View original post here:
TVi urges president to address pressures exerted on channel

See the original post here:
ARTICLE 19 and International Media Support call on new president to stand for freedom of expression

Read the original:
Georgian journalist barred from entering Ukraine

Read more:
Ukraine: despite disillusion, election confirms Orange Revolution’s achievements in creating democratic space

View original post here:
Libel tourists ‘threatening the foundations of democracy’

See the original post here:
ARTICLE 19 and IMS call for balanced and ethical reporting during elections

Link:
Politicians abuse power, attack journalists

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.

FreeMediaOnline.org, Free Media Online Blog, GovoritAmerika.us, August 13, 2009, San Francisco — A report by a senior Voice of America (VOA) correspondent, posted online today, shows a high level of confusion over the Obama Administration’s new policy of “resetting” relations with Russia. While the report by VOA’s Andre de Nesnera focuses on statements by Vice President Biden, which have “angered” Russian officials, and on apparent divisions within the Administration over Russia policy, it does not address a number of recent Russian actions and statements, which other analysts saw as a clear challenge to President Obama after his recent visit to Moscow. They included a stern videotaped warning to Ukraine’s pro-Western president, Victor Yushchenko, delivered earlier this week by President Medvedev.

Президент России>>

The content and the harsh tone of President Medvedev’s video message to Ukraine was in sharp contrast with a number of friendly and hopeful statements from President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, offering a “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations.

VOA report quoted a number of American analysts, including Stephen Jones, a Russia expert from Mount Holyoke College, and Robert Legvold at Columbia University, who are critical of Vice President Biden’s statements made in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal. In that interview, the U.S. Vice President suggested that Russia’s economic and social weakness would force the Kremlin to make concessions to the West on key national security issues. VOA’s Andre de Nesnera did not cite any comments in defense of Vice President Biden’s statements, which he had made after his visit to Ukraine and Georgia.

The VOA correspondent asserted in his report that after Vice President Biden’s interview with the Wall Street Journal, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had tried to “head off a dispute with Moscow” during an appearance on (NBC’s) television program Meet the Press. She told the American TV network that “We want what the president called for during his recent Moscow summit. We want a strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia. Now there is an enormous amount of work to be done between the United States and Russia,” said Clinton.

VOA’s de Nesnera also quotes Ronald Suny, at the University of Chicago, as saying that “the Russians have a point.” According to Ronald Suny “The Russians are extremely sensitive. They are looking for signals. They don’t know what to expect from this new government in Washington. And so they were very well pleased, it seemed, by Obama’s visit. And then the [vice president's] trip comes and these statements are made – and the Russians are now upset again. And they are asking, in a way, what are the signals? Which signals are we to take to be the real signals? And I’m as much at a loss as they are,” he said.

Other American experts, however, see the Kremlin’s recent actions as highly provocative and designed to regain Russia’s former imperial control over now independent countries like Ukraine and Georgia. They also point out that nationalistic and anti-American rhetoric serves the power interests of the current Russian leadership and will continue regardless of the Obama Administration’s wish for a “reset” in the bilateral relationship.

The Voice of America is a taxpayer-funded U.S. international broadcaster managed by the bipartisan Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). De Nesnera’s report was translated into Russian and posted on the VOA Russian-language website. VOA no longer broadcasts, however, on-air radio and television newscasts in Russian. They were terminated by the BBG in July 2008, just 12 days before Russian troops attacked the Republic of Georgia in a territorial dispute.

Voice of America Report Biden Remarks Anger Russian Officials
By Andre de Nesnera
Washington
13 August 2009

Recent statements by Vice President Joe Biden have angered Russian officials.

Vice President Biden recently told the Wall Street Journal that – in his words – the Russians “have a shrinking population base, have a withering economy, have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years.” He then suggested that all these trends would force Russia to make concessions to the West on key national security issues.

Mr. Biden made those statements following a trip to Ukraine and Georgia. Several weeks earlier, President Barack Obama held a Moscow summit with his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev – a meeting whose main goal was to reset U.S.-Russian relations on a positive footing.

Most analysts agree that was achieved. But they also say Mr. Biden’s statements represented a different kind of tone from the one that was taken by Mr. Obama in Moscow.

Stephen Jones, a Russia expert from Mount Holyoke College (in Hadley, Massachusetts), says the vice president was in a sense writing off Russia as a significant power.

“Russia, of course, is going through a very serious economic situation. Its prospects are not good in terms of the demographic situation, and the energy situation too because Gazprom is very inefficient and oil production is declining. But Russia is still enormously powerful in the region. And when Russia has its back to the wall, it can certainly pursue some very strong, even aggressive policies at times. So that sort of statement, I think, is rather exaggerated and rather naïve in many ways,” he said.

Vice President Biden’s remarks hit a raw nerve with Russian officials. Sergei Prikhodko, a senior Kremlin foreign policy adviser, said “it raised the question who is shaping U.S. foreign policy -the president or members of his team?”

Robert Legvold at Columbia University, agrees. “It has raised a lot of questions both in the Russian media and even in the western media about whether the administration is singing from the same page. And if the page they are singing from is the same, and it is the Biden message – then are we hearing from Biden what they really think and from Obama what the diplomatic gloss is that he means to put on the relationship. That, I think, has created – at least for the moment – something of a problem,” he said.

Ronald Suny, at the University of Chicago, says the Russians have a point. “The Russians are extremely sensitive. They are looking for signals. They don’t know what to expect from this new government in Washington. And so they were very well pleased, it seemed, by Obama’s visit. And then the [vice president's] trip comes and these statements are made – and the Russians are now upset again. And they are asking, in a way, what are the signals? Which signals are we to take to be the real signals? And I’m as much at a loss as they are,” he said.

Shortly after the interview was published, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to head off a dispute with Moscow during an appearance on (NBC’s) Meet the Press. “We want what the president called for during his recent Moscow summit. We want a strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia. Now there is an enormous amount of work to be done between the United States and Russia,” he said.

Secretary Clinton said Moscow and Washington are working to reduce their nuclear arsenals – and are collaborating on the key issues of North Korea and Iran. “And so there is an enormous amount of hard work being done. And we view Russia as a great power,” he said.

Some analysts say Mrs. Clinton’s remarks were an attempt at damage control at a time when relations between Washington and Moscow are at a sensitive stage given the new U.S. administration and the issues facing both countries.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) has put all the eggs of broadcasts to Russia from the U.S. in one basket.

