Victor Ashe

The bipartisan effort to stop the closure of the Greenville shortwave radio broadcasting facility was led BBG’s senior Republican member Ambassador Victor Ashe. He was assisted by North Carolina congressmen from both parties: U.S. Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr., R-N.C., U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C., and U.S. Rep. David Price, D-N.C. They received strong support from numerous human rights and media freedom advocacy groups, including the independent and nonpartisan Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB).

Rep. Walter B. Jones

Other members of Congress from both parties also joined forces last year to prevent the BBG executive staff from ending shortwave radio broadcasts and satellite television transmissions by the Voice of America to China. The Greenville station is not used for transmitting radio programs to Asia but serves mostly Cuba, South America, and Africa. It is, however, the only remaining U.S. government-owned shortwave broadcasting facility on U.S. territory. Other BBG-operated shortwave transmitters are based abroad and leases for these stations may be terminated by foreign governments due to domestic or foreign pressure.

Rep. G.K. Butterfield

Victor Ashe has also led the fight within the nine-member presidentially-appointed bipartisan board to save broadcasts to China and Tibet from the new round of cuts proposed by the same BBG executive staff for the FY 2013 BBG budget. He received strong support from BBG’s Democratic member Michael Meehan. Another Democratic member Susan McCue also voiced strong support for continuing VOA radio broadcasts to Tibet.

Rep. David Price

In the end, even those BBG members who initially sided with the executive staff and supported the cuts voted to restore funding to continue broadcasting to Tibet and China, just as they had agreed earlier to save the Greenville facility. Some BBG members may have been persuaded to change their vote by a powerful plea from Holocaust survivor Mrs. Annette Lantos. She is a highly-respected human rights campaigner and the wife of the late Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos who was one of the strongest voices in Congress in defense of human rights around the world.

The effort to restore the original name of the Greenville station is seen as a symbolic gesture to stress bipartisan support for U.S. international broadcasting and as part of a larger fight to keep U.S. radio and television news flow to countries without free media. President John F. Kennedy dedicated the facility in 1963 and Edward R. Murrow was a member of his administration. Edward R. Murrow’s son, Casey Murrow, attended the rededication ceremony as did Congressman Jones, Victor Ashe, and International Broadcasting Bureau Director Richard Lobo.

A team of BBG/IBB executives has been pushing for ending many direct-to-home radio and TV broadcasts in favor of using the Internet even to countries like China and Cuba which censor and block online news from Western sources and from their own dissidents. Some of the BBG’s strategic planners and their private consultants have been also advocating downplaying of human rights reporting and expanding English lessons and other non-political programming as a way of reaching a larger audience.

While shortwave radio listening has been declining around the world, it is still a vital link for regime opponents in many countries and those who cannot afford the Internet or don’t want to use it to get uncensored news for fear of being monitored by the local authorities. The saving of the U.S. facility in North Carolina is seen as a challenge to some of the strategic planners at the BBG. Critics have accused the BBG and IBB executive team of mismanagement and diverting money from broadcasting to pay for their bonuses, travel, and expensive outside contractors. These executives have been rated in the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) employee surveys as being the worst leaders and managers in the federal government. They have proposed in recent years the elimination of hundreds of journalistic and broadcasting positions while expanding their own bureaucratic staff. The BBG has one of the lowest employee morale among all government agencies.

Ashe has been the most outspoken BBG member demanding greater transparency and accountability at the agency. He has come out recently against the staff’s plan to merge the so-called surrogate broadcasters, which include Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia (RFA), and Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN). Critics describe the merger plan as a bureaucratic power grab to limit public and congressional scrutiny. Ashe has asked for public comments and listed his personal email. According to sources, he is also in favor of holding congressional hearings on the proposed merger and other plans developed by the BBG and IBB staff.

Members of Congress from both parties have always been the strongest supporters of U.S. international broadcasting, particularly to countries without free media. In the past, they have often come to the defense of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Voice of America against attempts by bureaucrats of both Republican and Democratic administrations to blunt human rights reporting and to close down various language broadcasting services in favor of questionable short-term gains.

Despite the setback on the Greenville station and broadcasts to Tibet and China, BBG/IBB executives still want to drastically reduce Voice of America English and Spanish broadcasts and to limit news to countries like the Russian Federation, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Turkey, Greece, and Georgia. We hope that both Republicans and Democrats in Congress will once again extend their protection to what is one of America’s most effective and least expensive national security and public diplomacy assets. U.S. government-funded international broadcasts are simply too important to be turned over to unaccountable bureaucrats just because they want it and hope that no one will notice. We do.

###

The official BBG announcement:

BBG Rededicates The Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) rededicated its Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station on May 2 during a ceremony in Grimesland, N.C., that honored Murrow, the renowned broadcaster and director of the USIA (1961-1964), and recognized World Press Freedom Day.
Speakers included Congressman Walter Jones; Casey Murrow, son of Edward R. Murrow; BBG Governor Victor Ashe, and International Broadcasting Bureau Director Richard M. Lobo. Speaker Bios

Edward R. Murrow’s legacy as a journalist and his rich understanding of the importance of press freedom as part of the bedrock of democracy along with the key role of U.S. international broadcasting as a model of a free press will be highlighted in the ceremony to be held in the lead-up to World Press Freedom Day, May 3rd.

The transmitting station, a 24/7 broadcast facility, supports the mission of the Broadcasting Board of Governors to “inform, engage and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy” through about 2,200 hours of transmissions each month.

The Murrow Transmitting Station

The Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station is the largest BBG transmission facility in the United States. It is a 24/7 shortwave facility, broadcasting about 2,200 hours each month. Over 80 percent of these transmissions are Radio Martí Spanish-language broadcasts to Cuba, and the balance is Voice of America programming to Latin America as well as VOA English, Portuguese, and French to Africa.

The station is located on 2,715 acres of land and is equipped with eight high-power shortwave transmitters, including five 500 kW and three 250 kW transmitters. The station has nearly 40 broadcast antennas in an arc around the main building to provide the maximum flexibility in reaching audiences overseas.

President John F. Kennedy formally dedicated the station on February 8, 1963, and in October 1968 it was named the “Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station” in honor of the renowned wartime broadcaster and director of the USIA.

Edward R. Murrow

Edward R. Murrow was a pioneering newsman whose distinctive baritone voice and devotion to the truth forever shaped the field of broadcast journalism. Beginning with his ever-calm reporting of the bombing of London during World War II, Murrow’s career spanned 25 years in both radio and television with CBS, then three years as director of the U.S. Information Agency.

Called the “Father of Broadcast Journalism,” Murrow began his broadcasts during the war with a matter-of-fact statement: “This…is London.” He survived the bombings, flew dozens of combat missions, and was among the first civilians to enter liberated Nazi death camps.

After the war, he hosted news and interview programs at CBS, including a 1954 broadcast that took on, and ultimately undid, the red-scare campaign of Senator Joseph McCarthy. He ended his career at CBS in 1961 when President Kennedy named him to head the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), where he brought his dedication to truth and accuracy to the field of public diplomacy. He died of cancer at 57 in 1965.

Broadcasting Board of Governors

The Broadcasting Board of Governors is an independent federal government agency that oversees all U.S. civilian international broadcasting. Our networks—the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio and TV Martí, Radio Free Asia (RFA), and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks’ (MBN) Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa—serve as indispensable sources of news for people who often lack access to independent information.

They inform, engage, and connect with international audiences across television, radio, Internet, and mobile devices in 59 languages in more than 100 countries.

In 2011, the BBG had one of its most successful years ever; our broadcasts reached a record 187 million people every week, up 22 million from 2010. We reach people in their languages of choice; in countries where independent journalism is limited or not available; and where governments jam broadcasts and censor the Internet. The International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) provides transmission, marketing, and program placement services for all BBG broadcast organizations.

For more information, please call 202-203-4400 or email pubaff@bbg.gov.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors is an independent federal agency, supervising all U.S. government-supported, civilian international broadcasting, whose mission is inform, engage and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy. BBG broadcasts reach an audience of 187 million in 100 countries. BBG networks include the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa), Radio Free Asia, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio and TV Martí).

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 20, 2012

Broadcasting Board of Governors Should Stay True to Their Mandate Not Only in China and Tibet

CUSIB/New York, NY — The Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB) has been vindicated by the action of Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) who approved a plan to restore funding in the FY 2013 budget request that the BBG proposed to cut earlier this year for U.S. international broadcasting to China and Tibet.

CUSIB applauds efforts by its members to bring this important issue to the attention of the American public. We are also deeply grateful to Mrs. Annette Lantos, a Holocaust survivor and human rights campaigner, who made a powerful plea to the Broadcasting Board of Governors in defense of Voice of America programs to China, Tibet, and Russia. CUSIB also thanks its Advisory Board members Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, and Jing Zhang, founder and president of Women’s Rights in China, for their efforts to show how VOA and Radio Free Asia (RFA) radio and television broadcasts help women in China who are victims of human rights abuses.

CUSIB Executive Director Ann Noonan stated: “Although we appreciate today’s decision by the BBG to restore Voice of America (VOA) Tibetan radio broadcasts and the Voice of America Cantonese Service, we remain concerned about how Voice of America English to Asia radio broadcasts and Voice of America Spanish and English radio, television and Internet to Latin America will be affected. We also remain concerned that the BBG executive staff ignored the message sent to them by Congress last year when they attempted to reallocate resources away from Voice of America broadcasting services and cut the jobs of their journalists committed to serving information needs of people living in countries without free media. The U.S. Congress had told the BBG in no uncertain terms that they were on the wrong course. This is not a battle we want to wage each year, and we would like to remain hopeful that the BBG will review its mission statement and use its resources wisely.”

“CUSIB would like to go on the record as opposing the proposed administrative merger of the surrogate broadcasters in its current form as undermining their independence, effectiveness and accountability to Congress and the American people,” stated CUSIB Director and co-founder Ted Lipien. “If the BBG is going to embrace internal administrative reform at its executive level, then CUSIB would strongly support increased funding from Congress for China, Middle East, Russia, Central Asia, Africa, and Latin America. If wisely managed, U.S. international broadcasting represents the best investment for U.S. national security interests. But we are concerned that the same officials who wanted to reduce broadcasts to Tibet and China using faulty research are also in charge of the proposed merger of the surrogate broadcasters and make unfounded claims about its benefits and presumed savings while pushing to limit public ownership and scrutiny over these and other operations,” Lipien said.

CUSIB supports the ongoing efforts of BBG member Ambassador Victor Ashe to protect the pro-media freedom and human rights mission of the Voice of America and the surrogate broadcasters and their journalists, especially his call for a continuation of U.S. radio broadcasting to Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.

CUSIB also concurs with the remarks by BBG member Michael Meehan as stated in the BBG’s official announcement: “China’s highly competitive media market and its government’s aggressive jamming of BBG content are long-standing challenges. Beijing blocks media of many kinds and aggressively stifles free expression, especially in regions where dissent continues to arise in the open, such as Tibet. While the Board understands the reality of the current budget environment, it also perceives a pressing need for the news and information that we provide to be seen and heard across China and Tibet.”

CUSIB awaits similar action from the BBG about the fate of other broadcasting services that also face unjustified cuts and reductions, including Voice of America Spanish, Georgian, Turkish, and Greek, among others, as well as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) broadcasts to the Russian Federation, and how a careful review of how the BBG and its International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) spend their resources might be able to save those programs and also save money for U.S. taxpayers.

The Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB) is an independent, nongovernmental organization which supports free flow of uncensored news from the United States to countries without free media.

For further information, please contact:
The Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB)
New York, New York

Ann Noonan, co-founder and Executive Director
Tel. 646-251-6069

Ted Lipien, co-founder and Director
Tel. 415-793-1642
Email: contact@cusib.org
www.cusib.org

by The Federalist

Let’s get right down to the nitty-gritty:

Against every major American rival or adversary (China, Iran and Russia being the Big Three), the BBG/IBB is a big-time loser. It does not matter what the medium. It does not matter what the “platform.” The BBG/IBB “agnostics” have failed miserably. The results are the same.

The “BBG Strategy” is a strategy of defeat. These internationalists/globalists are just that: defeatists. They are embarrassed by the American historical record of greatness and the inspiration that greatness gives to others. They are not up to the task. They have reduced US international broadcasting to something third rate. They are not creating, as they claim, a “global news network.” They are getting out of the serious news business, as anyone in the VOA Central Newsroom knows all-too-well.

In place of the solid program requirements of the VOA Charter, the BBG Strategy (their “flim flam strategic plan”), has reduced content of VOA programs: more superficial, less long form and in-depth, leaving audiences with something less than a complete or substantive treatment of major world issues. The broadcast staff is overextended. Expected to do “more with less,” the actual result is “less with less,” in terms of both quality and quantity.

And worst of all, they want to “expand and elevate” social media and expect the American taxpayer to foot the bill. That is what the BBG/IBB “strategists” are all about: ripping off the American taxpayer, trafficking in “lifestyle” trivia and mediocrity and giving themselves bonuses in the process.

Try as they might, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and their bonus-mongering International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) staff can’t shake the obvious: they are trying to take the US Government out of the business of international broadcasting. In doing so, they are left to defend the indefensible, putting up a self-serving sales pitch on their “BBG Strategy” website.

One of the cornerstones of what the BBG/IBB does is use semantics and half-truths to argue its case.

Let’s consider some of their arguments:

We’re Not Eliminating Radio

Most assuredly, they are. In the FY2013 budget proposal, the BBG/IBB wants to eliminate or reduce 14 of 43 Voice of America (VOA) language services and their radio broadcasts. They want to make additional cuts to language services of the various grantee operations. For VOA, the reduction represents a loss of over 30% of its radio broadcasting capabilities. They are not expanding radio broadcasting operations. They are cutting them. Indeed, when the BBG/IBB shut down VOA Russian radio broadcasts in 2008, a remark attributed to a senior agency official was, “We want all of VOA to be like the Russian Service in five years.” That means: no radio.

We know these BBG/IBB types very well. When they want something, they bite down hard and don’t let go. You can sense the psychological lockjaw to their thinking. They have wanted to make serious cuts to radio operations for years. By far, this is the largest attack against radio by these bureaucrats in the history of the agency. If they get these cuts, they will want more, using the same justifications and tricked up “data” to rationalize their case. They want out of radio in a big way. That is the intended outcome.

The Chinese and Radio

The BBG/IBB concedes that the Chinese are “interested” in shortwave radio.

No.

The truth of the matter is the Chinese government is committed to radio.

According to the BBG/IBB, the Chinese government has established a network of shortwave transmitters nationwide. The BBG/IBB notes that the Chinese use the same frequency that the BBG/IBB uses.

The BBG/IBB acknowledges that the Chinese are effective in jamming (or blocking) foreign broadcasts and “do so with great effect.”

In short, the BBG/IBB is on the defensive in China. This admission of Chinese effectiveness is saying that the BBG/IBB does not have effective countermeasures in place to overcome the Chinese success in jamming programs.

And ironically, the countermeasures taken by the Chinese government are the clearest acknowledgement that they take these VOA broadcasts seriously, when it seems the BBG/IBB does not.

The Chinese have also invested serious money, to the tune of about $7-billion dollars, in their overseas media operations. The BBG/IBB acknowledges that the Chinese want to be a big-time international media player.

Typically, the BBG/IBB is behind the curve. The Chinese are big-time media heavyweights. They have made their overseas media presence felt, including brand-new facilities in DC’s Chinatown, right across the National Mall from the BBG/IBB in the Cohen Building.

The BBG/IBB then turns around and dismisses the Chinese radio effort as a loss leader: something they are willing to do, “to accept fractional returns on its investment.”

If the BBG/IBB believes its own rhetoric, the Chinese have already won a great victory.

The BBG/IBB can’t see the obvious: With one stroke, the Chinese have created a successful countermeasure: they have established a domestic network using the same frequency as that used by the BBG/IBB and have blanketed the country to reach all its population. The Chinese government would not be making this substantial investment if the BBG/IBB broadcasts had no merit. They have made that investment to counter the news and information provided by US Government international broadcasting assets. And they wouldn’t be making that investment if audiences for shortwave radio programs were “so low,” as the BBG/IBB claims. In a country of 1.5 billion people, even so-called “low” percentages still translate into BIG population numbers.

Satellite Jamming and the Internet

The BBG/IBB goes on to argue that satellite jamming occurs only with “rogue states” (i.e., those pesky Iranians). The Chinese have yet to do so.

This confuses action with capability. The Chinese no doubt make daily threat assessments. That the Chinese have not done something does not equate with the lack of the capability to do something. If a judgment is made that the nature of a threat increases, no doubt the BBG will be very surprised with what the Chinese can do or are willing to do to protect their interests.

The BBG/IBB is not even paying attention to its own employees. We remember quite well an articulate, demonstrative argument offered by members of the VOA China Branch in 2011 when the BBG/IBB wanted to wipe out VOA Mandarin and Cantonese broadcasts. When it comes to capabilities of the Chinese government, a staffer correctly observed: “They can do it and they will do it.”

