russian stations rebroadcasting Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty news programs and that he would not interfere with the work of RFE/RL’s large Moscow bureau, which incidentally costs U.S. taxpayers each year millions of dollars. This was exactly what the agents of the Russian secret police did shortly after Mr. Hirschberg gave his assurances. Still, the BBG again listened to the advice from Mr. Hirschberg and Mr. Trimble and has moved all U.S.-funded on-air Russian radio broadcasts from Washington, D.C. to Prague and Moscow, putting American taxpayers-funded broadcasting resources much closer to the FSB, the security service responsible for carrying out Mr. Putin’s orders to destroy independent broadcast media in Russia.

FreeMediaOnline.org has warned the BBG that RFE/RL managers and reporters working and living in Russia as Russian citizens are open to intimidation and recruitment by Mr. Putin’s secret police. Knowing Mr. Putin’s record of silencing independent media in Russia, sabotaging of Internet sites, and using the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency and Mr. Putin’s old employer, to intimidate and shut down TV and radio stations, the BBG actions harm media freedom and pose a serious risk to U.S. national security, FreeMediaOnline.org concluded.

We recommended that RFE/RL bureau in Moscow should be greatly reduced in size and expense, and most American news and opinions should be reported by the Voice of America journalists based in Washington, with RFE/RL providing only truly surrogate and uncompromised reporting from Russia. RFE/RL’s reporting assignments in Russia should be dispersed among independent journalists working from home, making it more difficult for the secret police to monitor and control their news operations.  Even then, the BBG and RFE/RL management would not know who among their staff in Russia might be targeted by the FSB for intimidation and recruitment. The usual FSB practice in these cases is to tell their victims that as Russian citizens they will be prosecuted for revealing state secrets if they tell anyone about any of their contacts with the secret police.

RFE/RL president Jeff Gedmin claims that his reporters in Russia are engaged in ”surrogate broadcasting”, but surrogate broadcasting as it was known during the Cold War meant that RFE/RL journalists, who lived in the West, were not exposed to threats and pressures from a repressive regime.   In case of a serious crisis in U.S.-Russian relations, the Russian secret police would be able to shut down RFE/RL Moscow bureau and its network of reporters within minutes or use it to spread disinformation.

The BBG issued its announcement on U.S. broadcasts to Georgia shortly after FreeMediaOnline.org sent out a press release to U.S. and international media calling for keeping Voice of America Georgian broadcasts on the air indefinitely and immediately restoring VOA Russian radio. Link to a partial list of media which carried FreeMediaOnline.org press release.

 About FreeMediaOnline.org

FreeMediaOnline.org is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization supporting media freedom worldwide with free news and resources for independent journalists.

For further information, please contact us at 1-415-793-1642 and visit our website: www.freeemediaonline.org. Please e-mail, write or call your members of Congress and ask them to stop the Broadcasting Board of Governors from shutting down the Voice of America Georgian Service and to restore VOA broadcasts to Russia.

To support this campaign and our other actions on behalf of media freedom worldwide, please send your tax-exempt contributions to: FreeMediaOnline.org, 2247 Fulton Street, San Francisco, CA 94117.

ALL AMERICANS SHOULD BE CONCERNED THAT THEIR RESOURCES TO COMMUNICATE WITH THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE IN TIMES OF CRISIS HAVE BEEN PLACED WITHIN CLOSE REACH OF MR. PUTIN’S SECRET POLICE

This post was written by FreeMediaOnline.org president Ted Lipien. He was an acting associate VOA director until 2006. Earlier, he had been in charge of VOA broadcasts to Poland and managed broadcasting to Russia and other countries in Eurasia. He was also responsible for placing VOA, RFE/RL and other BBG-funded programs on local radio stations in Russia, Georgia, Afganistan, Bosnia, Iraq, and many other media-at-risk countries. In his recently published book on Pope John Paul II and feminism, he describes Polish secret police and KGB attempts to place spies at the Vatican and to influence broadcasts by Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America.

Ted,

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Release headline: Media Freedom NGO FreeMediaOnline.org Calls for Saving Voice of America Radio to Georgia

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