FreeMediaOnline.org, Free Media Online Blog, GovoritAmerika.us, Commentary by Ted Lipien, July 10, 2009, San Francisco — Established in 1942 in response to wartime emergency, the Voice of America (VOA) has been the official U.S. broadcaster, funded by American taxpayers and guaranteed journalistic independence by the U.S. Congress. VOA journalists produce radio and TV programs and maintain Internet websites in multiple languages. VOA helped the United States win the Cold War and continues to provide uncensored news to countries with limited or no free media.

But when President Obama went to Moscow this week and met with President Medvedev, Prime Minister Putin, as well as with opposition and civil society leaders, a VOA Russian Service correspondent who was reporting on these meetings vainly tried to see his own work on the VOA website. The VOA site suffered a catastrophic failure and was out of commission for at least two full days due to a suspected North Korean cyber attack. The Russians could not learn from the Voice of America about President Obama’s speeches in which he talked about human rights and media freedom issues in Russia. These speeches were not carried live by the Kremlin-controled national TV and radio networks and did not receive wide coverage from independent media outlets, few of which still remain.

Agency set up to guarantee America’s ability to communicate with the world could not protect its own website

Other U.S. government websites were also targeted by the latest cyber attack, but only the Voice of America website was made inaccessible for a number of days. This failure is extremely disturbing, since the Voice of America, created during World War II with a mission to provide accurate and objective news to the rest of the world, is still considered by the U.S. Congress and the White House as an important national security asset, especially in times of national and international emergencies.

Until the summer of 2008, the Voice of America Russian Service still had on-air radio and TV programs. Some of the radio programs were transmitted on short-wave, which hostile governments cannot easily block, while other radio and TV programs were rebroadcast by local stations and networks in Russia, even as the Russian security services were trying to force them to stop from carrying such foreign broadcasts.

BBG lacks strategic vision and fails to plan for emergencies

This is when the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) — the bipartisan body which manages U.S. international broadcasting entities, including the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio and TV Marti, Alhurra Television and others — decided that from now on the Voice of America will only use the Internet for delivering its programs to Russia. In July 2008, the BBG took all VOA Russian-language radio programs off the air. 12 days later, the Russian army attacked the Republic of Georgia over a territorial dispute, creating a major crisis in Moscow’s relations with Washington and other Western nations. Despite of the political and news emergency resulting from the Russian military attack, the BBG refused to resume VOA radio broadcasts to the war zone.

Before the Russian-Georgian war, members of Congress and representatives of human rights and media freedom organizations had warned the Bush Administration that the BBG’s Internet-only strategy for the Voice of America in Russia represented a serious national security risk and a further threat to what little remained of the Russian independent media. The BBG ignored these warnings.

The BBG not only did not anticipate the possibility of a Russian attack on Georgia, BBG members also did not consider the possibility that Barack Obama would be elected president, or that in the resulting improvement in U.S.-Russian relations, VOA might again be able to expand placement of its programs on national and local media in Russia. Such program placement represents the best option for gaining a large audience, assuming that it does not compromise journalistic freedom and objectivity of the programs being produced for local rebroadcasts — something that the BBG’s “marrying the mission to the market” strategy was not able to guarantee. In fact, it encouraged biased, unbalanced and soft journalism, as in Alhurra TV network’s coverage of the Holocaust deniers conference in Tehran, hosted by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and in some of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s (RFE/RL) programs. Both Alhurra and RFE/RL are managed by the BBG.

While the Russian government continued to expand placement in the United States for its international TV program, “Russia Today,” the BBG granted victory to the Russian security services in their intimidation campaign designed to drive the Voice of America off the airways in Russia shortly before President Obama was elected and promised to work to improve U.S.-Russian relations. If they are serious about U.S. international broadcasting, the Obama Administration officials should now point out to their counterparts in Moscow that, unlike harsh treatment of foreign and local media in Russia by the Russian secret police, the FBI and the CIA have not been trying to force “Russia Today” off American stations and cable channels.

Had it been allowed to maintain its multimedia program delivery strategy, the Voice of America could now be in a good position to quickly regain its TV and radio audience in Russia. But BBG officials killed both radio and TV, ignoring their own audience research, which showed that VOA was only reaching about 0.2% of the Russian audience through the Internet. Most importantly, however, they ignored clear evidence that, unlike radio and satellite TV, the Internet can be easily sabottaged and blocked not only by the Russian FSB, the KGB’s successor, but even by security services of other countries, and possibly also by ordinary hackers. The BBG has put all the eggs of broadcasts to Russia from the U.S. in one basket.

BBG officials failed to anticipate what might happen to the Internet-only strategy if U.S.-Russian relations should take a sudden turn for the worse. If the North Koreans could launch a successful attack on the VOA website — assuming that North Korea was indeed behind the latest attack — so can the Russian security services if ordered by the Kremlin. They demonstrated this ability during the Russian-Georgian war by blocking the Georgian government websites.

Another BBG-managed broadcaster, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, still has radio programs to Russia. But RFE/RL staff is based in Prague, the Czech Republic, and in Moscow. Its broadcasts do not focus on the United States or provide an American perspective on world events. In any case, RFE/RL reporters working in Russia are vulnerable to intimidation by the Russian security services. These foreign-born, locally-based journalists are discriminated against and denied basic legal protections by the BBG. They would be especially threatened if a serious crisis developed in U.S.-Russian relations.

The U.S. Congress and American taxpayers should be concerned that a VOA Russian Service correspondent traveling with Barack Obama to Moscow could not see for a number of days any of his reports on the President’s comments about human rights and media restrictions in Russia. They should be concerned that a few North Korean agents were apparently able to shut down the Voice of America website serving the entire world, including Russia, China, and Iran. They should also be concerned that members of the Broadcasting Board of Governors and their executive staff terminated VOA programs to Russia a few days before the Republic of Georgia was invaded, and that they have failed to protect the VOA website from cyber attacks. (The BBG also ended VOA Hindi radio broadcasts to India shortly before the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and VOA radio broadcasts to Ukraine one day before Russia shut of the delivery of natural gas supplies to Ukraine and Western Europe in the middle of winter. They even tried to limit broadcasts to Tibet.)