The BBG/IBB avoids arguing that their Internet content can’t be blocked. That’s because the Chinese, among others, have demonstrated they are more than capable of blocking, controlling and monitoring the Internet. Indeed, they have even created their own search engines and other common Internet features for use by their own population. They block. They control. They filter. The more successful the Chinese are in developing and expanding their own Internet model, the less effective will be the Internet outsiders, including the BBG/IBB, in developing a following.

And the BBG/IBB is missing the boat in another big way: the Chinese look inward for answers, not necessarily to some outside source. The Chinese leadership isn’t stupid. It is well aware that the needs of its people have to be met. It has made a conscious decision to put economic development as its top priority which in turn impacts on the effort to improve Chinese standards of living. It is not willing to turn loose the “Wild West” of the Internet on its citizens and risk what the government sees as great strides in Chinese development, stability and projection of its power.

We’re not defending what the Chinese are doing. We’re are analyzing their actions and assessing the impact of their decisions.

Like we said, the Chinese have already won a great victory. They see the BBG/IBB actions as a lack of resolve, a manifestation of weakness and lack of commitment. They’d be right on all counts.

And it doesn’t hurt to have about 7 times the money as the BBG/IBB (the kind of money which the agency will never see anytime soon) for the Chinese to make their model work.

And after all of this, one should pay close attention to the robust discussion going on inside China over the ouster of party leader Bo Xilai and the detention of his wife who is implicated in the killing of a British business consultant. Some of that discussion is taking place on the Chinese Internet, even in the face of government efforts to shut down or block certain sites.

In short, the Chinese are demonstrating that they don’t need the BBG/IBB to tell them what to think or how to conduct discussion and debate over topical Chinese issues. They are doing it for themselves.

The BBG/IBB Strategic Train Wreck:

One of the things the BBG/IBB “brain trust” has really excelled in is moving US Government international broadcasting into a no-win position.

Let’s go back to 2008 when the BBG/IBB dumped its VOA Russian broadcasts.

You know what that represents?

The BBG/IBB unconditionally surrendered to the Russians in the arena of international broadcasting.

Within weeks of that decision, the Russian military went on the offensive against the Republic of Georgia. It wasn’t just a purely conventional military operation. The Russians also used sophisticated cyber warfare assets to interdict Georgian and other websites.

And since, the Russians have expanded their broadcasting operations directed toward North America across all media: print, radio and television.

These guys don’t mess around.

And as we have seen with the VOA Russian website, it is all-too-easy to be compromised by false interviews and blogs that are easily taken over by anti-American, Russian ultra-nationalist postings. It’s a great deal for the Russians – whether government or non-government – to use a US Government website to fry the Americans.

These guys aren’t stupid. On the other hand:

At the same time the BBG/IBB was taking Russian broadcasts out of the strategic US Government broadcasting equation, they were also going after the VOA Georgian Service. Remember what we said earlier about the BBG/IBB: they bite down and don’t let go when they’re after something. They want to give up the Georgians and have once again put VOA Georgian on the chopping block.

It may have also escaped the attention of the BBG/IBB that there is a major conflict going on in Syria. The Syrian government has been tossing ordnance (artillery fire) into neighboring Turkey.

Guess what?

The BBG/IBB wants to give up its VOA Turkish service.

If there ever was a really strategic country in the Middle East, Near East or anywhere that has a convergence of critical strategic interests, it’s Turkey. And it’s been that way for two thousand years.

Of course, history is the thing the BBG/IBB knows the least and cares about even less.

And they’re giving up on Spanish to Latin America, including Cuba.

Who is filling the void?

Those pesky Iranians!

And they’re giving up on broadcasts to Tibet.

Need we say more about the defeatists and capitulators of the BBG/IBB “strategy?”

These are the same people that make gratuitous statements about “supporting freedom and democracy.” In view of what the agency is doing, that statement is BBG/IBB hypocrisy in action.

The actions of the BBG/IBB are a statement of its own. Their actions and intended objectives are saying that people and places are not important to them. Worse, they are saying that these people and places are not important to the United States Government.

And ultimately, the BBG/IBB demonstrates that it lacks the fortitude to stay with its mission. The Chinese had it right when one of their state newspapers called the decision to abandon Mandarin and Cantonese broadcasts last year “mission unfinished.”

So here is where things stand:

The Russians know they have won a great victory.

The Chinese know they are well on the way to winning a great victory.

The Iranians are poised to have a field day in Latin America.

And don’t even bring up that “Arab Spring” nonsense. All those American taxpayer millions spent on broadcasting to the Arab and Muslim world over the last decade and the end result is heading toward something wholly unsettling to American interests.

It is no wonder that the United States is one, big-time loser in the arena of global public opinion. If you’re scoring results, these BBG/IBB people are 0-4 in big league play.

Another thing:

Let’s go back to that $50-million dollar contract with the Gallup polling organization.

The more we think about it, the more we see that contract as less of a vehicle for research and more of an attempt by the BBG/IBB at a public relations device – an attempt to use “data” to validate a dysfunctional “strategic plan.” It’s more of the same from the BBG/IBB: beating themselves senseless expecting a different result.

Like we said, they bite down and don’t let go, even when what they are doing compromises US national and public interests and rips off the American taxpayer in the process.

The BBG/IBB has set in motion a process in which the ultimate outcome is to abandon the agency’s mission. There will be no turning back. To do so would be an admission that they are wrong. To repair the damage would cost the American taxpayers many more millions of dollars.

Either way, to continue the dysfunctional plan or to take remedial action to repair the damage from that plan, the BBG/IBB folks don’t care.

No accountability.

No responsibility.

The ultimate expression of arrogance and the corporate “strategy” which they have adopted.

The Federalist
April 2012

by Quo Vadis
 
Year after fiscal year, members of Congress in bipartisan fashion, question the  plans of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and its powerful Executive Staff to eviscerate the Voice of America. Since 1999, the Broadcasting Board of Governors has governed the units responsible for U.S. international broadcasting including the Voice of America, Radio/TV Marti and the grantee organizations:  RFE/RL, RFA (Radio Free Asia) and for the past several years, MBN (Middle East Broadcasting Network).
 
All sorts of reasons for dismantling VOA are presented.  The latest reasoning goes like this: the Chinese government jams VOA Mandarin and Cantonese broadcasts. In fact, the BBG people have demonstrated to congressional aides what jamming in China does to the signal.  Ergo, the broadcasts should be shut down.  Their solution?  The Internet, leaving out the critical fact that the Chinese government has complete control of the Internet thanks to its most efficient cyber-army.  Thankfully, Congress understood these facts when it decided to negate the BBG’s attempts last year to drastically cut VOA Mandarin and Cantonese radio and TV broadcasts to China. That did not deter the BBG Executive Staff from narrowing the reduction plan, now proposing to cut the VOA Cantonese Service in FY2013.
 
Another argument presented by the BBG in its jaunts to the Congress is:  since Mandarin and Cantonese speakers can read much of the Standard/Classical Chinese script, the BBG should cease Cantonese broadcasting.  The BBG and its Executive Staff neglect to mention that in their spoken forms, the Mandarin and Cantonese languages are totally different.  Therefore, by closing VOA Cantonese as they have been proposing for years, the BBG would effectively eliminate communications with over 60 million Cantonese-language speakers in China, including the residents of Hong Kong.
 
Using that curious reasoning of the BBG and its Executive Staff regarding jamming, one wonders how world history might have changed if the present BBG had governed international broadcasting during the long years of the Cold War? What would have happened if the VOA and RFE/RL had stopped its broadcasts to the countries of Eastern Europe and the USSR when jamming was extensive?   Would the Berlin Wall have fallen?  Would Lech Walesa have created the Solidarity movement?  Would the Republic of Georgia and the Baltic countries have had the chance at independence from the Soviet Union? Would the names of Vaclav Havel and Alexander Dubcek been known to the Czechoslovak people?
 
During the Cold War, in-country monitoring of broadcasts in those areas conclusively showed that there were significant lapses in the effectiveness of the Soviet and Eastern European jammers to fully obliterate the signals (quite a common thing that happens in shortwave broadcasting). Past Directors of the VOA  during the Cold War understood the issues of radio reception and the ability of shortwave to elude jamming, especially outside the cities. They would never have proposed the cessation of U.S. broadcasts to critical areas as the BBG is doing now.  And if by chance they had, there would have been some intervention by the U.S. Information Agency which at one time had a prioritized list of countries for which U.S. broadcasts, in the interests of national security, were essential.
 
Concrete evidence since the ’89 fall of the Berlin Wall with the subsequent liberalization in countries escaping the Soviet yoke shows that listening to VOA broadcasts, in spite of attempts at signal jamming, was extensive throughout the USSR and Eastern Europe. Using the faulty logic of today’s BBG and its Executive Staff in cutting broadcasts because of jamming, U.S. international broadcasting would have lost what many have called its finest hour.
 
And then, there’s that sticky question of shortwave radio that the BBG and its Executive Staff keep saying is out-of-date and passe.  Ironically, their own research shows that over a billion people in the world tune in regularly to shortwave radio and that shortwave is necessary in countries with vast land stretches like Russia which encompasses nine time zones as well as China or Brazil.  Their own statements verify that the bulk of their present audience listens via radio.  Their conclusion?  But, of course, heave shortwave radio broadcasts and close the Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station in Greenville NC.  Due to opposition from BBG member Victor Ashe and intervention by North Carolina Congressman Walter B. Jones, the Greenville facility has been saved for now.
 
It is comforting to know that there are many in Congress, on both sides of the aisle, who do understand what the VOA mission is all about, including Congresswoman Betty McCollum. In her remarks at a subcommittee hearing several years ago, Congresswoman McCollum stressed the strategic importance of radio in delivering the message of America to the world.  She also pointed out that VOA is a vital part of the public diplomacy toolbox, a comment that no doubt aggravated the BBG Executive Staff who deny that any such function exists for VOA.  Broadcasting employees could only wish that her belief in the value of VOA broadcasts would be shared, in some way, by the BBG Executive Staff.
 
Video:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHdpodoVxUE
 
Judging by the BBG’s concerted attacks upon the Voice of America, the remarks of Congresswoman McCollum and the bipartisan opinion of a majority of the U.S. Congress regarding the importance of VOA broadcasts are alien to the BBG Executive Staff whose actions reveal their determination to throw this once-effective 70-year-old institution on to the trash heap of history.
 
 
 

Bureaucratic power-grab

After making a good start on destroying Voice of America’s ability to fulfill its unique mission of informing the world about the United States, the next target of the Broadcasting Board of Governors and International broadcasting Bureau bureaucrat are now the surrogate broadcasters.

Sources tell BBG Watch that the power-grab by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) – International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) bureaucrats is killing morale at the grantee surrogate broadcasters: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia (RFA), and Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), which otherwise have enjoyed very high morale when compared to how the BBG, IBB, and Voice of America (VOA) staffs view their own managers and their leadership qualities.

The bureaucratic power-grab is the proposal to merge all three grantee organizations under one administrative umbrella.

At the same time, BBG/IBB bureaucrats have already grabbed even greater share of resources from the Voice of America (VOA), decimating its broadcasts and staffs. If morale at the surrogate broadcasters is bad, it is ten times worse at VOA, where entire language services are being abolished and its mission of representing the Unites States undermined in a direct violation of the law.

The IBB/BBG management team is in effect abolishing VOA’s broadcasting capabilities, particularly radio, and giving itself control over VOA assets to use for their own bureaucratic purposes. If they were also to gain full control of the surrogate broadcasters, it would be a frightening prospect considering that they have been consistently rated as the worst leaders and managers among all federal government executives. Keep in mind that they are the ones who proposed to end Voice of America Tibetan radio broadcasts while Tibetan monks were self-immolating and Tibet was burning

These BBG and IBB bureaucrats have always had much more control over the Voice of America than the surrogate broadcasters. The merger proposal is designed to put them also in firm administrative control over these privately-run but publicly-funded entities.

The grantee broadcasters are each focused on a particular area of the world and run by professionals who understand special needs of their specific audiences. To the extent that they can be effective, it is due to their programming specialization and administrative independence. They were in fact specifically created by Congress to be independent and to specialize.

The merger proposal in its current form will destroy their independence and ultimately their ability to specialize. This would make them ineffective. They will no longer be run by area specialists and journalists who are in touch with their audiences but by BBG and IBB bureaucrats. And, as we said before, these bureaucrats are the worst in the entire US federal government. It would be equivalent to putting experts in cracking safes in charge of the bank.

For example, the BBG’s CFO’s office has grown by leaps and bounds in the past couple of years while Voice of America staff is being decimated and top programming positions handed over to big contractors. And yet with all those new accountants in place, the CFO still can’t pay BBG, IBB and VOA contract employees on time. One could only imagine what havoc BBG and IBB bureaucrats would cause if given administrative control over the much more efficiently-run grantee organizations.

As these bureaucrats eliminate broadcasts and other information programs, International Broadcasting Bureau offices in the Cohen building are growing out of control. Many sources describe these IBB bureaucrats as being “totally out of touch with the actual broadcasters.”

The argument that the merger proposal will save money by eliminating duplicate administrative positions is completely false. It will simply transfer assets and resources from the grantee organizations who know how to use them efficiently to support specific missions and programs that they understand and feel passionate about to incompetent and power-hungry bureaucrats who have little knowledge of specific regions and their programming needs and care little for the suffering of those who live under oppressive regimes. If they did, they would not want to eliminate VOA radio to Tibet.

They even want to give themselves the power to actively market BBG programs in the United States by repealing the Smith-Mundt Act. Placing all BBG programs, including those from surrogate broadcasters, in public domain is a great idea. To that extent, the Smith-Mundt Act should be modified. But allowing these non-specialist bureaucrats to focus on an NPR-like outreach in the United States will simply further undermine the USIB’s core international mission.

By proposing to end or drastically reduce Voice of America broadcasting to China, Russia, Tibet, Vietnam, Laos, Georgia and many other countries, proposing to decimate VOA English and Spanish programs, and to eliminate Radio Free Asia shortwave radio transmissions to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, these bureaucrats have shown over and over again their indifference to serving the information needs of core international audiences.

Sources tell BBG Watch that BBG member Susan McCue, who as a former Chief of Staff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has more Congressional experience than other Board members, is working on putting together the US Innovation Act (USIA), hoping to pass all kinds of US international broadcasting legislation in one package. Ironically when the United States Information Agency (also USIA) was in charge of US international broadcasting before the BBG came into existence, it would have been inconceivable for VOA radio broadcasts to Tibet or any other nation ruled by a communist regime to be terminated.

It will be interesting to see what emerges from Susan McCue’s effort, but if the proposed legislation limits even further accountability of BBG/IBB officials and puts them in even greater control over strategic international broadcasting assets, the results would be disastrous. These officials claim that they are using audience research, eliminate duplication and save money in a period of tight budgets. Sources among experts at the surrogate broadcasters say, however, that the research techniques these bureaucrats use are flawed, that they can’t interpret correctly even those research results that are accurate, and the whole claim of saving money is false. No money is being saved. It goes to expanding their bureaucratic empire and lining the pockets of big contractors.

If the house is on fire because of a design flaw, one doesn’t go to the house architect to change the design. One calls a fire brigade. If Susan McCue is relying on advice from BBG/IBB in-house “experts” — the worst leaders and managers in the federal government according to OPM surveys — the proposed legislation is bound to increase their power while diminishing public scrutiny, undermining the efficiency of US international broadcasting operations and wasting taxpayers’ money.

A letter addressed to Congresswoman Kay Granger (R – TX), Chairman of the Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs of the House Committee on Appropriations and to Ranking Member Congresswoman Nita Lowey (D – NY) criticizes the Broadcasting Board of Governors for expanding their bureaucracy at the expense of critical overseas broadcasts and U.S. strategic interests:

The proposed reductions are driven not by a considered strategic world view, but by bureaucratic expedience and a fundamental misunderstanding of the mission of VOA. If the fiscal year 2013 proposal is enacted, the staff level for VOA will be reduced by 13.2% from the current year. In contrast, only 3.3% of the positions from the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB), which provides administrative support to the BBG, will be cut. If the fiscal year 2013 proposal is enacted the number of full time equivalent (FTE) positions for the IBB will rise from 593.2 in fiscal year 2011 to 678.2. In the same time period VOA will lose 121.2 FTE positions. The general trend of the IBB has been to grow larger while the number of language services they support is being reduced. Broadcasting should be the last thing to be cut. It makes little sense to grow the bureaucracy while cutting that which it is meant to support. The eliminations and reductions in broadcasting to Tibet, China, Laos, and Vietnam alone will cut 28 positions from VOA.

Link to the Letter

What the BBG needs is to reform itself, starting by sending their failed bureaucrats into early retirement, reversing their program cutting proposals, reaffirming Voice of America’s unique mission and preserving the autonomy of the grantee organizations. It would certainly be a welcome news in Tibet and in many other countries where desperate people see the Voice of America and the surrogate broadcasters as their only hope and their only news link to the free world.

Getting a BBG Birthday Cake

THE VOA ANNIVERSARY WALTZ:  LA DANSE MACABRE?

by Quo Vadis

For the past 10-15 years, as annual budget time nears, there’s a haunting presence in the halls of the Voice of America, call it, if you will, Mme La Guillotine furtively hovering in the background as broadcasters wonder whether this year it will be all over and they will be declared extinct like the dodo bird, a faded blip on the international broadcasting scene. A small cabal from the Executive Staff on the third floor of the Cohen Building, known as Valhalla to rank-and-file, stride to and fro with furrowed brows from meeting to meeting buttressed by bulging binders and glowing Power Point presentations, as they ponder the fate of the VOA language services in what some think is a macabre reenactment of the thumbs-up or down of Roman Coliseum days.

Some Services are plagued with this recurrent nightmare year after year as grating as a needle stuck in the groove of a scratched LP or maddening as the events in the film, Groundhog Day.  One of them is the VOA Georgian Service, doomed and then redeemed not once but many times. The Service was first saved from extinction by a VOA Director after a persuasive presentation by the service members together with a panel of knowledgeable experts.  In succeeding years, that pesky Mme La Guillotine persisted in prowling around the parameters of the Georgian Service. In ’08,  they were again on the chopping block but were saved, this time by the intervention of two gutsy Congresswomen, one who chaired the Congressional Georgian Caucus and believed that the Republic of Georgia was of great geo-political importance to the United States, a seemingly foreign concept to those making the decisions on diminishing the Voice of America. Fast forward to 2011 when VOA Georgian celebrated its 60th year of broadcasting with the well-deserved congratulatory messages and celebration. With those cheers for VOA Georgian achievements still a fresh memory, the fate of the Service once again hangs in the balance with severe cutbacks proposed in 2012, keeping only two employees who will be expected to produce high-quality TV and Internet – a recipe for potential failure.

In the ’08 proposed closures which Georgia barely escaped thanks to swift action by Congress, VOA Tibet was also scheduled to go off the air but escaped like its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who had been forced into exile to India many years before.  Last year, the VOA Tibetan Service, created by law in 1991, celebrated its 20th anniversary at festivities replete with kudos and toasts to its accomplishments. The very next year, perhaps because of the anniversary curse, third-floor executives announced that VOA Tibetan radio broadcasts, described by the Dalai Lama as a crucial lifeline to the outside world for his oppressed people, would be off the air leaving TV and internet. BBG executives are evidently oblivious to the fact that only exiled Tibetans in India can see VOA Tibetan TV since transmissions are effectively blocked within the country just as Chinese authorities prevent any internet access.  One of those fabled and familiar “oh well” moments.

Speaking of the bad-luck connection between VOA anniversaries and disaster, the Russian Service celebrated its 60th anniversary with much hoopla only to be unceremoniously shut down a year later in August of ’08 two weeks before the invasion by Russia of neighboring Georgia.  Ignoring the specific written advisory of Congress that radio/TV broadcasts to Russia be continued, the BBG transferred VOA Russian to internet only with the inevitable result that it lost its listeners, prestige and reach. Four years later, we see an aggressive Russia caught in the vise of an autocratic Putin and his plutocracy with unprecedented-since-the Cold-War venomous anti-American attacks issued from its ruling circles as our U.S. ambassador frantically strives to connect via Twitter.

The revolving-door scenario is repeated with the VOA Greek Service year after year: dumped and then resurrected, closed and then opened like a barn door in a windstorm.  Appeals to Congress and support from American Hellenic organizations kept turning the tide but again this year the Red Queen refrain – Off with their heads – is heard as the Greek Service faces closure for mysterious reasons known only to a select few perhaps in the secluded holy monasteries of Mount Athos.

The VOA China Branch narrowly dodged the infamous VOA anniversary curse last year when the U.S. Congress overruled the BBG‘s plans to cut radio/TV broadcasts to China and transfer its communication functions solely to InterNet which is almost totally blocked by China’s formidable cyber army. The Branch properly celebrated its 70th anniversary not in the confines of the VOA building but in the Rayburn Building of the U.S. Congress.

In March, the VOA celebrated its 70th anniversary with a glowing tribute to its influence and impact throughout the world over seven decades with congratulations from the U.S. President, the Secretary of State, video greetings from the Dalai Lama and Burmese activist Aung Suu Kyi, all kinds of hosannahs from near and far, from inside and outside the building.

Knowing the track record of anniversary celebrations preceding extinction, one can only wonder if the BBG knows something that VOA employees do not?

Moral of the story?  Beware of management emissaries from Valhalla bearing cake.

The bureaucratic executive staff at the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and its operating arm the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) are proposing major cuts in U.S. international broadcasting to strategic countries and regions while expanding their own ranks and expenses. They have targeted the primary strategic U.S. broadcaster — the Voice of America (VOA) — for the most severe program cuts and reductions while bureaucratic IBB positions will grow from fiscal year 2011 from 593 to 678.

The IBB/BBG executive bureaucracy has been rated in the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) surveys as the worst among all federal agencies in management knowledge and leadership.

Growing bureaucracy at the expense of programs

The proposed reductions are driven not by a considered strategic world view, but by bureaucratic expedience and a fundamental misunderstanding of the mission of VOA. If the fiscal year 2013 proposal is enacted, the staff level for VOA will be reduced by 13.2% from the current year. In contrast, only 3.3% of the positions from the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB), which provides administrative support to the BBG, will be cut. If the fiscal year 2013 proposal is enacted the number of full time equivalent (FTE) positions for the IBB will rise from 593.2 in fiscal year 2011 to 678.2. In the same time period VOA will lose 121.2 FTE positions. The general trend of the IBB has been to grow larger while the number of language services they support is being reduced. Broadcasting should be the last thing to be cut. It makes little sense to grow the bureaucracy while cutting that which it is meant to support. The eliminations and reductions in broadcasting to Tibet, China, Laos, and Vietnam alone will cut 28 positions from VOA.

PROPOSED REDUCTIONS AT VOA

The Broadcasting Board of Governors oversees all civilian international broadcasting operations funded by the U.S. government:  VOA/Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia (RFA) Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and the Middle East Broadcasting Network (MBN).

Of these, VOA is the only Agency subject to direct Congressional oversight because it is part of the U.S. Government.

In addition to world news, VOA provides news and information about the United States, its people, its ideals and beliefs and its government policies.

RFA, REF/RL and MBN are privately-run organizations yet federally funded by grants from the BBG.  Each operates as a surrogate broadcaster by acting as a free-press for those countries in which they operate.  Their mission is to be an alternative for in-country news.  Their mission does not include broadcasting news from or about the United States, its people, its ideals or U.S. government policies as is enshrined in the VOA Charter, Public Law 94-350.

ACTIVITY                  # OF POSITIONS         #OF POSITIONS CUT

Central News                     125                            – 43 

POTENTIAL IMPACT:   With its Central Newsroom staff in Washington, DC, reduced by one third, VOA would risk losing a high quality  news service that has been its brand since 1942.  It will no longer be able to cover news, trends and American life comprehensively 24/7 — its trademark as a “go to” source about America and the world.  Carefully sourced information is essential to the success and standards of VOA’s more than 40 language services.  The news writing responsibility will be delegated to the language services which are staffed in part with non-U.S. citizen contractors who have little, if any, stake in or understanding of U.S. foreign policy.  It is essential to use a Central News Service which could and should be used by ALL the various elements.  The recent occurrence in VOA Russian where a fake interview with the dissident Naval’ny was posted on the VOA Russian website is a perfect example of the chaos that can ensue if this reorganization of Central News is approved.

English                                  99                             – 28

POTENTIAL IMPACT:   Radio broadcasts (shortwave, AM and FM) would be silenced to all areas of the world except Africa.  This includes strategically important broadcasts to the Middle East, China and Tibet where where VOA English is the only USG international broadcast service that is not jammed.  VOA’s remaining global broadcasts in English would cease including all hourly newscasts and regionalized news and information about America from a uniquely American point of view.  Emphasis would be placed on social media and the Internet which are easy to interdict.  In this decision, the BBG ignores the fact that all over the world, English is becoming a favorite second language, especially among the youth.  The great popularity of  VOA Special English programs with its limited vocabulary and explanation of idiomatic English phrases is a prime example of good programming that reaches listeners who are interested in English.

Broadcast Operations       284                           -16     

POTENTIAL IMPACT:    Linked to reduction in need for radio technicians to support programs throughout this list

Spanish                                  27                            -14 

POTENTIAL IMPACT:    Six Spanish broadcasters will remain in Washington; 4 will be transferred to New York, and 4 to Miami.  This is Phase 1 of a long-range VOA and Radio-TV Marti consolidation.  VOA radio relays to 19 Spanish-speaking countries in our hemisphere will be severely curtailed at the same time Iran has established HispanTV a Spanish language TV channel that communist/Cuba sympathizer Hugo Chavez is actively involved with.  This is in addition to Hugo Chavez’ other project – Telesur which besides Venezuela is cosponsored by from Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Uruguay.  Telesur broadcasts 24/7 to South, Central and North America.  The Network has a staff of 500 with offices throughout Latin America and broadcasts via satellite, cable, and terrestrial TV and radio platforms.  The content has been identified by various groups as being anti-U.S.  Perhaps as a result, one country after another in Latin America is choosing leftist governments.  The BBG has been steadily ignoring these threats in our hemisphere cutting Portuguese to Brazil and sporadically broadcasting to countries which could be potential threats to our national security.  Also, there has been NO directive from Congress which would authorize the BBG to dramatically reorganize and consolidate Radio/TV Marti.  What happens to the Radio Broadcasting to Cuba Act, Public Law 98-111 which Ronald Reagan signed in 1983 putting it under the auspices of the VOA?

Afghan (Dari-Pashto)          40                             -10 

POTENTIAL IMPACT:    VOA radio to strategically-important Afghanistan would be halved from 12 to 6 hours daily during the critical 2012-2014 drawdown period for NATO and US forces.  Original programming would be cut, risking a possible loss of younger multimedia expert staff and a substantial reduction in VOA Afghan’s audience share (60% of adults).   Six hours weekly of TV would be retained while all research information points to the fact that RADIO is the prime communication in Afghanistan.

Vietnamese                       16                                -10

POTENTIAL IMPACT:    VOA will lose its 17 ½ hours weekly of radio, leaving only Internet services to a country where all the media are controlled by the Communist Party.  The six remaining staff members may not be able to: 1) sustain four current Internet sites they now reach, as Hanoi steps up efforts to control these by establishing its own state-owned social network, 2) retain the VOA Vietnamese position as the third most visited website at the Voice.  The proposed cut would severely hinder America’s ability to counter the propaganda of communist governments in Hanoi and Beijing.  The VOA Vietnamese Service has been a trusted source of news since 1943 and has almost 5 times the audience of the Vietnamese Service of Radio Free Asia.  In essence, this cut to VOA Vietnamese is punishment for a job well done.

Cantonese                             7                               -7            ABOLISH SERVICE

POTENTIAL IMPACT:  VOA Cantonese would be abolished on grounds that the audience is “negligible.” But RFA Cantonese will continue, with eight staff members even though it has only a “trace” audience.  In an independent survey last year, VOA had a weekly TV audience share of 9.8 % in Hong Kong and 1.9% in Guangdong Province.  VOA has a recognition factor there 2.5 times greater than RFA.  VOA and RFA have different and distinct missions (preamble, page 1). Following the example of the successful programming to Eastern Europe and the USSR during the Cold War when the US broadcast through surrogate stations RFE/Radio Liberty as well as VOA, RFA should be entrusted with programming about domestic events while VOA Cantonese radio/TV would concentrate on world news.  Another factor arguing for retention is the fact that as of March 1, 2012, Chinese authorities stopped all Cantonese-language programming in Guangdong province affecting over 50 million people.  Hong Kong, also predominantly Cantonese-speaking with 7 million people, could also be affected down the line.  Contrary to what the BBG has erroneously said re: Mandarin and Cantonese having the same classic standard Chinese characters, SPOKEN Mandarin and SPOKEN Cantonese are totally different languages.  During this time when Cantonese speakers in China would be deprived of media in their own language is a crucial strategic moment for VOA/RFA to INCREASE not decrease programming.

Tibetan                                 22                            – 7

POTENTIAL IMPACT:    All VOA Tibetan radio will be abolished, with TV expanded from its current two hours to three hours a week to a country where there are no affiliates on which to broadcast the program.  Although PRC radio jamming is extensive, the television audience in Tibet is still smaller by comparison because of government efforts to jam TV satellite signs.  There’s no reason to help the PRC achieve their objective of silencing the Voice and radio which remains a major information link to the worldwide Tibetan diaspora.  Interestingly enough, in his remarks recorded for the 70th anniversary of VOA, the Dalai Lama kept repeating the impact of VOA Tibet RADIO to the Tibetans and its great importance.  A recent feature on NPR revealed the fact that Buddhist monks secretly listen to VOA Tibet radio programs although under constant surveillance by Chinese militia.  At this critical moment when over 20 monks have self-immolated to bring the attention of the outside world to their plight is no time to CUT VOA Tibet programs which are truly a lifeline for those listeners.  Accurate research on radio listening habits in Tibet are virtually impossible to obtain since outsiders are not allowed free access into the country.  Research is available on TV listening habits among Tibetan refugees in India who fled the oppression in their native country.

Bangla                                 11                             – 6

POTENTIAL IMPACT:   All Bangla AM and shortwave will cease, and remaining 5 staff will concentrate on FM and TV placement.  VOA Bangla, aided by a powerful AM signal from Thailand, had more than 1,000 fan clubs in 2002 and its presence on Dhaka FM demands adequate staff to produce programs.

Albanian                             12                              -5 

POTENTIAL IMPACT:   All VOA radio in Albanian will end, but TV production will continue.   VOA is the leading international broadcaster to Kosovo and Albania but will be hard pressed to retain this position with only 7 staff.

Greek                                   4                              – 4              ABOLISH SERVICE

POTENTIAL IMPACT:  The proposed elimination of broadcasting to this strategically important country is ill-advised.  It would come just as its financial crisis and internal unrest threaten Greece’s security and the financial stability of both the EU and the United States.  VOA Greek reaches nearly 500,000 people weekly in Athens alone.  It is also on the air in Cyprus.  Its strategic importance is being totally ignored.

Turkish                                 8                            – 4

POTENTIAL IMPACT:   Cutting this service in half to focus only on the Internet while abolishing TV and radio broadcasts would seriously undermine VOA’s capability to reach a critical and growing anti-American Muslim audience in the volatile region.  It would also threaten impressive audience gains of the past year.  The 24/7 website recommended by the BBG requires more staff, not less.  Internet service in Turkey is spotty at best.  The BBG, as is the norm, is shooting itself in the foot with this decision and in addition, imperiling our national security.

Georgian                            6                            – 4

POTENTIAL IMPACT:   Reducing rejuvenated VOA Georgian by two thirds makes no strategic sense.  In 2010, when Georgian broadcasts ceased, Russian troops invaded that strategically important country two weeks later.  Russia occupies, or has growing influence, in neighboring South Ossetia and Abkhazia and hostilities could potentially break out with no warning.  The Republic of Georgia is making tremendous strides in its economy.  The 60 years of VOA Georgian broadcasting into the country have created a pro-American stance among its people.  Georgian forces have fought in Iraq & Afghanistan. VOA Georgian radio would disappear at precisely the wrong time especially since many predict that after his victory, Putin may once again begin aggressive actions against Georgia.  The two surviving staff members would find it impossible to produce both a high quality Internet and TV service prescribed by the BBG following the proposed reduction.   The BBG is setting the service up for failure and within a year, would probably close the service.

Lao                                      6                               -4

POTENTIAL IMPACT:  Lao media are tightly controlled by the ruling communist party which has been in power since 1975.  With its staff cut to two and the loss of shortwave transmissions, VOA Lao will be severely weakened — producing material largely for 8 affiliated FM stations across the border from Laos in neighboring Thailand.  Laos is a country hungry for a variety of Western news sources.  VOA and RFA, even with their different missions, can fill the void,

Burmese                           13                             – 1

POTENTIAL IMPACT:    Burma is on the verge of substantial democratic reforms.  It’s been said that the Rangoon government is contemplating allowing VOA radio and TV programs to be rebroadcast on Burmese government controlled media which may be wishful thinking and not valid information on which to base the decision to possibly cut .  Affiliate programming is highly uncertain as that programming can be shut down suddenly and quickly as it was with VOA Russian, Ukrainian, Azerbaijan and other language services.  Ironically, in a video presentation at the VOA 70th anniversary celebration, the leader of the Burmese democracy movement, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, spoke of her 18 years under house arrest and repeated over and over how VOA Burmese which she listens to every night was her lifeline of information and the source of the hope that kept her alive.