Americans should not be surprised, however, by the BBG’s dismal record. The Broadcasting Board of Governors has been consistently rated by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management as the worst managed Federal agency.

There have been many calls for abolishing the current board in charge of U.S. international broadcasting. Some have suggested taking away the BBG’s powers to conduct day-to-day journalistic and programming operations. Others have called for selecting competent journalists, human rights, and media freedom professionals to fill the vacant BBG positions.

Journalists working at the Voice of America Russian Service hope that something will be done to make their programs once again heard and seen in Russia. As a result of the BBG’s termination of on-air radio and TV Russian broadcasts, their audience in Russia shrunk by an estimated 98%, an unprecedented audience loss in the history of international broadcasting. The same BBG officials who suggested that the Internet-only strategy for VOA in Russia would work also failed to protect the VOA website from a relatively minor cyber attack.

Frustrated current and former VOA journalists seeks private Russian-American broadcasting ventures to overcome restrictions imposed by the BBG

Some VOA Russian Service journalists, frustrated by the inability of the BBG and VOA management to grasp the opportunities presented by President Obama’s call for a “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations, have started to explore with Russian networks the possibility of launching live TV discussion programs between Washington and Moscow, which would be conducted outside of VOA, privately funded, and would focus on serious political, social, economic, and cultural topics of the day. BBG and VOA officials eliminated such programs last summer and ordered production of short videos with a focus on popular American culture.

The morale of journalists working for VOA’s Russian Service is at all time low. One of its most experienced journalists and managers has left. VOA executives refused to fill the position of the service director, appointing instead a number of non-Russian managers, some of whom do not even speak Russian. They also refused to send a Russian Service reporter when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had her first meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva, during which she called for a new start in U.S.-Russian relations.

In response to the dismal state of VOA’s Russian Service, some former VOA journalists have launched an independent private website, GovoritAmerika.us, which serves as an aggregator of U.S.-Russia-related news and analyses from multiple American government and non-government sources. GovoritAmerika.us website was available online and included extensive summaries of Voice of America reports when the VOA website suffered a two-day meltdown.

With the latest blow of seeing even their current limited work vanish during the critical news window of President Obama’s visit to Russia, VOA journalists are understandably frustrated. Let’s hope that the Obama White House will take notice of this latest example of the BBG’s numerous failures. The latest one is the BBG’s failure to protect America’s lead website for communicating with the rest of the world.

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 his life in communist-ruled Poland and in the first ten years of his papacy. The book also has extensive 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.

VOA Responds to Crisis in Georgia

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

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

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

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

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

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

VOA Covers Mumbai Terrorist Attacks

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

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

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

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

Ukrainian Language Broadcasting

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

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

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

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

BBG CLAIMS TITLE AS THE WORST PLACE TO WORK IN GOVERNMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expanding our reach.

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

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

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

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

WILL AMERICA’S VOICE STAY SILENCED?

07. May 2009
An Understanding Government report

By Mitchell Polman

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

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

America’s voice in Russia fades to silence

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

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

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

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

“Runet” – the Internet in Russia

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

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

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty gains while VOA loses

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

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

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

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

Reaction from inside and outside Russia

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

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

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

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

Former VOA Staff Calling for Service Restorations

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

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

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

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

Voices of discord at VOA Russian service?

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

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

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

The future of the BBG

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dear Snjezana,

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

About Ted Lipien

Ted Lipien is a former Voice of America acting associate director. He was also a regional BBG media marketing manager responsible for placement of U.S. government-funded radio and TV programs on stations in Russia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries in Eurasia. In the 1980’s he was in charge of VOA radio broadcasts to Poland during the communist regime’s crackdown on the Solidarity labor union and oversaw the development of VOA television news programs to Ukraine and Russia. He is also author of “Wojtyla’s Women: How They Shaped the Life of Pope John Paul II and Changed the Catholic Church” (O-Books – June 2008). In his book he describes the efforts of the KGB and other communist intelligence services to place spies in the Vatican and to influence reporting by Western journalists.

About FreeMediaOnline.org

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

About GovoritAmerika.us

In December 2008, FreeMediaOnline.org has launched a Russian-language web site — GovoritAmerika.us ГоворитАмерика.us  – which includes summaries of some of the more serious news and commentaries from multiple U.S. government and nongovernment sources.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ГоворитАмерика.us – Всесторонний Анализ Новостей из США

The following is a Voice of America report.

Miroslav Dobrovodsky

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

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

Receiving VOA Excellence in Programming Awards

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

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

Czech President and former dissident Vaclav Havel thanking VOA

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

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

As a young reporter in Bratislava, ca. 1966

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

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

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

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

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

Interviewing Alexander Dubcek

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

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

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.

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

Closed Down American Centers and Crippled Voice of America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dubious Market Research in Russia Results in Attempts at Censorship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BBG Eliminated Voice of America Arabic Broadcasts

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

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

Denying the Holocaust at U.S. Taxpayers’ Expense

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

Misleading Administration and Congress

In answers to written questions from Senator Richard Lugar submitted during her Senate confirmation process, Hillary Clinton said that “the BBG has learned that it must rely on the best market analysis to understand the unique listening habits and attitudes of the populations we seek to inform.” The BBG indeed spends tremendous amount of taxpayer money on market research. Unfortunately, most BBG members have demonstrated that they lack both experience and judgment to apply research results to political realities in countries without free media.

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

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

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

Supporting Privatized Entities More Important to BBG than Representing America

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

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

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

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

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

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

BBG Deserves Greater Scrutiny

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

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

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

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

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

Another U.S. Senator, Sam Brownback (R-KA),  has called for abolishing the Broadcasting Board of Governors. He introduced legislation that would establish the National Center for Strategic Communications, an agency similar to the now defunct U.S. Information Agency. 

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

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

Federal Human Capital 2008 Survey (FHCS)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Ted Lipien

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

Wojtyla's Women by Ted Lipien

About FreeMediaOnline.org

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

About GovoritAmerika.us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This commentary can be republished with attribution to FreeMediaOnline.org

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

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

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

FreeMediaOnline.org bloggers described the “Democracy Video Challenge” contest as crude propaganda. One blogger, who grew up in Eastern Europe under communism and later worked as a journalist in the United States, wrote that asking young people to produce videos about democracy and offering them a free trip to the United States as a prize seems reminiscent of similar contests about the virtues of communism that school students behind the Iron Curtain had to enter to meet propaganda goals.