PROPOSED_REDUCTIONS_AT_VOA.doc.PDF

PROPOSED_REDUCTIONS_AT_VOA.doc

The BBG  executive staff, now part of the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) reporting to IBB director Richard Lobo, has been persistent in trying to close down numerous VOA broadcasting services or to reduce their programs. In 2007, these BBG executives wanted to cut the number of hours of radio to Tibet. A demonstration on Capitol Hill by Tibetan Buddhist monks and an unequivocal admonition from Congress thwarted their plans. Last year, Congress again thwarted their plans to end VOA radio and TV programs in Mandarin and Cantonese to China. This year, BBG executives again proposed to eliminate all VOA radio broadcasts to Tibet and to close down the VOA Cantonese Service. Many other VOA broadcasting services are also slated to be cut or reduced, with the loss of 170 VOA positions.

The BBG’s proposal calls for the elimination of VOA radio broadcasts to Georgia, a country facing a major threat from Russia and internal threats to freedom of the press. The VOA Georgian Service had already been slated to be shut down in 2008. “However, the war with Russia saved us within one day,” wrote a VOA staffer. (It did not save VOA Russian radio and television programs, which went silent 12 days before the war started. The BBG staff refused to resume them in response to the war emergency.)  Because of the Russian-Georgian conflict, the Georgian Service was allowed to go from 30 minutes to one hour of daily radio broadcasts. But the BBG staff was determined to eliminate VOA radio to Georgia sooner or later.

For historical reference, this is how the BBG staff treated the Georgian Service in 2008 shortly before and after the Russian invasion of Georgia:

After the Russian-Georgian conflict had started, the BBG “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.

In their FY2013 budget proposal, the BBG wants to cut four positions from the VOA Georgian Service.

“At this point, we have six positions, although only five are occupied. By this decision, we will be reduced to two staff positions. The VOA Director is saying we will retain several contractors,” wrote a VOA staffer.

“The Budget proposal is calling for a more TV-oriented Georgian Service. We do not know how we can do this with only two people on staff. The Service is demoralised. We feel this is crippling, especially since our staff was completed only a year ago,” wrote a VOA broadcaster.

In December 2010,  the Service started a brand new TV program ( the first TV production by the VOA Georgian Service). It is broadcast on a nationwide public TV channel in Georgia. “It was well received by audiences and journalists,” wrote a VOA staffer.

But, as with many other VOA television programs placed on local networks abroad, there is a problem of journalistic integrity and adherence to the Voice of America Charter, a Congressionally-passed Public Law which mandates accurate, balanced and comprehensive coverage by VOA.

A VOA source reports that the Voice of America Georgian Service has “asked” not to produce Georgia-related political news reports for their television program being placed on the public TV channel in Georgia.

“We believe that this restricts us in communicating with the audience about the most pressing topics,” wrote a VOA staffer, “but for now we seem to be stuck with this affiliate network.”

This is a common problem for many VOA broadcasting services. Local affiliates dictate what kind of programming or reporting is or isn’t acceptable. If VOA does not comply, they take VOA programs off the air. These demands often originate with local regime and government officials who object to VOA news reports and want to ban or restrict them.

Television is particularly prone to this kind of pressure. Radio is less affected, but some local radio affiliates also try to restrict political coverage. “By crippling the Georgia Service by staff reductions, we will no longer be able to provide radio broadcasts, which — unlike television — are a major avenue for our political news reporting,” wrote a staffer. “We can say much more on the radio, and get much more of it out despite attempts to censor our output.”

A Voice of America source close to the situation listed several other factors contributing to the demoralization among the VOA Georgian Service staffers. They are convinced that BBG officials want to cripple VOA broadcasting to Georgia:

- Voice of America  Georgian Service was recognized for its 6o years of broadcasting last December when BBG Governor Victor Ashe and VOA Director David Ensor presented us with a commemorative plaque. We believe that both Governor Ashe and Director Ensor were honestly trying to be helpful and supportive, but no doubt BBG staffers knew at that time what they were planning to do to our staff and our broadcasts and other BBG members went along with their plan without asking questions that ought to be asked.

- Russia continues to occupy 20 percent of the Georgian territory.

- Georgian media is ranked as partly free by Freedom House. The television market is increasingly controlled by the government. In the meantime, the Voice of America Georgian Service is being “asked” not to produce Georgia-related political reporting for its television program. We believe that this restricts us in communicating with the audience about  the most pressing topics, but for now we seem to be stuck with this affiliate.

- The Voice of America Georgian Service represents the only American news media presence in Georgia. Prague-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is obviously not in the same category. Broadcasting to Georgia is in the national security interests of the United States. By crippling the VOA Georgian Service with staff reductions, we no longer will be able to provide radio broadcasts, which — unlike our television program  – are a major avenue for our political news reporting.

- The Voice of America Georgian Service is to lose for staffers. At this point, we have six positions, although only five are occupied.

- By this decision of the BBG, we will be reduced to two staff positions. The VOA Director is saying we will retain several contractors who are exploited, poorly paid and have no rights or benefits. They can also be fired without any recourse at any time. BBG officials also want to fire most of our staffers.

- The BBG Budget proposal is calling for a more TV-oriented Voice of America Georgian Service. We do not know how we can do this with only two staff positions.

- The Voice of America Georgian Service is demoralized. We feel this is crippling, especially since our staff composition was completed only a year ago. 

- In December 2010,  we started a brand new TV program ( the first TV production by the VOA Georgian Service) broadcast on a nationwide public TV channel in Georgia. It was well received by audiences and journalists. 

- We feel the cuts and reductions proposed by the BBG staff are unfair since the Georgian Service has been performing extremely well despite not being given enough time to show its full potential — in radio, TV and web — after our last minute revival in 2008. It is just not fair.

- We feel that the next step of BBG executives, after crippling and reducing the VOA Georgian Service, is its closure. This is happening when media freedom in Georgia is worsening, critical parliamentary and presidential elections are coming up, the government is stepping up pressure on the opposition, and anti-American rhetoric is growing among the society at large. With the Russian elections in March and Putin’s expected victory, the situation in Georgia can only go sour, especially within the Russian controlled territorial enclaves. With Russia’s military presence inside these separatist regions and a potential for instability and conflict affecting U.S. military, political, economic and other interests in the region, Voice of America radio broadcasts in Georgian serve a vital national security function.

February 17, 2012
For Immediate Release

Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting Opposes Broadcasting Board of Governors’ Budget Proposal for FY2013

The Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB) has issued the following statement after a careful review of the Broadcasting Board of Governors’ 161-page Budget Proposal for FY2013:

“The Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting is outraged by the Broadcasting Board of Governors’ Budget for FY2013 that proposes to cut and reduce Voice of America (VOA) English and foreign language programs and positions, as well as programs and positions at Radio Free Asia (RFA) and at other U.S. government-funded international broadcasting entities managed by the BBG.

We oppose the BBG’s efforts to eviscerate core news services provided by the Voice of America and other broadcasters while using U.S.-taxpayer resources to inflate the ranks of the BBG management.

The VOA Tibetan Service was created by an Act of Congress signed into law on February 16, 1990 ‘to provide Voice of America Tibetan language programming to the people of Tibet.’ Less than one year ago the Voice of America was celebrating the importance of Tibetan radio broadcasts, marking the 20th anniversary of the first VOA Tibetan radio program.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors now wants to eliminate completely these critical radio broadcasts from their budget and leave funding only for a television program which most people in Tibet are unable to receive. This BBG action would defeat the purpose of the Federal law sponsored by Rep. Dante B. Fascell (Public Law No: 101-246) which established the VOA Tibetan Service.

We also adamantly oppose the BBG’s plans to cut the entire VOA Cantonese Service, which includes the VOA Cantonese weekly program, ‘American Report’ viewed in Cantonese‐speaking areas of China.

We expect that there will be a public outcry for these services to remain. Afghanistan, Albania, Bangladesh, Burma, Georgia, Greece, Laos, Russian Federation, Turkey and Vietnam are some of the other countries to which the BBG wants to reduce information programs. The Caucasus region, including Chechnya, and Central Asia are also targeted by the BBG for program cuts and reductions.

CUSIB also questions the BBG’s ‘over-arching strategic objective … (T)o become the world’s leading international news agency by 2016…’  This proposal also seems to be in direct conflict with Congressional intent as it will divert scarce resources from serving those who are most desperate to receive uncensored news and information.

In a memo to BBG staff, the BBG wrote: ‘We realize that some of these proposed changes will create anxiety.’  On the contrary, these BBG proposed changes will re-ignite passion of every journalist and human rights activist and incite and re-inspire them to preserve those programs that support journalism for media freedom and human rights.”

The Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB) is an independent, nongovernmental organization which supports free flow of uncensored news from the United States to countries without free media.

For further information, please contact:

The Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB)
New York, New York

Ann Noonan, co-founder and Executive Director
Tel. 646-251-6069

Ted Lipien, co-founder and Director
Tel. 415-793-1642
Email: contact@cusib.org
www.cusib.org
 

###

Text of Public Law 101-246 establishing the Voice of America Tibetan Service:

SEC. 234. VOICE OF AMERICA BROADCASTS TO TIBET.

(a) ESTABLISHMENT OF SERVICE- Not later than 90 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Director of the United States Information Agency shall establish through the Voice of America, a service to provide Voice of America Tibetan language programming to the people of Tibet.
(b) AMOUNT OF PROGRAMMING- For each of the fiscal years 1990 and 1991, programming broadcasts to the people of Tibet pursuant to this section shall occur for not less than two hours each day.
(c) REPORT- As soon as possible in the fiscal year 1990, the Director of the United States Information Agency shall submit to the Congress a comprehensive written report detailing the implementation of the programming provided for in this section.
(d) AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS- In addition to funds otherwise available under subsection (e), there are authorized to be appropriated to the Voice of America for purposes of carrying out this section $1,000,000 for each of the fiscal years 1990 and 1991.
(e) TRANSFER AUTHORITY- The Director of the United States Information Agency may transfer to Voice of America Tibet Service such amounts appropriated for the `Television and Film Service’ for each of the fiscal years 1990 and 1991 as exceed the amounts authorized to be appropriated for each such fiscal year for such Service.

SEC. 235. VOICE OF AMERICA’S THAILAND RADIO FACILITIES.

The Director of the United States Information Agency may enter into a contract for the construction of the Voice of America’s Thailand radio facilities for periods not in excess of 5 years or delegate such authority to the Corps of Engineers of the United States Department of the Army if there are sufficient funds to cover at least the Government’s liability for payments for the fiscal year in which the contract is awarded plus the full amount of estimated cancellation costs.

SEC. 236. VOICE OF AMERICA BROADCASTS TO THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA.

For each of the fiscal years 1990 and 1991, the Voice of America shall provide not less than 12 hours of programming each day for the People’s Republic of China.
SEC. 237. VOICE OF AMERICA EQUIPMENT ABROAD.

It is the sense of the Congress that the United States Information Agency and the Voice of America should take every step necessary to ensure that existing Voice of America equipment abroad is properly maintained and enhanced to prevent deterioration.

February 17, 2012
For Immediate Release

Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting Opposes Broadcasting Board of Governors’ Budget Proposal for FY2013

The Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB) has issued the following statement after a careful review of the Broadcasting Board of Governors’ 161-page Budget Proposal for FY2013:

“The Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting is outraged by the Broadcasting Board of Governors’ Budget for FY2013 that proposes to cut and reduce Voice of America (VOA) English and foreign language programs and positions, as well as programs and positions at Radio Free Asia (RFA) and at other U.S. government-funded international broadcasting entities managed by the BBG.

We oppose the BBG’s efforts to eviscerate core news services provided by the Voice of America and other broadcasters while using U.S.-taxpayer resources to inflate the ranks of the BBG management.

The VOA Tibetan Service was created by an Act of Congress signed into law on February 16, 1990 ‘to provide Voice of America Tibetan language programming to the people of Tibet.’ Less than one year ago the Voice of America was celebrating the importance of Tibetan radio broadcasts, marking the 20th anniversary of the first VOA Tibetan radio program.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors now wants to eliminate completely these critical radio broadcasts from their budget and leave funding only for a television program which most people in Tibet are unable to receive. This BBG action would defeat the purpose of the Federal law sponsored by Rep. Dante B. Fascell (Public Law No: 101-246) which established the VOA Tibetan Service.

We also adamantly oppose the BBG’s plans to cut the entire VOA Cantonese Service, which includes the VOA Cantonese weekly program, ‘American Report’ viewed in Cantonese‐speaking areas of China.

We expect that there will be a public outcry for these services to remain. Afghanistan, Albania, Bangladesh, Burma, Georgia, Greece, Laos, Russian Federation, Turkey and Vietnam are some of the other countries to which the BBG wants to reduce information programs. The Caucasus region, including Chechnya, and Central Asia are also targeted by the BBG for program cuts and reductions.

CUSIB also questions the BBG’s ‘over-arching strategic objective … (T)o become the world’s leading international news agency by 2016…’  This proposal also seems to be in direct conflict with Congressional intent as it will divert scarce resources from serving those who are most desperate to receive uncensored news and information.

In a memo to BBG staff, the BBG wrote: ‘We realize that some of these proposed changes will create anxiety.’  On the contrary, these BBG proposed changes will re-ignite passion of every journalist and human rights activist and incite and re-inspire them to preserve those programs that support journalism for media freedom and human rights.”

The Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB) is an independent, nongovernmental organization which supports free flow of uncensored news from the United States to countries without free media.

For further information, please contact:

The Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB)
New York, New York

Ann Noonan, co-founder and Executive Director
Tel. 646-251-6069

Ted Lipien, co-founder and Director
Tel. 415-793-1642
Email: contact@cusib.org
www.cusib.org
 

###

Text of Public Law 101-246 establishing the Voice of America Tibetan Service:

SEC. 234. VOICE OF AMERICA BROADCASTS TO TIBET.

(a) ESTABLISHMENT OF SERVICE- Not later than 90 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Director of the United States Information Agency shall establish through the Voice of America, a service to provide Voice of America Tibetan language programming to the people of Tibet.
(b) AMOUNT OF PROGRAMMING- For each of the fiscal years 1990 and 1991, programming broadcasts to the people of Tibet pursuant to this section shall occur for not less than two hours each day.
(c) REPORT- As soon as possible in the fiscal year 1990, the Director of the United States Information Agency shall submit to the Congress a comprehensive written report detailing the implementation of the programming provided for in this section.
(d) AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS- In addition to funds otherwise available under subsection (e), there are authorized to be appropriated to the Voice of America for purposes of carrying out this section $1,000,000 for each of the fiscal years 1990 and 1991.
(e) TRANSFER AUTHORITY- The Director of the United States Information Agency may transfer to Voice of America Tibet Service such amounts appropriated for the `Television and Film Service’ for each of the fiscal years 1990 and 1991 as exceed the amounts authorized to be appropriated for each such fiscal year for such Service.

SEC. 235. VOICE OF AMERICA’S THAILAND RADIO FACILITIES.

The Director of the United States Information Agency may enter into a contract for the construction of the Voice of America’s Thailand radio facilities for periods not in excess of 5 years or delegate such authority to the Corps of Engineers of the United States Department of the Army if there are sufficient funds to cover at least the Government’s liability for payments for the fiscal year in which the contract is awarded plus the full amount of estimated cancellation costs.

SEC. 236. VOICE OF AMERICA BROADCASTS TO THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA.

For each of the fiscal years 1990 and 1991, the Voice of America shall provide not less than 12 hours of programming each day for the People’s Republic of China.
SEC. 237. VOICE OF AMERICA EQUIPMENT ABROAD.

It is the sense of the Congress that the United States Information Agency and the Voice of America should take every step necessary to ensure that existing Voice of America equipment abroad is properly maintained and enhanced to prevent deterioration.

More here:
Attacks on activists latest sign that Russia is ‘morally corrupt to the core’?

Continued here:
Georgians in Gali

Link:
Eastern Europe press freedom awards 2011

FreeMediaOnline.org

On its lauch day, Voice of America Digital Frontiers has posted a link to FreeMediaOnline.org report Voice of America Russian Service LiveJournal Website Under Porn Attack with the following comment: “just in time for Digital Frontiers to launch? Yipes!”

FreeMediaOnline.org has been critical of the BBG’s decisions to terminate VOA radio and TV services and to steer funding to private Internet contractors who have made VOA websites more vulnerable to cyber attacks. Voice of America Russian Service radio broadcasts were silenced by the BBG just 12 days before the Russian military attack on Georgia in August 2008.