Ted Lipien, president of FreeMediaOnline.org, a San Francisco-based media freedom nonprofit, commented that this particular contest has been part of a much larger effort by the Bush Administration’s political appointees who tried to privatize the conduct of public diplomacy by granting lucrative contracts to advertising firms and web development companies. “They generally know very little about foreign policy and foreign cultures. Many of their ideas and programs have embarrassed the United States and contributed to the growth of anti-Americanism abroad,” Lipien said.

FreeMediaOnline.org bloggers also pointed out that these experiments in propaganda advertising were undertaken at the expense of traditional public diplomacy programs supported by American taxpayers, such as exchanges for foreign journalists and serious international news broadcasting by the Voice of America (VOA). These programs have been effective over many decades but were reduced during the Bush Administration to pay for various advertising schemes and the use of private contractors.

The Department of State was not the only U.S. government entity affected by experiments in advertising and privatization. The Bush Administration’s last Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, James K. Glassman, supported a privatization effort  at the Voice of America, the official but journalistically independent U.S. government supported international broadcaster,  that resulted in weakening and in some cases ending substantive American radio and web journalism directed at audiences abroad.

While he was the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which manages U.S. international broadcasting, Glassman and other BBG members voted to end VOA radio news programs to many countries, including Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine. Glassman ordered instead more Internet video production, which requires high speed Internet access in areas usually known for poverty, corruption and conflict. He refused to allow VOA Russian Service journalists to resume emergency radio broadcasts to the war zone during the Russian-Georgian conflict last summer.

But in a move that may signal change under Secretary Clinton, the State Department web site, which has been partially and quickly redesigned after President Obama took office, no longer shows on the home page a prominently displayed image announcing the “Democracy Video Challenge” contest. It now shows under the heading of “FOREIGN POLICY HIGHLIGHTS” a link to  a different online video contest, “My Culture + Your Culture,” which seems more in line with traditional public diplomacy programs carried out by American diplomats as opposed to content developed by advertisers and private contractors.

But to participate in the “My Culture + Your Culture”  contest, visitors are taken to ExchangesConnect web site, which — as in the case of the “Democracy Video Challenge” web site –  also does not look at all like a U.S. government official site but rather like a site run by a nongovernmental enterprise. ExchangesConnect is copyrighted (unlike official U.S. government web sites, which are not copyrighted) and has all the indications of  being operated by a private contractor. There is a small notice, however, that ExchangesConnect is administered by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. Much of the propaganda effort during the Bush Administration, both at State and at the BBG, was designed to hide any connection to the U.S. government in a naive belief that foreign audiences would not notice.

In the same area of the State Department web site’s home page with information about the cultural video contest, visitors are also informed about the “Ask The Ambassador” online forum that lets them interact with U.S. Ambassadors around the world. It tells visitors that when a chat is announced, questions submitted online are answered by State Department officials and posted to the website so that others many benefit from the discussion. Unfortunately, there was no announcement of any new online discussions.

To get to the “Democracy Video Challenge” contest, site visitors can still stay on the State Department’s home page, but they now have to navigate under “FOREIGN POLICY HIGHLIGHTS” to a next slide.  In addition to the video contest, that slide also features a link to the “Policy Podcast,” where State Department officials discuss upcoming events and foreign policy issues.

The U.S. certainly needs more Public Diplomacy 2.0 programs that promote online discussions with American officials and use other interactive forms of communicating with foreign audiences.  The new Obama Administration has to be careful, however, what content goes into these programs.  Secretary Clinton should not allow advertising and propaganda to replace serious journalism. She should not discard well-tested public diplomacy tools in favor of gimmicks developed by private contractors whose only qualification are connections to high government officials.

Ted Lipien of FreeMediaOnline.org pointed out that one result of privatizing experiments during the Bush Administration was the airing of unchallenged statements from Holocaust deniers on the U.S.-funded Alhurra television network for the Middle East. Before that happened, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which is responsible for these broadcasts, eliminated Voice of America Arabic radio programs, which had accurate and balanced news prepared by well-trained journalists. The BBG re-directed resources, previously used for serious journalism at VOA, to develop Alhurra as a private entity. It could more easily control  Alhurra as a private entity and force it to accept advertising and marketing concepts rejected by VOA journalists as incompatible with objective and balanced reporting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeMediaOnline.org has been reporting recently on the actions of U.S. political appointees and senior government agency officials who had stopped Voice of America (VOA) radio broadcasts to Russia 12 days before the outbreak of the war in the Caucasus, terminated VOA Hindi radio to India shortly before the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and ended VOA Ukrainian radio programs on December 31, 2008, just hours before Russia stopped the flow of natural gas supplies to Ukraine and the rest of Europe. 

According to the latest Federal Human Capital Survey (FHCS), the employees of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) have recently given the BBG Board members and the officials of the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) the worst ever rating for good management and placed the BBG at the very bottom of Federal agencies.

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) describes the Federal Human Capital Survey (FHCS) as “a tool that measures employees’ perceptions of whether, and to what extent, conditions characterizing successful organizations are present in their agencies. Survey results provide valuable insight into the challenges agency leaders face in ensuring the Federal Government has an effective civilian workforce and how well they are responding.”

FreeMediaOnline.org, a San Francisco-based nonprofit supporting media freedom worldwide, is deeply concerned that the BBG’s actions are undermining access of international audiences to unbiased news and information from the United States. Especially hard hit are the very poorest groups as well as refugees and other victims of war and repression. In many countries around the world — including Russia, India, and Ukraine –the BBG and the International Broadcasting Bureau staff have abandoned Voice of America radio, which used to serve these audiences, in favor of relying exclusively on television and the Internet. This insensitive and elitist strategy has been condemned by labor leaders, human rights activists, as well as BBG’s own employees.

FreeMediaOnline.org is republishing a report on the latest Federal Human Capital Survey posted on the BBG Government Employees AFGE Local 1812 Union web site.

2008 HUMAN CAPITAL SURVEY RESULTS EVEN WORSE FOR BBG

 

DATELINE: Washington, D.C. 01/09/09.  The results of the 2008 Federal Human Capital Survey for the Broadcasting Board of Governors were released yesterday.  It proved to be the worst survey yet for the BBG.  Some examples of the results:

 

The BBG received a negative response of 37.1% to the survey question: “I recommend my organization as a good place to work”.  The negative responses governmentwide averaged 14.9%.

 

It was a negative response of a whopping 50.9% for the BBG regarding the question: “How satisfied are you with the policies and practices of your senior leaders?”.  The governmentwide negative numbers for this question were 28.9%.

 

For the question, “I can disclose a suspected violation of any law, rule or regulation without fear of reprisal”, the BBG earned a 33.3% negative response.  Governmentwide the negative responses averaged 19.0%.

 

All the negative percentages for the BBG listed above are higher than the previous results for the same questions in the surveys of 2006 and 2004.  Instead of working to improve the dismal showing on past surveys, the management of the BBG and the organizations under its umbrella seem to take pride in being if not the worst, one of the worst, places to work in all of government.  Lisa Vandenberg, the president of the Union representing the employees at the FLRA, was quoted recently regarding the survey results for the Agency where she works, “We were led by people not interested in our mission or sustaining our program.”.  That could very well be said by the people working under the BBG.

 

FreeMediaOnline.org has also been critical of the BBG for dismantling the Voice of America and favoring privatized U.S. broadcasting not designed or staffed to present American voices and explain American values to the world. These BBG policies have resulted in giving airtime on Alhurra Television to Holocaust deniers and allowing racist Russian politicians extensive access to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) airwaves. The BBG has also based much of RFE/RL’s reporting and administration in Russia, where locally-hired employees and contractors, who are Russian citizens, are subject to blackmail and other forms of intimidation from the Kremlin’s secret police and intelligence services.

The BBG executive director is Jeffrey Trimble, who was formerly acting president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Only five members currently serve on the bipartisan Board: Joaquin F. Blaya, Blanquita Walsh Cullum, D. Jeffrey Hirschberg, Steven J. Simmons, and Condoleezza Rice (ex officio).

One prominent former BBG member Edward E. Kaufman, recently appointed as a U.S. Senator from Delaware, (He had been Senator Biden’s chief of staff and replaces him in the Senate.) joined other Democrats and Republicans, including the BBG’s most recent Republican chairman James K. Glassman, who is now the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs,  in voting to end VOA radio programs to Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, and India — each time shortly before a major news emergency affecting these countries. Only one BBG member, syndicated radio host Blanquita Walsh Cullum, was reported to have opposed programming cuts to media-at-risk countries. 

Some BBG employees have expressed hope to FreeMediaOnline.org that the new Obama Administration will undertake major reforms at the Agency. The Obama transition team has been credited with forcing the BBG to release contents of a highly critical independent study of Alhurra Television, conducted by the USC Annenberg School for Communication, which the BBG wanted to keep secret. The transition team was reviewing America’s international broadcasting services, including the Voice of America and the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and advised the transition team working with the U.S. Department of State on public diplomacy.

The international broadcasting services team was led by Ernest J. Wilson III, Dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. BBG employees will have a chance to question him during a roundtable discussion which will take place January 22, 2009, 12:00 PM, at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. Participants can register online on the USC Center on Public Diplomacy web site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Worst of Times

by The Federalist

“US international broadcasting is being led by people not interested in its mission or in sustaining its programs.”

This applies to all levels of US international broadcasting, from the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs down to managers within the broadcasting entities, the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB), and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG).  When it comes to public diplomacy, the greatest detriment to the national and public Interest may, in fact, be these officials.

Time and again, they have demonstrated an extraordinary disregard for the power, consequence, and significance of silence.  In public diplomacy and in international broadcasting, silence equates with failure, abandonment, and a loss of international power and prestige.

These officials have systematically engaged in silencing US international broadcasting assets: in Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, India and Pakistan…all flashpoints for much larger conflicts.  Worse, they do so with extreme arrogance, without regard to painful realities around the world.  They do not understand the necessity of a strategic triad of broadcast mediums that allow for a flexible and fluid response to changing situations.  In their decision-making, they have repeatedly demonstrated that they are shortsighted, unimaginative, and inflexible…the perfect faults to exploit by forces intent upon defeating the reach of US international broadcasting assets and the US public diplomacy effort.  Discrediting the United States is made a whole lot easier by the ineptitude exhibited in these processes.

In the face of deteriorating circumstances, these officials have embraced an all-or-nothing strategy based on using the Internet as their sole source for audio, video and text.

Let us disabuse the notion that this strategy is groundbreaking, trendsetting or staying ahead of the technological curve.  US government computer systems are vulnerable to cyber warfare.  Recently, a high level briefing was provided the outgoing Bush and incoming Obama administrations regarding the vulnerabilities of and threats to US government computer systems.  The threat is real and substantial.

No doubt, those responsible for Internet security for US international broadcasting would claim that its systems are secure.  However, it should be remembered that a culture of deceit permeates many levels of the US international broadcasting entities…the same kind of deceit that attempts to cover up embarrassing failures of its operations, such as with alHurra television, until the cover-up effort was trumped by  the release of the Annenberg Report on alHurra credited to the Obama transition team.  Claims of cyber security for US international broadcasting systems should be met with great skepticism.  Be mindful of the admonition: consider the source.

One more point: the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, James Glassman, thinks that “we’re Coke and they’re Pepsi.”  Perhaps Mr. Glassman doesn’t have a television and hasn’t had the opportunity to watch footage of the current round of conflict between Hamas and the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip, or the widening of the conflict by rocket fire now coming from southern Lebanon into Israel.  Or perhaps Mr. Glassman can inquire of Hamas or Hezbollah if they think they are Coke or Pepsi. 

The point is this: the analogy is idiotic…under almost any circumstances but especially those of the present.

These are not the best of times for US international broadcasting.  Maintaining the status quo, through the twits and tweets of a fairy tale world view pontificated by inept political appointees or senior officials covering up the multi-million dollar failures of its high profile projects like alHurra, is the short march to the worst of times.