At the time, BBG officials claimed that VOA Russian Service will be able to reach a vast Internet audience in Russia. But the number of visitors to VOA Russian Service website has been in low thousands and its total audience reach in Russia has dramatically declined since the BBG’s decision to stop most VOA Russian-language radio and TV broadcasts.

The BBG and VOA executives ignored warnings that their Internet-only strategy undermines the potential impact of US-funded international broadcasting as a tool in defense of freedom of expression in countries like Russia and exposes the Voice of America to crippling cyber attacks. VOA’s main websites were successfully hacked and out of commission for at least two days during President Obama’s first official visit to Moscow. BBG executives were also responsible for the decision to place the VOA Russian Service Blog on the LiveJournal platform

News item from Kim Andrew Elliott on International Broadcasting website:

Digital Frontiers is a new VOA web section, with video introduction by VOA director Dan Austin, that deals with things digital, cyber, virtual, mobile, etc., including the censorship and efforts to overcome the censorship of digital content. The hard launch is today, 6 May, but as of this typing there still is no link to the site from the voanews.com home page. The short URL is www.voanews.com/digitalfrontiers.

VOA press release, 5 May 2010: “VOA Director Danforth Austin says, ‘We hope to make Digital Frontiers a global resource for those interested in online freedom and to expand this online project into broadcasts, seminars and other outreach.’ ‘Wherever you live, you have something to teach the world,’ Austin says, and ‘with ‘Digital Frontiers’ we’ll tell your story, and share it with the world.’”

Continue reading here:
IFJ endorses joint Russian and Georgian demand to end media restrictions

View original post here:
Georgia/Russia: A Year Later, Justice Still Needed

FreeMediaOnline.org, Free Media Online Blog, GovoritAmerika.us, Media analysis by Ted Lipien, August 21, 2009, San Francisco — A title of a recent report on the Voice of America Russian Service website caught my attention: “Сговор Сталина с Гитлером – «единственное средство самообороны»?” “Stalin’s Pact with Hitler – «The Only Means of Self-Defense»?”

The story posted in Russian was the VOA Russian Service translation of the English Service report from Moscow by Jonas Bernstein. When I checked the original English-language report, the title was different: “Russia Defends Stalin’s Deal with Hitler.” It was a well-written, objective and comprehensive story how the current leadership and nationalist extremists in Russia are trying to rewrite history by defending Stalin’s secret deal with Hitler that led to the start of World War II.

In the secret documents signed in Moscow by their foreign ministers, Hitler and Stalin had agreed to divide Poland and give the Soviet Union control of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and parts of Finland and Romania. Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, and the attack by the Red Army followed on September 17.

The difference between the Russian and the English title of the VOA report seemed minor but could have a significant impact on an audience in Russia and presumably was chosen with some deliberation. “Russia Defends Stalin’s Deal with Hitler” suggests a neutral perspective. “Stalin’s Pact with Hitler – «The Only Means of Self-Defense»?” — a question asked on behalf of a U.S. Government-funded broadcasting station — gives a subtle measure of legitimacy to the Kremlin’s defense of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, even if the words «The Only Means of Self-Defense» are in quotes followed by a question mark. Behind the title of the VOA story on the Russian Service website was the statement of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, issued on August 17, saying it had declassified documents showing that the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was the Soviet Union’s “only available means of self-defense.”

While the VOA report itself does not in any way support the assertion that Stalin had no other choice but to become Hitler’s accomplice in attacking Poland and occupying other countries — in fact, it quotes extensively from those who hold the opposite view — the title used by VOA’s Russian Service shows that the Kremlin’s efforts to rewrite history are achieving at least some success, and not only among nationalists in Russia.

There may also be an additional explanation why an editor in Washington chose to use a title for the audience in Russia that is both provocative and seems to cater to the prejudices of post-communists and nationalists.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a bipartisan Federal agency which manages VOA, has been pressuring the Russian Service journalists to increase their audience ratings, while at the same time it has been cutting their budget to pay for broadcasting initiatives in the Middle East and other projects awarded to private contractors. In 2008, the BBG had terminated all on-air VOA Russian-language radio programs, just 12 days before Russia launched a major military attack on the Republic of Georgia over a territorial dispute. (Later, the BBG had also eliminated on-air VOA Russian television news programs and forced the Russian Service to rely solely on the Internet for program delivery. VOA websites were completely crippled by a cyber attack for at least two full days during President Obama’s recent official visit to Russia. One short radio rebroadcast in Moscow was reinstituted by the BBG, but only after strong protests from VOA journalists and media freedom advocates.)

Blaming the BBG for editorial mistakes in how VOA journalists describe the history of World War II may seem far-fetched, but another BBG-managed broadcaster, Alhurra Television, caused a major scandal and drew anger of many members of Congress by airing extensive statements from Holocaust deniers. It was an apparent effort to make Alhurra programs more acceptable to those in the Middle East who do not believe the Holocaust is a historical fact. With its programming philosophy set by BBG members, their private sector consultants and neoconservatives in the Bush Administration, Alhurra has not managed to attract a large number of viewers. BBG policies had an equally disastrous impact on VOA’s Russian Service. Largely as a result of the BBG-imposed program cuts, VOA’s audience reach in Russia has declined 98% and is now estimated at only about 0.2% annually.

VOA Russian Service journalists are under enormous pressure to expand their Internet audience, which may also explain why they chose this particular title for the news story about the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. Never mind that it’s almost like asking whether Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union or the Holocaust were also the only means of self-defense. After all, the Nazis claimed they were. Reporting about history at the VOA Russian Service has not been easy under the BBG’s “marry the mission to the market” programming philosophy.

But the Kremlin’s Foreign Intelligence Service has some reasons to cheer that their efforts to rehabilitate Stalin are having an impact. Even if it is only a title for a news story from the U.S. taxpayer-funded Voice of America, at least they managed to raise their defense of the Soviet dictator to a legitimate question.

Voice of America report from Moscow

Russia Defends Stalin’s Deal with Hitler
By Jonas Bernstein
Moscow
20 August 2009

Sunday, August 23, marks the 70th anniversary of the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – the non-aggression treaty signed in 1939 by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The pact included a secret protocol dividing Eastern and Central Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence. Days after it was signed, first German and then Soviet forces invaded Poland.

The anniversary’s approach has sparked a debate in Europe. Western governments condemn Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin as two equally murderous variants of totalitarianism. The Russian government calls that comparison a “distortion” of history.

On August 17, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service issued a statement saying it had declassified documents showing that the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was the Soviet Union’s “only available means of self-defense.”

The spy agency’s demarche was just the latest in a series of Russian government statements that critics say appear to defend Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and justify actions he took shortly before and during World War II.

In early May, Russian Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu introduced legislation in parliament that would make it a crime to deny the Soviet victory in World War II.

Later in May, President Dmitri Medvedev issued a decree setting up a presidential commission to counter what he called attempts to “falsify history.”

At a meeting in early July, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe passed a resolution designating August 23 – the anniversary of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – as a day of remembrance for the victims of both Stalinism and Nazism.

Russian delegates to the European security body walked out of the meeting, in protest. Russia’s Foreign Ministry denounced the OSCE resolution as “an attempt to distort history with political goals,” while Russia’s parliament called it a “direct insult to the memory of millions” of Soviet soldiers who, in the words of the parliament, “gave their lives for the freedom of Europe from the fascist yoke.”

Former independent Russian parliament Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov says what he calls the “official” Russian position on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is “extremely strange.”

Ryzhkov asks why today’s Russia, which has a democratic constitution and new democratic legitimacy, should justify the division of Europe between Hitler and Stalin.

He says that this view is now included in Russian history text books and has caused “enormous moral damage” to Russia’s reputation, particularly in the countries of Eastern Europe that were the main victims of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Ryzhkov says the only explanation for the Russian leadership’s position on the issue is what he calls “sympathy for Stalin.”

Public opinion surveys suggest many ordinary Russians share at least some of their government’s views.

A poll conducted by the state-run VTsIOM agency, following the OSCE resolution condemning Stalinism and Nazism, found that 53 percent of the respondents across Russia viewed it negatively, while 11 percent viewed it positively and 21 percent viewed it neutrally. In addition, 59 percent of those polled said the resolution was aimed at undermining Russia’s authority in the world and diminishing its contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Dmitry Furman of the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Europe calls the presidential commission to counter what it deems historical falsification an “idiotic undertaking” and a “very bad idea.” He also says Stalin’s government killed as many, or even more people than Hitler’s.

But, given the suffering Russians endured after Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, Furman says it is natural that many resist equating Stalinism and Nazism.

Furman says it is “very difficult psychologically” for Russians to put what they see as their “victors” in the Great Patriotic War, as they call World War II, on the same level with the vanquished Nazis.

Voice of America Report As Posted on the Russian Service Website

Сговор Сталина с Гитлером – «единственное средство самообороны»?

В воскресенье 23 августа исполняется 70 лет со дня заключения Пакта Молотова-Риббентропа. Речь идет о договоре о ненападении, подписанном в Москве народным комиссаром иностранных дел СССР Вячеславом Молотовым и министром иностранных дел Германии Иоахимом фон Риббентропом. К пакту был приложен секретный протокол о разделе Восточной и Центральной Европы на сферы влияния Советского Союза и нацистской Германии. Через неделю германский вермахт вторгся в Польшу с запада, а две недели спустя в Польшу вторглась с востока Красная армия.

Приближение годовщины пакта вызывает острые дискуссии. Западные правительства осуждают Гитлера и Сталина как вождей двух одинаково преступных форм тоталитаризма. Москва именует подобные сравнения «искажением» истории.

17 августа нынешнего года Служба внешней разведки РФ известила о рассекречивании документов 70-летней давности, призванных доказать, что заключение Пакта Молотова-Риббентропа было для СССР «единственным средством самообороны». Критики расценивают этот демарш российского разведывательного ведомства как очередной шаг Кремля, направленный на реабилитацию Сталина и оправдание его действий накануне и во время второй мировой войны.

В мае российский министр по чрезвычайным ситуациям Сергей Шойгу внес в Госдуму законопроект об уголовном наказании за отрицание победы СССР во второй мировой войне. Чуть позже президент Дмитрий Медведев учредил комиссию по борьбе с «фальсификацией истории».

В июне Организация по безопасности и сотрудничеству в Европе приняла резолюцию, объявляющую 23 августа днем памяти жертв сталинизма и нацизма. Российская делегация в знак протеста покинула заседание ОБСЕ. МИД РФ назвал резолюцию «попыткой исказить историю в политических целях», а Дума сочла ее «прямым оскорблением памяти миллионов» советских солдат, «отдавших жизнь за освобождение Европы от фашистского ига».

Существуют, однако, и другие мнения. По словам независимого российского парламентария Владимира Рыжкова «официальная» российская позиция в оценке пакта Молотова-Риббентропа звучит «крайне странно». Почему сегодняшняя Россия, имеющая демократическую конституцию, должна защищать раздел Европы между Сталиным и Гитлером, спрашивает он?

Как указывает Рыжков, подобные суждения включены в учебники, что наносит «огромный моральный ущерб» репутации России, особенно в странах Восточной Европы, ставших главными жертвами Пакта Молотова-Риббентропа. Единственным объяснением позиции российского руководства депутат Госдумы считает возможную «симпатию к Сталину».

Опросы показывают, что многие рядовые россияне разделяют, по крайней мере, некоторые оценки Кремля. Опрос, проведенный государственным агентством ВЦИОМ после принятия резолюции ОБСЕ, выявил, что 53% респондентов относятся к ней негативно, 11% – позитивно, а 21% – нейтрально. Кроме того, 59% опрошенных выразили убеждение, что резолюция нацелена на подрыв авторитета России в мире и преуменьшение ее вклада в разгром фашистской Германии.

Сотрудник Института Европы РАН Дмитрий Фурман назвал президентскую комиссию по борьбе с фальсификацией истории «идиотским мероприятием». По его словам при Сталине было убито не меньше, а, может быть, и больше людей, чем при Гитлере. Однако, учитывая страдания, перенесенные народами Советского Союза в годы гитлеровской оккупации, многим россиянам психологически трудно поставить себя – победителей в Великой Отечественной войне – на одну доску с побежденными фашистами.

FreeMediaOnline.org, Free Media Online Blog, GovoritAmerika.us, Media analysis by Ted Lipien, August 21, 2009, San Francisco — A title of a recent report on the Voice of America Russian Service website caught my attention: “Сговор Сталина с Гитлером – «единственное средство самообороны»?” “Stalin’s Pact with Hitler – «The Only Means of Self-Defense»?”

The story posted in Russian was the VOA Russian Service translation of the English Service report from Moscow by Jonas Bernstein. When I checked the original English-language report, the title was different: “Russia Defends Stalin’s Deal with Hitler.” It was a well-written, objective and comprehensive story how the current leadership and nationalist extremists in Russia are trying to rewrite history by defending Stalin’s secret deal with Hitler that led to the start of World War II.

In the secret documents signed in Moscow by their foreign ministers, Hitler and Stalin had agreed to divide Poland and give the Soviet Union control of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and parts of Finland and Romania. Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, and the attack by the Red Army followed on September 17.

The difference between the Russian and the English title of the VOA report seemed minor but could have a significant impact on an audience in Russia and presumably was chosen with some deliberation. “Russia Defends Stalin’s Deal with Hitler” suggests a neutral perspective. “Stalin’s Pact with Hitler – «The Only Means of Self-Defense»?” — a question asked on behalf of a U.S. Government-funded broadcasting station — gives a subtle measure of legitimacy to the Kremlin’s defense of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, even if the words «The Only Means of Self-Defense» are in quotes followed by a question mark. Behind the title of the VOA story on the Russian Service website was the statement of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, issued on August 17, saying it had declassified documents showing that the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was the Soviet Union’s “only available means of self-defense.”

While the VOA report itself does not in any way support the assertion that Stalin had no other choice but to become Hitler’s accomplice in attacking Poland and occupying other countries — in fact, it quotes extensively from those who hold the opposite view — the title used by VOA’s Russian Service shows that the Kremlin’s efforts to rewrite history are achieving at least some success, and not only among nationalists in Russia.

There may also be an additional explanation why an editor in Washington chose to use a title for the audience in Russia that is both provocative and seems to cater to the prejudices of post-communists and nationalists.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a bipartisan Federal agency which manages VOA, has been pressuring the Russian Service journalists to increase their audience ratings, while at the same time it has been cutting their budget to pay for broadcasting initiatives in the Middle East and other projects awarded to private contractors. In 2008, the BBG had terminated all on-air VOA Russian-language radio programs, just 12 days before Russia launched a major military attack on the Republic of Georgia over a territorial dispute. (Later, the BBG had also eliminated on-air VOA Russian television news programs and forced the Russian Service to rely solely on the Internet for program delivery. VOA websites were completely crippled by a cyber attack for at least two full days during President Obama’s recent official visit to Russia. One short radio rebroadcast in Moscow was reinstituted by the BBG, but only after strong protests from VOA journalists and media freedom advocates.)

Blaming the BBG for editorial mistakes in how VOA journalists describe the history of World War II may seem far-fetched, but another BBG-managed broadcaster, Alhurra Television, caused a major scandal and drew anger of many members of Congress by airing extensive statements from Holocaust deniers. It was an apparent effort to make Alhurra programs more acceptable to those in the Middle East who do not believe the Holocaust is a historical fact. With its programming philosophy set by BBG members, their private sector consultants and neoconservatives in the Bush Administration, Alhurra has not managed to attract a large number of viewers. BBG policies had an equally disastrous impact on VOA’s Russian Service. Largely as a result of the BBG-imposed program cuts, VOA’s audience reach in Russia has declined 98% and is now estimated at only about 0.2% annually.

VOA Russian Service journalists are under enormous pressure to expand their Internet audience, which may also explain why they chose this particular title for the news story about the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. Never mind that it’s almost like asking whether Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union or the Holocaust were also the only means of self-defense. After all, the Nazis claimed they were. Reporting about history at the VOA Russian Service has not been easy under the BBG’s “marry the mission to the market” programming philosophy.

But the Kremlin’s Foreign Intelligence Service has some reasons to cheer that their efforts to rehabilitate Stalin are having an impact. Even if it is only a title for a news story from the U.S. taxpayer-funded Voice of America, at least they managed to raise their defense of the Soviet dictator to a legitimate question.

Voice of America report from Moscow

Russia Defends Stalin’s Deal with Hitler
By Jonas Bernstein
Moscow
20 August 2009

Sunday, August 23, marks the 70th anniversary of the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – the non-aggression treaty signed in 1939 by Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The pact included a secret protocol dividing Eastern and Central Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence. Days after it was signed, first German and then Soviet forces invaded Poland.

The anniversary’s approach has sparked a debate in Europe. Western governments condemn Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin as two equally murderous variants of totalitarianism. The Russian government calls that comparison a “distortion” of history.