The Federalist 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Privatized broadcasting entities managed by the BBG have been plagued with financial and editorial scandals. The nonprofit investigative journalism web site ProPublica.org has uncovered  major financial irregularities at Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television and reported on the lack of editorial controls that have resulted in giving airtime to Ismalist extremists and Holocaust deniers.  A study prepared by the Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School, University of Southern California, which was commissioned by the U.S. government, concluded that Alhurra, Arab-language television to the Middle East managed by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) fails to meet basic journalistic standards and is seen by few.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ted Lipien is a former Voice of America acting associate director. He was also a regional BBG media marketing manager responsible for placement of U.S. government-funded radio and TV programs on stations in Russia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries in Eurasia. He is founder and president of FreeMediaOnline.org, a San Francisco-based nonprofit which support media freedom worldwide, and author of “Wojtyla’s Women: How They Shaped the Life of Pope John Paul II and Changed the Catholic Church” (O-Books – June 2008). In his book he describes the efforts of the KGB and other communist intelligence services to place spies in the Vatican and to influence reporting by Western journalists.

Many foreign policy experts, members of Congress, and press freedom NGOs saw the BBG’s decision as a major public diplomacy blunder.  But the BBG continues to defend its actions and claims that it had a go ahead from Congress to end VOA radio programs.  After the start of the summer war in the Caucasus, the BBG suspended its orders to stop radio broadcasts to Georgia but refused to resume VOA shortwave broadcasts in Russian.

The Public Diplomacy Council members who have criticized the BBG come from diplomacy, the armed forces, nonprofits and academia.  The BBG has few if any defenders. FreeMediaOnline.org could not identify any member of Congress or a prominent public diplomacy expert who  would express approval for the BBG’s decision to terminate VOA radio broadcasts to Russia. 

In a reaction to widespread criticism, the BBG spokesperson Letitia King wrote to the Public Diplomacy Council that “it is false to claim that the BBG has acted in any way that contravenes Congress.” She also stated the BBG “received Congressional approval for all program changes that have been made, including language service reductions,” and she called on the PDC to correct its error.

Ms. King also took issue with the Public Diplomacy Council’s claim 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. She argued that the BBG “has sought efficiencies throughout the organization in order to concentrate resources on language broadcasts.”

FreeMediaOnline.org reported that while planning to eliminate VOA radio broadcasts to  Russia and Georgia, the BBG and its most recent chairman James K. Glassman, the current Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, also planned to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to expand their public relations operations. Among other things, the BBG had made an unsuccessful attempt to hire Paula Zahn, formerly of CNN, as their high profile spokesperson. The funds that the BBG wanted to allocate to this project could have paid for continuing VOA radio broadcasts to a country like Georgia.

In a document titled “Reforming U.S. International Broadcasting for a New Era,” the Public Diplomacy Council makes a number of proposals to reform U.S. international broadcasting and blames the BBG for undermining the effectiveness of the Voice of America. The Council has urged the future Obama Administration to immediately restore all radio services reduced at the VOA in FY 08. 

From the Public Diplomacy Council’s “Reforming U.S. International Broadcasting
for a New Era,” November 17, 2008:
 

On July 26, 2008, twelve days before Russia invaded Georgia, the BBG silenced VOA Russian radio, and then ignored subsequent appeals to restore it.  On September 30, the Board abolished VOA radio services in Serbian, Bosnian, and Macedonian and in the Hindi service to India, provisionally retaining Ukrainian and Georgian.  This action directly contravened Congressional passage last December of an FY 08 appropriation prohibiting all cuts.  The impact: loss of nine million listeners on the eve of a landmark U.S. presidential election.

The BBG spokesperson is vague as to what specific Congressional approval the BBG had received to cut VOA radio programs to Russia and other countries. Although the BBG letter does not offer a proof of any Congressional approval, the BBG seems to be using a highly legalistic argument that Congress has agreed to all the VOA program cuts since it had passed the Administration’s FY09 budget. In fact, members of Congress and a Congressional committee had told the BBG not to proceed with the planned radio program cuts at VOA.

On July 17, 2008, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT ) specifically warned the BBG not to stop or reduce broadcasts  to Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tibet and to the Balkans, saying that “freedom of speech remains restricted and broadcasting is still necessary”  in these countries. But, acting in great secrecy and without any public announcement for U.S. or foreign media, the BBG stopped all VOA Russian radio programs on July 26.

Letter to the Public Diplomacy Council from the Broadcasting Board of Governors’ Spokesperson
November 20, 2008

The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) takes sharp exception to many points in “Reforming U.S. International Broadcasting for a New Era,” a statement issued by the Public Diplomacy Council (PDC) on November 17.

It is false to claim that the BBG has acted in any way that contravenes Congress. The BBG received Congressional approval for all program changes that have been made, including language service reductions. The PDC should correct its error.

The success or failure of the BBG should be judged on its broadcasting impact.

The post-9/11 public diplomacy charge was clear: to focus on Muslim audiences as an antidote to poisonous propaganda from Al Qaeda and other extremists. The challenge is how best to do that in specific countries, each with unique political factors, diverse media environments, and populations largely hostile to America.

The BBG has met this challenge by shaping broadcasts to fit the exigencies of each target audience. Since 2001, with support from the Administration and Congress, the BBG has launched six major communication channels – including 24/7 Dari and Pashto in Afghanistan, Radio Sawa and Alhurra TV for the Mi ddle East, Radio Farda and the Persian News Network for Iran, and Radio Aap ki Dunyaa for Pakistan — and ramped up daily broadcasting to Indonesia, Somalia, and other countries. These new initiatives have grown the BBG’s global weekly audience from 100 to over 175 million people. Broken out by country, this number includes: 27 million in Indonesia, 14 million in Iran, 13 million in Afghanistan, 12 million in Pakistan, 11.5 million in Iraq, 7 million in Egypt, 6 million in Syria, and 5 million in Morocco. Over 30 BBG language services now reach in excess of one million people weekly.

The PDC statement misrepresents the BBG’s work in other respects:

• PDC notes that VOA is chartered by statute to present international and U.S. news that is accurate, objective, and comprehensive; to represent America in all its diversity; and to present U.S. policies. But it fails to note that the statute governing broadcasting provides a similar mandate to all BBG broadcast entities. Each of the BBG’s broadcast entities maintains flexibility to tailor content to its audiences.

• Since FY 2000, VOA’s budget has increased over 47 percent, from $127 to $190 million in FY 2008. VOA has added television broadcasts to Afghanistan and Pakistan and increased programs in Persian, Urdu, Dari, Pashto, Korean, Somali, and several other languages.

• The BBG has sought efficiencies throughout the organization in order to concentrate resources on language broadcasts. Since FY 200 3, 78 percent of BBG budgetary reductions were to administrative, engineering, and support costs. It would not be possible to reinstate particular language broadcasts without additional cost.