On August 17, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service issued a statement saying it had declassified documents showing that the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was the Soviet Union’s “only available means of self-defense.”

The spy agency’s demarche was just the latest in a series of Russian government statements that critics say appear to defend Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and justify actions he took shortly before and during World War II.

In early May, Russian Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu introduced legislation in parliament that would make it a crime to deny the Soviet victory in World War II.

Later in May, President Dmitri Medvedev issued a decree setting up a presidential commission to counter what he called attempts to “falsify history.”

At a meeting in early July, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe passed a resolution designating August 23 – the anniversary of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – as a day of remembrance for the victims of both Stalinism and Nazism.

Russian delegates to the European security body walked out of the meeting, in protest. Russia’s Foreign Ministry denounced the OSCE resolution as “an attempt to distort history with political goals,” while Russia’s parliament called it a “direct insult to the memory of millions” of Soviet soldiers who, in the words of the parliament, “gave their lives for the freedom of Europe from the fascist yoke.”

Former independent Russian parliament Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov says what he calls the “official” Russian position on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is “extremely strange.”

Ryzhkov asks why today’s Russia, which has a democratic constitution and new democratic legitimacy, should justify the division of Europe between Hitler and Stalin.

He says that this view is now included in Russian history text books and has caused “enormous moral damage” to Russia’s reputation, particularly in the countries of Eastern Europe that were the main victims of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Ryzhkov says the only explanation for the Russian leadership’s position on the issue is what he calls “sympathy for Stalin.”

Public opinion surveys suggest many ordinary Russians share at least some of their government’s views.

A poll conducted by the state-run VTsIOM agency, following the OSCE resolution condemning Stalinism and Nazism, found that 53 percent of the respondents across Russia viewed it negatively, while 11 percent viewed it positively and 21 percent viewed it neutrally. In addition, 59 percent of those polled said the resolution was aimed at undermining Russia’s authority in the world and diminishing its contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Dmitry Furman of the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Europe calls the presidential commission to counter what it deems historical falsification an “idiotic undertaking” and a “very bad idea.” He also says Stalin’s government killed as many, or even more people than Hitler’s.

But, given the suffering Russians endured after Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, Furman says it is natural that many resist equating Stalinism and Nazism.

Furman says it is “very difficult psychologically” for Russians to put what they see as their “victors” in the Great Patriotic War, as they call World War II, on the same level with the vanquished Nazis.

Voice of America Report As Posted on the Russian Service Website

Сговор Сталина с Гитлером – «единственное средство самообороны»?

В воскресенье 23 августа исполняется 70 лет со дня заключения Пакта Молотова-Риббентропа. Речь идет о договоре о ненападении, подписанном в Москве народным комиссаром иностранных дел СССР Вячеславом Молотовым и министром иностранных дел Германии Иоахимом фон Риббентропом. К пакту был приложен секретный протокол о разделе Восточной и Центральной Европы на сферы влияния Советского Союза и нацистской Германии. Через неделю германский вермахт вторгся в Польшу с запада, а две недели спустя в Польшу вторглась с востока Красная армия.

Приближение годовщины пакта вызывает острые дискуссии. Западные правительства осуждают Гитлера и Сталина как вождей двух одинаково преступных форм тоталитаризма. Москва именует подобные сравнения «искажением» истории.

17 августа нынешнего года Служба внешней разведки РФ известила о рассекречивании документов 70-летней давности, призванных доказать, что заключение Пакта Молотова-Риббентропа было для СССР «единственным средством самообороны». Критики расценивают этот демарш российского разведывательного ведомства как очередной шаг Кремля, направленный на реабилитацию Сталина и оправдание его действий накануне и во время второй мировой войны.

В мае российский министр по чрезвычайным ситуациям Сергей Шойгу внес в Госдуму законопроект об уголовном наказании за отрицание победы СССР во второй мировой войне. Чуть позже президент Дмитрий Медведев учредил комиссию по борьбе с «фальсификацией истории».

В июне Организация по безопасности и сотрудничеству в Европе приняла резолюцию, объявляющую 23 августа днем памяти жертв сталинизма и нацизма. Российская делегация в знак протеста покинула заседание ОБСЕ. МИД РФ назвал резолюцию «попыткой исказить историю в политических целях», а Дума сочла ее «прямым оскорблением памяти миллионов» советских солдат, «отдавших жизнь за освобождение Европы от фашистского ига».

Существуют, однако, и другие мнения. По словам независимого российского парламентария Владимира Рыжкова «официальная» российская позиция в оценке пакта Молотова-Риббентропа звучит «крайне странно». Почему сегодняшняя Россия, имеющая демократическую конституцию, должна защищать раздел Европы между Сталиным и Гитлером, спрашивает он?

Как указывает Рыжков, подобные суждения включены в учебники, что наносит «огромный моральный ущерб» репутации России, особенно в странах Восточной Европы, ставших главными жертвами Пакта Молотова-Риббентропа. Единственным объяснением позиции российского руководства депутат Госдумы считает возможную «симпатию к Сталину».

Опросы показывают, что многие рядовые россияне разделяют, по крайней мере, некоторые оценки Кремля. Опрос, проведенный государственным агентством ВЦИОМ после принятия резолюции ОБСЕ, выявил, что 53% респондентов относятся к ней негативно, 11% – позитивно, а 21% – нейтрально. Кроме того, 59% опрошенных выразили убеждение, что резолюция нацелена на подрыв авторитета России в мире и преуменьшение ее вклада в разгром фашистской Германии.

Сотрудник Института Европы РАН Дмитрий Фурман назвал президентскую комиссию по борьбе с фальсификацией истории «идиотским мероприятием». По его словам при Сталине было убито не меньше, а, может быть, и больше людей, чем при Гитлере. Однако, учитывая страдания, перенесенные народами Советского Союза в годы гитлеровской оккупации, многим россиянам психологически трудно поставить себя – победителей в Великой Отечественной войне – на одну доску с побежденными фашистами.

FreeMediaOnline.org, Free Media Online Blog, GovoritAmerika.us, Commentary by Ted Lipien, August 18, 2009, San Francisco — Ever since the United States Information Agency (USIA) was dismantled in a foolish post-Cold War cost-cutting move, the U.S. State Department and American diplomats abroad have not been able to present a coherent message to foreign audiences quickly and effectively. The latest example is the lame U.S. public response to the terrorist attack in Ingushetia — no phone call from President Obama to President Medvedev, just a short written statement which was not easily available. There was no statement from Secretary Clinton.

Even though the lack of a proper U.S. response was not deliberate and can be blamed on the distraction with the health care reform and just plain bureaucratic incompetence, the Russian leaders and the Russian public have a reason to wonder how badly the Obama Administration wants Russia’s support in combating terrorism and restraining Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Americans, on the other hand, should be concerned how professional and how effective is America’s public diplomacy, which aims to inform and influence public opinion abroad to make it more sympathetic to U.S. interests. The ultimate aim is to make America safer by strengthening and promoting security and democracy worldwide. Yet, few within the government bureaucracy in Washington seem to grasp that ineffective public diplomacy threatens America’s safety.

Prior to 1999, a cadre of foreign service officers assigned to USIA in Washington and abroad had been responsible for crafting and coordinating U.S. responses to major international and domestic news events. Overall, they did a good job in helping to win the Cold War.

During that period USIA operated separately of the State Department but was integrated into the foreign policy establishment in Washington and at U.S. embassies abroad. USIA officers knew their foreign audiences, specialized in working with local media, and made sure that whatever message the U.S. was trying to send was presented quickly and credibly using the most modern and efficient channels of communication available at the time.

Many of these skills have now been lost. The case in point is the U.S. reaction to the latest terrorist attack in Russia that killed and wounded many innocent civilians. While the White House did issue a short statement of condolences from President Obama, the statement was not posted immediately on the White House or the State Department websites, where it would have been accessible to Russian media and individual web users. There was no official photograph or video to accompany the statement. It was not translated into Russian except in a brief news item posted with some delay on the Voice of America (VOA) Russian Service website. But after recent program cuts by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which manages U.S. international broadcasting, VOA’s estimated annual reach in Russia through the Internet is only about 0.2%.

VOA website is better designed and more frequently updated than the State Department websites but is still far from perfect. Another U.S.-funded broadcaster, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) has a superior Russian news website — more in terms of design than content — but it does not specialize in American news and faces other problems, such as American management’s discrimination against foreign-born journalists and intimidation of its reporters in Russia by the Kremlin’s secret police.

There was no mention Monday of the terrorist attack or the U.S. reaction to it on the official State Department Blog, the U.S. Embassy Moscow website or the Open America website created by the Embassy in Moscow to communicate with the Russian public. There was also nothing posted about this tragic incident on the Russian-language America.gov website edited in Washington by the State Department’s public diplomacy team. This website is notoriously late in posting news-related U.S. government statements and articles. Not that the web team at the White House has done a much better job as far as Russia is concerned. It took the White House 10 days to post a video from President Obama’s trip to Russia.

The video, produced in the style of early Cold War propaganda newsreels, was already overtaken by other events when it was posted ten days after President Obama’s visit, and there was no Russian translation to accompany the images. It was not posted on the U.S. Embassy Moscow website.

Evgeny Morozov, originally from Belarus, who is a fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York, has some very interesting insights about new media and public diplomacy. He wrote in Foreign Policy that “watching American diplomats embrace new media for the purposes of public diplomacy has been a very awkward experience (not as painful as watching my 82-year-old grandpa learn how to use Skype, but at times it has come pretty close). By shifting their outreach campaigns to Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, the government may be trying to do the impossible, i.e. to plant carefully worded and controlled messages on platforms that sprang up precisely to avoid the kind of influence that the State Department seeks to exert via them.”

His last point is certainly worth pondering. The U.S. Ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle, a career diplomat who speaks fluent Russian, has made good attempts to communicate directly with the Russian people through radio and television interviews, but the Kremlin controls access to those television and radio networks which enjoy the highest ratings because of their nation-wide coverage. Ambassador Beyrle also has his own blog, in which he makes use of video and his Russian-language skills. Compared to the official State Department Blog, which has little useful information and even less analysis, in addition to relying heavily on AP images — which are not in public domain — his blog is far more informative and focused.

Whether or not Evgeny Morozov is right that the benefits of the Internet for official public diplomacy are to some degree utopian, U.S. taxpayers deserve that their money used for their government’s efforts of communicating with foreign audiences be wisely spent. Even if U.S. diplomats are ill-equipped to take advantage of the new social media, they can still use the Internet to present and explain foreign policy questions.

But U.S. Embassy and State Department websites and blogs are not only poorly designed, they are also infrequently updated and rarely offer public domain photographs and other useful materials. Foreign journalists cannot rely on them for timely and objective information, in-depth analysis, and free resources, such as ready-for-posting photo images and broadcast quality video and audio.

They can also no longer rely for the same on the Voice of America. The Broadcasting Board of Governors, which was created when USIA was dismantled, eliminated VOA Russian-language radio broadcasts just 12 days before the Russian military attack on Georgia last summer. The BBG denied VOA resources to serve as a multimedia source of comprehensive information about U.S-Russian relations and American society and did not protect the VOA website from cyber attacks. During President Obama’s official visit to Moscow, the VOA website was out of commission for at least two full days.

Instead of demanding that the Russian security services stop threatening radio and TV stations using VOA news programs and that the Russian authorities should treat VOA the same way the Russian state broadcasters Radio Russia and Russia Today TV are treated in the U.S., where they are free to place their programs on cable and individual stations, the BBG responded to the secret police intimidation by eliminating on-air VOA radio and TV broadcasts. An NGO website, GovoritAmerika.us, launched in 2008, edited by volunteers and not connected with the U.S. government, offers now the only one-source access with direct links to both U.S. government and non-government U.S.-Russia-related news materials, but the website receives no public funding, which prevents it from expanding its coverage.

Even with currently available resources, the Obama Administration could have done a much better job in communicating its sympathy and support for the Russian people in the aftermath of the latest deadly terrorist attack if it had mobilized its public diplomacy team. If the Obama White House and the State Department had decided on their public diplomacy message and given a proper briefing for Vice President Biden, it might have helped him avoid making comments in the Wall Street Journal interview suggesting that Russia is a second-rate country — comments that the Russians found highly insulting, and rightly so — while at the same time the Russian leadership has taken a number of highly provocative steps, vis-a-vis the U.S. and Russia’s nearest neighbors, which suggest that their interest in President Obama’s call for a “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations is not nearly as strong as his. (Vice President Biden’s staff has been much better in updating White House website stories and posting photographs on his trips abroad than President Obama’s public affairs team, which shows the importance of foreign policy and public diplomacy experience some of them acquired while working in the U.S. Senate.)

Not all of Vice President Biden’s comments were ill-advised from the public diplomacy perspective. Robert Amsterdam, an international lawyer who represents Russian businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an imprisoned political foe of Prime Minister Putin, wrote in a recent article in the Huffington Post that by “creating manageable confrontations, especially with Europe, the United States, and the former Soviet states, the Kremlin is attempting to govern outwardly, diminishing pressures for greater accountability in their domestic shortcomings, and helping to stir up nationalism and support for the regime.” Under these circumstances, communicating with the Kremlin and the Russian public requires a great deal of sophistication.

All of this calls for a quick overhaul of U.S. public diplomacy. The State Department has a new public diplomacy chief, Under Secretary Judith McHale — her predecessor, James K. Glassman, appointed by the Bush White House, terminated VOA Russian radio and TV in his previous position as the BBG chairman — but there still is no Obama Administration plan and no structure to that would help the U.S. to respond with a coherent and well-delivered message to such developments as the recent terrorist attack in Russia, the Kremlin’s threats against Georgia and Ukraine, or the Russian media’s reaction to Vice President Biden’s Wall Street Journal interview.

Concerned by these shortcomings, several members of Congress, including Senator Richard Lugar (R-Indiana), are trying to revive support and funding for professionally conducted U.S. public diplomacy. Senator Lugar introduced S. Res. 49 on February 13, 2009, expressing the sense of the Senate regarding the importance of public diplomacy. He also wrote an oped for ForeignPolicy.com on this topic. Another U.S. Senator, Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), has called for abolishing the Broadcasting Board of Governors. He introduced legislation that would establish the National Center for Strategic Communications, an agency similar to the now defunct U.S. Information Agency. Senator Patrick Leahy (D -Vermont) has tried to stop the BBG from eliminating U.S. broadcasts in foreign languages but his efforts have been ignored by most of the Board members and their executive staff. Only one BBG member, Blanquita Walsh Cullum — the only journalist serving on the Board — opposed cuts in U.S.-funded broadcasting to Russia and other media-at-risk countries.

Whether these and other calls for reforming U.S. public diplomacy and international broadcasting will be answered and result in meaningful legislative changes will depend on the cooperation from the Obama White House. New media, international broadcasting, and public diplomacy cannot solve all the problems the U.S. is facing abroad, but a little bit of expertise in these areas and good management can be very helpful. Otherwise, pro-democracy activists and authoritarian regimes will continue to wonder what the Obama Administration wants and what it can do. It would help if the Administration could agree on what that message should be and how it should be delivered.

The Russians may conveniently assume that Vice President Biden’s unfortunate comments about their country’s second-rate status were deliberate, and may think the same about the non-response in Washington to the terrorist attack in Ingushetia. But as someone who has observed the U.S. foreign policy establishment first-hand, I can say that most of it can be blamed on carelessness, incompetence, and the simple fact that most of the State Department and U.S. diplomats based abroad are on vacation in August. But in addition to that, the structural problems of U.S. public diplomacy are real and demand immediate attention from the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress.

‘I am not happy . . . but it is good that I get famous,’ Georgian Cyxymu says of the onslaught that brought down Twitter and crippled Facebook and other online services.

The Los Angeles Times and other American newspapers reported that the massive cyber attack last week, seen by security experts as aimed at silencing a single blogger in the country of Georgia, instead made him a global celebrity.

LAT reporter David Colker wrote that “Cyxymu, as he is known on his mostly anti-Russia blog, has been the subject of news reports worldwide ever since he was identified as the target of the attack that took down Twitter for hours and crippled other popular online services.” more from LAT

A comment from Ted Lipien, president of FreeMediaOnline.org, a San Francisco-based media freedom NGO:

This LAT report sheds a new light on the decision made by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) to end all on-air Voice of America (VOA) Russian radio and television broadcasts and its planned termination of VOA Georgian radio broadcasts. Despite protests from members of Congress and human rights and media freedom organizations, the BBG in fact terminated Russian-language VOA radio broadcasts at the end of July 2008, only 12 days before Russian troops attacked Georgia. (BBG officials did not have enough time before the outbreak of the Russian-Georgian war to end VOA radio to Georgia, but they still stopped on-air VOA television broadcasts to Russia shortly after the war started.)

Internal BBG documents described the Internet as the optimium program delivery platform for Russia. During President Obama’s historic trip to Russia earlier this summer, the entire Voice of America website was completely crippled for at least two full days by another cyber attack. Instead of using new media and Web 2.0 applications to enhance a sensible and cost-effective multimedia program delivery strategy, the BBG granted the Russian security services full victory in their efforts to limit the access of Western broadcasters to a mass media audience in Russia. In the meantime, Russian state broadcasters, such as Russia Today TV, continued to expand their presence in the American media market without any restrictions.

After Barack Obama’s electoral victory, the Voice of America Russian Service no longer had the necessary technical and human resources to try to reclaim its role as a major on-air radio and television broadcaster capable of conducting interactive live discussion programs with state or independent broadcasters in Russia. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), also managed by the BBG, was allowed to keep its Russian-language radio broadcasts, but RFE/RL does not specialize in American news and most of its Russian staff is based in Russia within easy reach of the secret police operatives assigned to keep an eye on, and if necessary, to intimidate independent journalists.

The current annual audience reach for VOA in Russia is estimated at only 0.2%, which represents a recent 98% decline, largely as a result of the BBG’s actions. The Broadcasting Board of Governors is a bipartisan body which manages U.S. international broadcasting. According to FreeMediaOnline.org sources, only one BBG member voted against ending on-air VOA radio and television programs to Russia.

[Russia] uses overt and covert means of economic warfare, ranging from energy blockades and politically motivated investments to bribery and media manipulation in order to advance its interests and to challenge the transatlantic orientation of Central and Eastern Europe.

An Open Letter to the Obama Administration from Central and Eastern Europe

We have written this letter because, as Central and Eastern European (CEE) intellectuals and former policymakers, we care deeply about the future of the transatlantic relationship as well as the future quality of relations between the United States and the countries of our region. We write in our personal capacity as individuals who are friends and allies of the United States as well as committed Europeans.

Our nations are deeply indebted to the United States. Many of us know firsthand how important your support for our freedom and independence was during the dark Cold War years. U.S. engagement and support was essential for the success of our democratic transitions after the Iron Curtain fell twenty years ago. Without Washington’s vision and leadership, it is doubtful that we would be in NATO and even the EU today.

We have worked to reciprocate and make this relationship a two-way street. We are Atlanticist voices within NATO and the EU. Our nations have been engaged alongside the United States in the Balkans, Iraq, and today in Afghanistan. While our contribution may at times seem modest compared to your own, it is significant when measured as a percentage of our population and GDP. Having benefited from your support for liberal democracy and liberal values in the past, we have been among your strongest supporters when it comes to promoting democracy and human rights around the world.

Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, however, we see that Central and Eastern European countries are no longer at the heart of American foreign policy. As the new Obama Administration sets its foreign-policy priorities, our region is one part of the world that Americans have largely stopped worrying about. Indeed, at times we have the impression that U.S. policy was so successful that many American officials have now concluded that our region is fixed once and for all and that they could “check the box” and move on to other more pressing strategic issues. Relations have been so close that many on both sides assume that the region’s transatlantic orientation, as well as its stability and prosperity, would last forever.

That view is premature. All is not well either in our region or in the transatlantic relationship. Central and Eastern Europe is at a political crossroads and today there is a growing sense of nervousness in the region. The global economic crisis is impacting on our region and, as elsewhere, runs the risk that our societies will look inward and be less engaged with the outside world. At the same time, storm clouds are starting to gather on the foreign policy horizon. Like you, we await the results of the EU Commission’s investigation on the origins of the Russo-Georgian war. But the political impact of that war on the region has already been felt. Many countries were deeply disturbed to see the Atlantic alliance stand by as Russia violated the core principles of the Helsinki Final Act, the Charter of Paris, and the territorial integrity of a country that was a member of NATO’s Partnership for Peace and the Euroatlantic Partnership Council -all in the name of defending a sphere of influence on its borders.

Despite the efforts and significant contribution of the new members, NATO today seems weaker than when we joined. In many of our countries it is perceived as less and less relevant – and we feel it. Although we are full members, people question whether NATO would be willing and able to come to our defense in some future crises. Europe’s dependence on Russian energy also creates concern about the cohesion of the Alliance. President Obama’s remark at the recent NATO summit on the need to provide credible defense plans for all Alliance members was welcome, but not sufficient to allay fears about the Alliance´s defense readiness. Our ability to continue to sustain public support at home for our contributions to Alliance missions abroad also depends on us being able to show that our own security concerns are being addressed in NATO and close cooperation with the United States

We must also recognize that America’s popularity and influence have fallen in many of our countries as well. Public opinions polls, including the German Marshall Fund’s own Transatlantic Trends survey, show that our region has not been immune to the wave of criticism and anti-Americanism that has swept Europe in recent years and which led to a collapse in sympathy and support for the United States during the Bush years. Some leaders in the region have paid a political price for their support of the unpopular war in Iraq. In the future they may be more careful in taking political risks to support the United States. We believe that the onset of a new Administration has created a new opening to reverse this trend but it will take time and work on both sides to make up for what we have lost.

In many ways the EU has become the major factor and institution in our lives. To many people it seems more relevant and important today than the link to the United States. To some degree it is a logical outcome of the integration of Central and Eastern Europe into the EU. Our leaders and officials spend much more time in EU meetings than in consultations with Washington, where they often struggle to attract attention or make our voices heard. The region’s deeper integration in the EU is of course welcome and should not necessarily lead to a weakening of the transatlantic relationship. The hope was that integration of Central and Eastern Europe into the EU would actually strengthen the strategic cooperation between Europe and America.

However, there is a danger that instead of being a pro-Atlantic voice in the EU, support for a more global partnership with Washington in the region might wane over time. The region does not have the tradition of assuming a more global role. Some items on the transatlantic agenda, such as climate change, do not resonate in the Central and Eastern European publics to the same extent as they do in Western Europe.

Leadership change is also coming in Central and Eastern Europe. Next to those, there are fewer and fewer leaders who emerged from the revolutions of 1989 who experienced Washington’s key role in securing our democratic transition and anchoring our countries in NATO and EU. A new generation of leaders is emerging who do not have these memories and follow a more “realistic” policy. At the same time, the former Communist elites, whose insistence on political and economic power significantly contributed to the crises in many CEE countries, gradually disappear from the political scene. The current political and economic turmoil and the fallout from the global economic crisis provide additional opportunities for the forces of nationalism, extremism, populism, and anti-Semitism across the continent but also in some our countries.

This means that the United States is likely to lose many of its traditional interlocutors in the region. The new elites replacing them may not share the idealism – or have the same relationship to the United States – as the generation who led the democratic transition. They may be more calculating in their support of the United States as well as more parochial in their world view. And in Washington a similar transition is taking place as many of the leaders and personalities we have worked with and relied on are also leaving politics.

And then there is the issue of how to deal with Russia. Our hopes that relations with Russia would improve and that Moscow would finally fully accept our complete sovereignty and independence after joining NATO and the EU have not been fulfilled. Instead, Russia is back as a revisionist power pursuing a 19th-century agenda with 21st-century tactics and methods. At a global level, Russia has become, on most issues, a status-quo power. But at a regional level and vis-a-vis our nations, it increasingly acts as a revisionist one. It challenges our claims to our own historical experiences. It asserts a privileged position in determining our security choices. It uses overt and covert means of economic warfare, ranging from energy blockades and politically motivated investments to bribery and media manipulation in order to advance its interests and to challenge the transatlantic orientation of Central and Eastern Europe.

We welcome the “reset” of the American-Russian relations. As the countries living closest to Russia, obviously nobody has a greater interest in the development of the democracy in Russia and better relations between Moscow and the West than we do. But there is also nervousness in our capitals. We want to ensure that too narrow an understanding of Western interests does not lead to the wrong concessions to Russia. Today the concern is, for example, that the United States and the major European powers might embrace the Medvedev plan for a “Concert of Powers” to replace the continent’s existing, value-based security structure. The danger is that Russia’s creeping intimidation and influence-peddling in the region could over time lead to a de facto neutralization of the region. There are differing views within the region when it comes to Moscow’s new policies. But there is a shared view that the full engagement of the United States is needed.

Many in the region are looking with hope to the Obama Administration to restore the Atlantic relationship as a moral compass for their domestic as well as foreign policies. A strong commitment to common liberal democratic values is essential to our countries. We know from our own historical experience the difference between when the United States stood up for its liberal democratic values and when it did not. Our region suffered when the United States succumbed to “realism” at Yalta. And it benefited when the United States used its power to fight for principle. That was critical during the Cold War and in opening the doors of NATO. Had a “realist” view prevailed in the early 1990s, we would not be in NATO today and the idea of a Europe whole, free, and at peace would be a distant dream.

We understand the heavy demands on your Administration and on U.S. foreign policy. It is not our intent to add to the list of problems you face. Rather, we want to help by being strong Atlanticist allies in a U.S.-European partnership that is a powerful force for good around the world. But we are not certain where our region will be in five or ten years time given the domestic and foreign policy uncertainties we face. We need to take the right steps now to ensure the strong relationship between the United States and Central and Eastern Europe over the past twenty years will endure.

We believe this is a time both the United States and Europe need to reinvest in the transatlantic relationship. We also believe this is a time when the United States and Central and Eastern Europe must reconnect around a new and forward-looking agenda. While recognizing what has been achieved in the twenty years since the fall of the Iron Curtain, it is time to set a new agenda for close cooperation for the next twenty years across the Atlantic.

Therefore, we propose the following steps:

First, we are convinced that America needs Europe and that Europe needs the United States as much today as in the past. The United States should reaffirm its vocation as a European power and make clear that it plans to stay fully engaged on the continent even while it faces the pressing challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the wider Middle East, and Asia. For our part we must work at home in our own countries and in Europe more generally to convince our leaders and societies to adopt a more global perspective and be prepared to shoulder more responsibility in partnership with the United States.

Second, we need a renaissance of NATO as the most important security link between the United States and Europe. It is the only credible hard power security guarantee we have. NATO must reconfirm its core function of collective defense even while we adapt to the new threats of the 21st century. A key factor in our ability to participate in NATO’s expeditionary missions overseas is the belief that we are secure at home. We must therefore correct some self-inflicted wounds from the past. It was a mistake not to commence with proper Article 5 defense planning for new members after NATO was enlarged. NATO needs to make the Alliance’s commitments credible and provide strategic reassurance to all members. This should include contingency planning, prepositioning of forces, equipment, and supplies for reinforcement in our region in case of crisis as originally envisioned in the NATO-Russia Founding Act.

We should also re-think the working of the NATO-Russia Council and return to the practice where NATO member countries enter into dialogue with Moscow with a coordinated position. When it comes to Russia, our experience has been that a more determined and principled policy toward Moscow will not only strengthen the West’s security but will ultimately lead Moscow to follow a more cooperative policy as well. Furthermore, the more secure we feel inside NATO, the easier it will also be for our countries to reach out to engage Moscow on issues of common interest. That is the dual track approach we need and which should be reflected in the new NATO strategic concept.

Third, the thorniest issue may well be America’s planned missile-defense installations. Here too, there are different views in the region, including among our publics which are divided. Regardless of the military merits of this scheme and what Washington eventually decides to do, the issue has nevertheless also become — at least in some countries — a symbol of America’s credibility and commitment to the region. How it is handled could have a significant impact on their future transatlantic orientation. The small number of missiles involved cannot be a threat to Russia’s strategic capabilities, and the Kremlin knows this. We should decide the future of the program as allies and based on the strategic plusses and minuses of the different technical and political configurations. The Alliance should not allow the issue to be determined by unfounded Russian opposition. Abandoning the program entirely or involving Russia too deeply in it without consulting Poland or the Czech Republic can undermine the credibility of the United States across the whole region.

Fourth, we know that NATO alone is not enough. We also want and need more Europe and a better and more strategic U.S.-EU relationship as well. Increasingly our foreign policies are carried out through the European Union – and we support that. We also want a common European foreign and defense policy that is open to close cooperation with the United States. We are the advocates of such a line in the EU. But we need the United States to rethink its attitude toward the EU and engage it much more seriously as a strategic partner. We need to bring NATO and the EU closer together and make them work in tandem. We need common NATO and EU strategies not only toward Russia but on a range of other new strategic challenges.

Fifth is energy security. The threat to energy supplies can exert an immediate influence on our nations’ political sovereignty also as allies contributing to common decisions in NATO. That is why it must also become a transatlantic priority. Although most of the responsibility for energy security lies within the realm of the EU, the United States also has a role to play. Absent American support, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline would never have been built. Energy security must become an integral part of U.S.-European strategic cooperation. Central and Eastern European countries should lobby harder (and with more unity) inside Europe for diversification of the energy mix, suppliers, and transit routes, as well as for tough legal scrutiny of Russia’s abuse of its monopoly and cartel-like power inside the EU. But American political support on this will play a crucial role. Similarly, the United States can play an important role in solidifying further its support for the Nabucco pipeline, particularly in using its security relationship with the main transit country, Turkey, as well as the North-South interconnector of Central Europe and LNG terminals in our region.

Sixth, we must not neglect the human factor. Our next generations need to get to know each other, too. We have to cherish and protect the multitude of educational, professional, and other networks and friendships that underpin our friendship and alliance. The U.S. visa regime remains an obstacle in this regard. It is absurd that Poland and Romania — arguably the two biggest and most pro-American states in the CEE region, which are making substantial contributions in Iraq and Afghanistan — have not yet been brought into the visa waiver program. It is incomprehensible that a critic like the French anti-globalization activist Jose Bove does not require a visa for the United States but former Solidarity activist and Nobel Peace prizewinner Lech Walesa does. This issue will be resolved only if it is made a political priority by the President of the United States.

The steps we made together since 1989 are not minor in history. The common successes are the proper foundation for the transatlantic renaissance we need today. This is why we believe that we should also consider the creation of a Legacy Fellowship for young leaders. Twenty years have passed since the revolutions of 1989. That is a whole generation. We need a new generation to renew the transatlantic partnership. A new program should be launched to identify those young leaders on both sides of the Atlantic who can carry forward the transatlantic project we have spent the last two decades building in Central and Eastern Europe.

In conclusion, the onset of a new Administration in the United States has raised great hopes in our countries for a transatlantic renewal. It is an opportunity we dare not miss. We, the authors of this letter, know firsthand how important the relationship with the United States has been. In the 1990s, a large part of getting Europe right was about getting Central and Eastern Europe right. The engagement of the United States was critical to locking in peace and stability from the Baltics to the Black Sea. Today the goal must be to keep Central and Eastern Europe right as a stable, activist, and Atlanticist part of our broader community.

That is the key to our success in bringing about the renaissance in the Alliance the Obama Administration has committed itself to work for and which we support. That will require both sides recommitting to and investing in this relationship. But if we do it right, the pay off down the road can be very real. By taking the right steps now, we can put it on new and solid footing for the future.

Valdas Adamkus Former President of the Republic of Lithuania
Martin Butora Former Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to the United States
Emil Constantinescu Former President of the Republic of Romania
Pavol Demes Former Minister of International Relations and Advisor to the President, Slovak Republic
Lubos Dobrovsky Former Defense Minister of the Czech Republic, former Ambassador to Russia
Matyas Eorsi Former Secretary of State of the Hungarian MFA
Istvan Gyarmati Ambassador, President of the International Centre for Democratic Transition in Budapest
Vaclav Havel Former President of the Czech Republic
Rastislav Kacer Former Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to the United States
Sandra Kalniete Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Latvia
Karel Schwarzenberg Former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Czech Republic
Michal Kovac Former President of the Slovak Republic
Ivan Krastev Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria
Alexander Kwasniewski Former President of the Republic of Poland
Mart Laar Former Prime Minister of Estonia
Kadri Liik Director of the International Centre for Defense Studies in Tallinn, Estonia
Janos Martonyi Former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hungary
Janusz Onyszkiewicz Former Vice-president of the European Parliament, former Defense Minister, Poland
Adam Rotfeld Former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Poland
Alexandr Vondra Former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister, Czech Republic
Vaira Vike-Freiberga Former President of the Republic Latvia
Lech Walesa Former President of the Republic of Poland

With VOA Left Voiceless, Obama Fails to Reach Russian Public

President Obama’s foreign policy thus far has been marked by an emphasis on public diplomacy. As a result, successfully engaging foreign publics has become a top priority of his administration. The President himself has taken an active role in this effort, delivering several high-profile speeches to audiences around the world. His July 7th oration in Moscow, which focused on the importance of media freedom and human rights, was one such occasion.

But Obama’s message failed to reach his intended audience- the Russian public. On Russian television, which is tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Obama’s remarks were largely ignored, receiving hardly any air-time.