• VOA audiences in Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia continue to be served by high-quality VOA television and Internet programming, and by radio broadcasts from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. VOA television and Internet broadcasts in Hindi also continue.

• To assert that the BBG needs “real strategy and analysis” ignores the BBG’s comprehensive strategic plan, available at http://www.bbg.gov/, which details specific actions to yield measurable outcomes. BBG spending on global audience research has increased from less than $3 million in FY 2001 to $9.1 million in FY 2008.
What matters to the BBG is reaching as many people as possible with accurate, balanced news and information that gains their trust and makes a difference in their lives. The focus of discussion needs to be on how U.S. international broadcasters are going to better serve more people with quality journalism to advance U.S. strategic interests in difficult-to-reach countries were democracy and freedom of speech are in short supply.

We share the commitment of the Public Diplomacy Council to excellence in our international broadcasting efforts and value forward-looking discussion of how t o maximize our effectiveness.

Sincerely,

Letitia M. King
Acting Director Office of Public Affairs

 

In a response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the BBG  Office of General Counsel conceded that it cannot produce a specific document which would have given the BBG Congressional approval for its decision to cut VOA radio programs to Russia and other countries.

The Public Diplomacy Council is not the only group that is highly critical of the BBG. A statement issued by the leadership of the Voice of America employees’ unions, AFGE Local 1812 and AFSCME Local 1418, said that the Broadcasting Board of Governors “has been responsible for one blunder after another — to the point that its actions have compromised U.S. strategic interests.” Saying that “the elimination of Russian and Georgian radio broadcasts should be the last straw,” the VOA employees’ union leaders called on Congress to act immediately to dissolve the Broadcasting Board of Governors.  Their letter also said that the BBG, “unilaterally and in contravention of the express language of the Congress, closed the Voice of America Russian Radio Service.”  “In effect, we are deaf, dumb and blind in Russia,” the union letter said.

Articles highly critical of the BBG’s actions in the Middle East and Russia have been published by the independent journalism web site ProPublica.org. They point out that despite many major editorial and financial scandals, the BBG still favors the privatized broadcasting entities, such as Alhurra, over VOA. Investigative journalists at ProPublica.org, a non-profit led by former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger, reported that a guest invited to participate in an Alhurra program had called for killings of American soldiers in Iraq. The network also aired a report on a Holocaust deniers conference in Tehran. According to ProPublica.org, “the reporter who covered the conference told viewers that Jews had provided no scientific evidence of the Holocaust.”

FreeMediaOnline.org president Ted Lipien said that the responsibility for such broadcasts rests with the BBG’s blind trust in high audience ratings as reflected in its spokesperson’s statement that “what matters to the BBG is reaching as many people as possible.”  While the BBG claims that it wants ”accurate, balanced news and information” that gains the trust of audiences overseas, Lipien said that consultants hired by the BBG and its staff have been ordering BBG broadcasters to avoid airing views that audiences would strongly disagree with and to offer those that they like.  Even invited program guests have been told on occasion to moderate their pro-human rights opinions to meet the expectations of the audience.

Lipien said that in addition to airing views of Holocaust deniers, these policies have also led to canceling of VOA call-in radio programs on human rights in Russia and firing of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) editors who defended human rights programming.  Human rights activists overseas are also alarmed by BBG’s actions. Buddhist monks protested against BBG’s plans to reduce radio programs to Tibet. Earlier this year,  a Russian NGO, the Moscow Human Rights Bureau, criticized RFE/RL for giving an entire hour of airtime to a former Russian Parliament deputy Andrey Savel’yev. The Russian human rights organization said that Mr. Savel’yev’s “chauvinist and racist views are well-known.” The Moscow Human Rights Bureau said that the station was guilty not only  of enabling such people “to spread their poisonous views,” but also of legitimizing their ideas “in the minds of many impressionable radio listeners.” The appeal, written by the organization’s head Aleksandr Brod, argues that stations, which “in their pursuit of higher ratings” invite such “nationalist radicals,” are giving these enemies of democracy a larger audience and exacerbating ethnic tensions.

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. FreeMediaOnline.org reported that one of the BBG members who had voted for cutting VOA radio to Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine was Ted Kaufman, a former chief of staff to Senator Joe Biden.

The Public Diplomacy Council’s recommended steps for a new administration include:

• An immediate restoration of all radio services reduced at the Voice of America in FY 08.  On July 26, 2008, twelve days before Russia invaded Georgia, the BBG silenced VOA Russian radio, and then ignored subsequent appeals to restore it.  On September 30, the Board abolished VOA radio services in Serbian, Bosnian, and Macedonian and in the Hindi service to India, provisionally retaining Ukrainian and Georgian.  This action directly contravened Congressional passage last December of an FY 08 appropriation prohibiting all cuts.  The impact: loss of nine million listeners on the eve of a landmark U.S. presidential election.

 

•   A fundamental restructuring.  The Broadcasting Board of Governors should be replaced by a new nonpartisan oversight commission that would assume more of an advisory role, leaving daily management in the hands of a commission-appointed professional CEO, the VOA director, and the presidents of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcast Networks (Radio Sawa and Alhurra TV), and Radio-TV Marti to Cuba.  Through direct and public reporting on a regular basis, the commission should be accountable to the legislative and executive branches of the federal government for operations of all these networks, including program content.

 

• A long range commitment to consolidation and integration of the networks.  The CEO of international broadcasting should immediately formulate a new strategic plan, 2010-2014, that would include a series of target dates for the consolidation of all five broadcast entities into a single international network.  The goal: cost savings aimed at making U.S. global broadcasting unmatched on the airwaves and in cyberspace.

In implementing the latest round of radio program cuts last summer, the BBG staff led by its executive director Jeff Trimble and most BBG members, both Republicans and Democrats, ignored specific directives from Congress to refrain from reducing VOA radio broadcasts to Russia and other media-at-risk countries. In response to widespread criticism that followed, including articles on the FreeMediaOnline.org website, the BBG suspended its earlier decision to terminate VOA radio broadcasts to Georgia and Ukraine, but the BBG staff continued to resist calls to restore VOA radio broadcasts to Russia. Only recently did the BBG  relent by allowing VOA Russian service to start producing a half hour radio program for the web five days a week. The program is also rebroadcast on an AM transmitter in Moscow, which is still available despite the Russian government’s crackdown on private FM stations which were rebroadcasting VOA Western radio programs.