To make matters worse, a crippling cyber-attack had rendered the international websites of Voice of America (VOA) useless. As a result, VOA, the federally-funded broadcast service congressionally mandated to provide objective, accurate news to foreign audiences, was utterly incapable of offering the Russian public unbiased coverage of the President’s speech. VOA’s loss of web-based capabilities might have been less damaging if not for the fact that its oversight, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, decided in 2008 to completely do away with VOA’s Russian language radio and television broadcasts into the country.

VOA has demonstrated its ability to circumvent anti-American state-media and deliver objective news programming, most notably in Iran following the June 12th election. However, the internet-only approach in Russia, and the inability to provide sufficient security for this service, allowed Kremlin-controlled media to undermine Obama’s attempt to connect with the Russian public. Unless the Obama Administration takes the necessary steps to ensure the vitality of VOA and similar programs, our nation’s outreach to foreign publics will continue to be rebuffed by unreceptive governments.
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Highlights from the President’s Trip to Russia

Posted by Katherine Brandon

Get a behind-the-scenes look at the highlights of the President’s trip to Moscow earlier this month. See images of his trip, and listen to the President speak at the New Economic School. You can read the whole speech here.

END OF WHITE HOUSE MATERIAL

White House Video From Russia Released 10 Days Late, Without Russian Translation, And A Message Overtaken By Events

Pro-democracy intellectuals in Russia and political leaders from the former Soviet block countries, who had lived under communism and were exposed to communist propaganda, would probably see the White House video as dangerously naive.

FreeMediaOnline.org, Free Media Online Blog, GovoritAmerika.us, Commentary by Ted Lipien, July 17, 2009, San Francisco — The White House posted on its website today carefully produced video highlights from the President’s visit to Russia, exactly ten days after Barack Obama delivered a major speech on the future of U.S.-Russian relations. The address to the graduates of the New Economic School, which Natalia Bubnova, a public affairs specialist at the Carnegie Center in Moscow, described as a “silent speech,” was not carried live by the Kremlin-controlled national television networks and received relatively little media coverage in Russia, where journalists are increasingly threatened by the Kremlin’s secret police and the local mafia of business and government leaders. Many Russian journalists have been murdered by unknown assailants, and the few remaining semi-independent media outlets practice self-censorship to protect themselves from official reprisals.

But if the White House video was designed to inform and inspire the Russian public about the President’s commitment to a new start in U.S.-Russian relations, it was not only released ten days too late to be of any news value to journalists and media consumers. It also came without a Russian translation, and its overly optimistic message presented in the style of old Soviet era propaganda films would have been inappropriate for the skeptical Russian audience. Barack Obama would have done much better in communicating his message of change to the Russian people if the White House handlers had arranged during his visit for a series of extensive live interviews with audience participation on national TV networks in Russia and had insisted that his speech also be carried live on the same television channels, which are controlled by the Kremlin. When it comes to overcoming media control in Russia, some of the Cold War diplomatic tactics are still needed.

The limited media outreach during the Moscow visit was in sharp contrast with the White House public relations effort to publicize the President’s earlier speech in Cairo, Egypt, in which Barack Obama called for a new beginning in America’s relationship with Muslim communities around the world. The Cairo speech was released by the White House in Arabic and other foreign languages, both in text and in video, as soon as it was delivered. The media blitz after the Cairo speech seems to have been, however, a one-time effort, which the Obama Administration seems not capable of sustaining due to a severe shortage of experienced public diplomacy and media specialists.

Other than the lack of proper structures and resources, the public diplomacy experts at the White House and the State Department also seem to have some difficulty realizing that their focus should be on providing timely and objective information in foreign languages to local media outlets and media consumers rather than taking full ten days to produce a short upbeat video, as the one released today, that looks and sounds much more like a government-generated propaganda film of World War II and Cold War vintage. Had the video been released immediately after the speech, Russian journalists may have been able at least to take advantage of its outstanding visual composition and provide an appropriate text and translation. Ten days later, in its English-language version, it is largely unusable. Its release now is also counterproductive, as its core message has been overtaken by recent events in Russia and the region.

Normally, the Voice of America (VOA), the U.S. government-funded international broadcaster, would have carried live a major presidential speech in Moscow and provided a Russian translation. VOA would have also offered live commentaries by independent U.S. experts. These would be broadcast on satellite radio and television from VOA studios in Washington, D.C. Some of the programs might have also been replayed live or broadcast later on those stations in Russia that would still be willing to defy the Russian secret police and maintain an affiliate relationship with VOA. The VOA Russian broadcast would have also been transmitted on short-wave radio frequencies, which cover great distances and are not as easy to jam as a single website, although they attract a very limited number of listeners unless there is a major crisis and a government blockade or heavy censorship of all other media.

Unfortunately, the Federal agency in charge of the Voice of America, the bipartisan Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), terminated in 2008 all live VOA Russian-language radio and television programs, both high-tech satellite and low-tech short-wave, just 12 days before Russia’s sudden military attack on the Republic of Georgia over a territorial dispute. Since then, the BBG has refused urgent pleas from VOA journalists to resume these broadcasts as a response to the last summer’s Russian-Georgian war and the still deteriorating human rights and media situation in Russia.

The Voice of America Russian Service was left only with a poorly-designed and unprotected website and a 30 minute Monday through Friday pre-recorded radio segment on a weak AM station in Moscow, which was restored only after protests from media freedom advocates over a period of many months. To make things much worse, during Barack Obama’s historic first presidential visit to Russia, the Voice of America website went blank for at least two full days as a result of a suspected North Korean cyber attack. The website was back online after President Obama left Russia, but even then the audio program on the web was not updated for over a week. The BBG/VOA web team was not aware of the problem for several days. Instead of a recording of President Obama’s speech with a Russian translation, visitors to the VOA website were offered a week-old audio newscast. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), another U.S. taxpayer-funded international broadcaster also managed by the BBG, did cover the Obama visit, but RFE/RL is based in Prague, the Czech Republic, and in Moscow, and its Russian speaking reporters do not specialize in analyzing U.S. foreign policy from an American perspective. RFE/RL reporters based in Russia are also vulnerable to threats from the Russian secret police.

Even if the Voice of America website were available during President Obama’s visit to Russia, it would not have included full texts in Russian, video, and audio of all the presidential speeches delivered in Moscow. BBG officials responsible for terminating live VOA Russian radio and TV programs had also directed the Russian Service to focus their energies on producing short and entertaining news stories for the web in order to drive more visitors to the VOA website.

English and Russian texts of most of President Obama’s speeches in Moscow — but not audio or video files — were posted rather quickly on the State Department’s news and information website, America.gov, and on the website of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Summaries of President Obama’s speeches and links to full texts were also available on GovoritAmerika.us, a Russian-language news analysis website created by volunteers associated with the San Francisco-based media freedom nonprofit FreeMediaOnline.org. Some of them are former VOA journalists who are concerned about media censorship in Russia and the restrictions imposed by the BBG on the Voice of America Russian broadcasts.

One of the drawbacks of waiting ten days to produce a video from a presidential trip is that new events can quickly overtake the video’s message. The same is true for producing a video that is much more oriented toward promoting a particular propaganda theme rather than offering factual information in a timely manner.

The White House video was heavily focused on hailing a new beginning in the bilateral relationship between Washington and Moscow and making a clean break with the Cold War models. Unfortunately for the public relations specialists who produced it, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev directly challenged their theme and President Obama when he visited South Ossetia earlier this week and said that Moscow would continue to back the breakaway Georgian region, which Russia recognized as independent despite strong objections from the United States and most other nations. Then, as a further sign that the situation in Russia was not moving in the direction desired by the Obama Administration, a respected human rights activist, Natalya Estemirova, was abducted and brutally murdered in Chechnya. Both the U.S. State Department spokesman and the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle, have condemned the murder. The White House has also condemned the killing, calling it “especially shocking” that it happened a week after President Barack Obama met with activists, including those from the human rights group Memorial, of which Ms. Estemirova was a member.

Because of these events in Russia, this may have not been the best time to release the already much outdated video. Also, a group of pro-American intellectuals and political leaders from former Central and East European countries, including former Polish president Lech Walesa and former Czech president Waclav Havel, has just published an open letter to the Obama Administration, warning President Obama of Russia’s return to what they call a “revisionist power pursuing a 19th century agenda with 21st century tactics.” The letter refers to “nervousness in our capitals” over energy blockades, media manipulation and other methods Russia has used to undermine the region’s ties with Western Europe and the United States.

The White House media team may deserve some credit for much more timely postings of official photographs, texts of presidential speeches and at least some videos during President Obama’s first visit to Moscow. After his initial meeting in London with President Medvedev in April 2009, the official photograph of the two presidents was not made available on the White House website for several days. The website was only infrequently updated during the entire U.S. presidential trip to Europe last April.

President Obama has a highly talented team of photographers and web designers lead by Pete Souza, but his public affairs and public diplomacy advisors seem to be lacking critical journalistic skills and are suffering from what could only be described as too much of a hero worship to be able to produce timely and credible materials for the media and news consumers. (They even put “hero” as part of the name for web images with President Obama, which anybody visiting the White House website can see by right-clicking on these photos in order to download and save them.)

These White House advisors, if they are indeed advising the president, clearly lack the journalistic, public diplomacy and foreign policy experience to find the right balance in describing and presenting his message to Russia and the rest of the world. They are, unfortunately, repeating the mistakes of the Bush White House by confusing U.S. domestic political campaign advertising with public diplomacy abroad. Pro-democracy intellectuals in Russia and political leaders from the former Soviet block countries, who had lived under communism and were exposed to communist propaganda, would probably see the White House video as dangerously naive.

Perhaps then, it’s not so bad after all that the video with the highlights of President Obama’s trip to Russia was released several days too late and without foreign language captions. Hopefully for the Obama Administration, it will not receive much publicity in the region formerly dominated by the Soviet Union and still feeling threatened by Russia’s autocratic leaders. If it does, it will only contribute to the nervousness about the U.S. policy and intentions.

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). The book, which describes Pope John Paul II’s views on feminism, also includes evidence of the importance of Western radio broadcasts during Karol Wojtyla’s life in communist-ruled Poland and in the first ten years of his papacy. The book also has references to the efforts of the KGB and other communist intelligence services to place spies in the Vatican and to influence reporting by journalists covering the Polish pope.

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.

Прочитайте речь на русском языке.

ГоворитАмерика.us Всесторонний Анализ Новостей из США – Link to GovoritAmerika.us Home

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Выбор ГоворитАмерика.us GovoritAmerika.us. Вы можете скопировать и использовать эту статью. You can copy and use this report. Подписка на рассылку ГоворитАмерика.us.

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 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.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://govoritamerika.us/zpod/voaradio.swf" height="250" width="520" base="http://govoritamerika.us/zpod/" /]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

FreeMediaOnline.org interview with Mario Corti

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

More about Mario Corti

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

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

 

More about Tengiz Gudava

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

FreeMediaOnline.org interview with Mario Corti

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

More about Mario Corti

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

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

 

More about Tengiz Gudava

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

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

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.

The commentary was written to show that in a flagrant disregard for U.S. foreign policy and human rights interests,  the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) nearly killed the Russian Service and other VOA broadcasting units. Due to the BBG’s actions, the Voice of America no longer has any Arabic-language programs and its broadcasts to many countries have been silenced. The BBG prevents the Russian Service from broadcasting live radio and TV and deprives it of resources to do any kind of serious reporting work, even for the Internet.

VOA sources tell FreeMediaOnline.org that the Service is barely able to assign one journalist to work an eight hour shift on weekends and can spare at most two or three to work the evening shift only Monday through Friday.  Journalistic positions remain unfilled, the service has no director, and the manager in charge of Internet programming  does not speak Russian and has no experience in Russian affairs.

FreeMediaOnline.org was told that the service had no money to send a reporter with Secretary Clinton. VOA Russian Service journalists cannot broadcast live radio and TV programs and therefore cannot cover live news conferences — all because of the BBG-imposed restrictions. VOA English Service has also been deprived of resources and is unable to provide extensive coverage of Russia and U.S.-Russian relations.

FreeMediaOnline.org has developed a special website, GovoritAmerika.us - ГоворитАмерика.us, in an attempt to help VOA’s Russian Service distribute their limited output and to provide additional U.S.-Russia-related news and analysis from various other sources in the United States to compensate for the restrictions placed on VOA by the BBG. None of it is sufficient, however, to repair the damage stemming from the BBG’s actions.

As FreeMediaOnline.org had predicted, the Internet-only strategy, forced on on the Russian Service by the BBG, has caused its annual audience reach to drop from 7.3% (2007) to 0.2% (est.2009) — a staggering and historically unprecedented 98% decline. All other major international broadcasters, including the BBC World Service, managed to hold on to their audiences in Russia in 2008 despite Mr. Putin’s restrictive media policies. None followed the BBG’s lead in completely terminating on-air Russian-language radio and TV broadcasts. What Mr. Putin could not fully achieve, the BBG did it for him. The United States no longer has a credible voice in Russia.

On top of that, BBG officials produced market research showing that Russian audiences like Mr. Putin, don’t want to hear criticism of human rights abuses, and want less politics. VOA Russian Service journalists were told to be less critical and focus more on nonpolitical Internet reporting that would attract more visitors to their site . This is an example of the total misunderstanding of VOA’s mission and the reasons for the public funding for U.S. international broadcasting.

The VOA Russian Service has been starved of resources, given an impossible task and set up to fail, but the BBG and the VOA management would rather blame a team of dedicated journalists rather than the officials who ended VOA radio broadcasts to Russia just 12 days before the Russian invasion of Georgia and refused to resume them.

Here are some excerpts from a note sent today by a VOA Russian Service broadcaster:

We are accused of bad editorial judgement, poor quality of our reporting and all other possible sins. Never mind that we are starved to death financially and in other resources including manpower, and literally barred from the air.

….management WANTED us to report more on culture because “independent monitors” in Russia said so in the program review.

How much of further damage undermining the Russian Service can we endure? I don’t know…

The commentary was written to show that in a flagrant disregard for U.S. foreign policy and human rights interests,  the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) nearly killed the Russian Service and other VOA broadcasting units. Due to the BBG’s actions, the Voice of America no longer has any Arabic-language programs and its broadcasts to many countries have been silenced. The BBG prevents the Russian Service from broadcasting live radio and TV and deprives it of resources to do any kind of serious reporting work, even for the Internet.

VOA sources tell FreeMediaOnline.org that the Service is barely able to assign one journalist to work an eight hour shift on weekends and can spare at most two or three to work the evening shift only Monday through Friday.  Journalistic positions remain unfilled, the service has no director, and the manager in charge of Internet programming  does not speak Russian and has no experience in Russian affairs.

FreeMediaOnline.org was told that the service had no money to send a reporter with Secretary Clinton. VOA Russian Service journalists cannot broadcast live radio and TV programs and therefore cannot cover live news conferences — all because of the BBG-imposed restrictions. VOA English Service has also been deprived of resources and is unable to provide extensive coverage of Russia and U.S.-Russian relations.

FreeMediaOnline.org has developed a special website, GovoritAmerika.us - ГоворитАмерика.us, in an attempt to help VOA’s Russian Service distribute their limited output and to provide additional U.S.-Russia-related news and analysis from various other sources in the United States to compensate for the restrictions placed on VOA by the BBG. None of it is sufficient, however, to repair the damage stemming from the BBG’s actions.

As FreeMediaOnline.org had predicted, the Internet-only strategy, forced on on the Russian Service by the BBG, has caused its annual audience reach to drop from 7.3% (2007) to 0.2% (est.2009) — a staggering and historically unprecedented 98% decline. All other major international broadcasters, including the BBC World Service, managed to hold on to their audiences in Russia in 2008 despite Mr. Putin’s restrictive media policies. None followed the BBG’s lead in completely terminating on-air Russian-language radio and TV broadcasts. What Mr. Putin could not fully achieve, the BBG did it for him. The United States no longer has a credible voice in Russia.

On top of that, BBG officials produced market research showing that Russian audiences like Mr. Putin, don’t want to hear criticism of human rights abuses, and want less politics. VOA Russian Service journalists were told to be less critical and focus more on nonpolitical Internet reporting that would attract more visitors to their site . This is an example of the total misunderstanding of VOA’s mission and the reasons for the public funding for U.S. international broadcasting.

The VOA Russian Service has been starved of resources, given an impossible task and set up to fail, but the BBG and the VOA management would rather blame a team of dedicated journalists rather than the officials who ended VOA radio broadcasts to Russia just 12 days before the Russian invasion of Georgia and refused to resume them.

Here are some excerpts from a note sent today by a VOA Russian Service broadcaster:

We are accused of bad editorial judgement, poor quality of our reporting and all other possible sins. Never mind that we are starved to death financially and in other resources including manpower, and literally barred from the air.

….management WANTED us to report more on culture because “independent monitors” in Russia said so in the program review.

How much of further damage undermining the Russian Service can we endure? I don’t know…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Ted Lipien

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

About FreeMediaOnline.org

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

About GovoritAmerika.us

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

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.