The BBG staff’s policy of marginalizing VOA radio programming to Russia is still reflected in how the now restored but still significantly shortened radio program can be accessed on the Internet. There is no direct audio link to it on the VOA Russian Service Home Page. Web users can only find the radio program by navigating though the site.  Also, until earlier this week, the link was not being updated and continued to provide audio from a program aired well before the U.S. presidential elections.

In addition to reports on Michael Jackson and Mickey Mouse in line with the BBG’s emphasis on increasing audience reach through entertainment programming, the newly restored VOA radio program “Panorama” does offer on some days more in-depth news analysis and greater range of American opinions in a single broadcast than video clips and short articles which the BBG staff wanted the VOA Russian web site to feature. More recently, the VOA Russian Service has increased the number of longer reports and interviews on political topics, although the overall program content is still not what it was before the BBG-imposed cuts last summer. VOA did not restore its previous hour-long radio call-in program that dealt with political issues in Russia and was popular with independent journalists and human rights activists.

FreeMediaOnline.org offers a more user-friendly way of listening on the web to the newly-restored VOA Russian radio program “Panorama.”  Click here for the radio player in a new window. The Z-Pod radio player also provides an easy way of listening to VOA English News and VOA Special English programs.

 FreeMediaOnline.org and Free Media Online Blog  November 8, 2008, San Francisco – Henry Loomis, who died Nov. 2 in Jacksonville, Fla., at age 89, was director of the Voice of America (VOA) during the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. During his tenure from 1958 to 1965, the VOA Charter was written, and technical facilities and programming for every part of the world were expanded. The VOA Charter, which protects the independence and integrity of VOA programming, was signed into law in 1976 by President Gerald Ford.

Loomis, a strong defender of independent journalism at the Voice of America, resigned in protest as VOA director in 1965 after the Johnson White House demanded that VOA keep quiet about American planes flying over Laos. He later served as president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting during the Nixon administration.

As VOA director, Loomis was in firm control of the station’s strategic planning. In the 1990s, much of the authority of the VOA director had been transferred to the bipartisan Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which eliminated the VOA Arabic radio service and  earlier this year shut down VOA radio broadcasts to Russia shortly before the Russian military attack on Georgia. The BBG also had plans to reduce or terminate VOA radio broadcasts to Tibet, Uzbekistan, China, Georgia, Ukraine, and a number of other countries. Due to protests from Dalai Lama, Tibetan monks, members of Congress, and press freedom organizations, the BBG was forced to suspend some of these cuts, but VOA radio broadcasts to Russia remain off the air.

Many Voice of America employees, who have been marginalized and demoralized by the BBG’s actions, remember Henry Loomis as a relentless and effective defender of VOA’s independence and journalistic mission. He is also credited with persuading Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, to spare the ancient Japanese city of Kyoto from a nuclear attack. Loomis, a physicist by training,  had studied Japanese history and art at Harvard. During World War II, he enlisted in the navy and served as a radar officer. Before being named Voice of America director in 1958, Loomis worked for the CIA and the Pentagon. After he retired, Loomis continued to speak out in support of funding and independence for Voice of America broadcasters.

Reporters Without Borders said in its November 3rd letter that it was “dismayed” by these “shocking statements” by the council’s chairman, Nushirvan Magerramli, announcing the bans on October 31st.

Reporters Without Borders believes that if the Azeri government carries out its threat, BBC, RFE/RL, and VOA will continue to broadcast on short wave. The organization pointed out that these international broadcasters ”would be able to broadcast on short wave as happened during the Soviet era. It would only have the effect of lowering the quality of reception for listeners,” but the radios would not disappear, Reporters Without Borders said in its statement.

Voice of America journalists and media freedom organizations are concerned, however, that the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a bipartisan body which oversees VOA and RFE/RL, will use the excuse of the crackdown on FM rebroadcasting in Azerbaijan to shut down the production in Washington of  all VOA Azeri radio programs.

There is a precedent for such an action on the part of the BBG, which now has six members split between Democrats and Republicans. The former BBG chairman James K. Glassman,  a Republican who is now the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs,  had justified the recent termination of VOA Russian-language radio broadcasts by claiming that Mr. Putin’s campaign of closing down VOA FM affiliates made all  VOA radio vernacular language broadcasting to Russia ineffective, including short wave radio. For various political and bureaucratic reasons, most other Republican members and all Democrats serving on the BBG have supported Glassman’s position. This view has been widely rejected, however, by members of Congress of both parties, foreign policy experts, and media freedom organizations.

FreeMediaOnline.org, a media freedom nonprofit based in San Francisco, had reported that several BBG members and the BBG staff led by its executive director Jeff Trimble, a former acting president of RFE/RL, have been working behind the scenes to divert money from Voice of America broadcasts to Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine to fund  the scandal-ridden Alhurra television for the Middle East and to strengthen Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcasting to Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union. In cutting VOA Russian radio Trimble was said to have received support from the Senate staff of the vice-president elect Joe Biden. RFE/RL is a semi-private entity incorporated in Delaware and based in Prague, the Czech Republic. It has a large bureau in Moscow whose employees according to reports are subject to pressure and intimidation from the Russian secret police. Voice of America is based in Washington, D.C. and most of its employees work in the United States. BBG member Ted Kaufman is a former chief of staff to Senator Biden.

Read: ProPublica.org article USC Study of Alhurra Withheld From Public; Inquiries of Network’s Operation Deepen

 Despite warnings from Congress and human rights organizations, the BBG terminated VOA Russian-language radio broadcasts just 12 days before the Russian military attack on Georgia and also wanted to end VOA radio broadcasts to Georgia and Ukraine. VOA employees are concerned that the BBG staff will respond the same way to the most recent crisis in Azerbaijan.

The BBG has temporarily suspended its plans to end VOA radio broadcasts to Georgia and Ukraine but VOA radio programs to Russia have not resumed as they were before the Russian invasion to Georgia. The BBG staff had also prevented VOA from producing Russian-language radio programs for the web, but relented after strong criticism from Congress and media freedom organizations. Last month a half-hour radio program was placed on the VOA Russian-language website as a Monday-through-Friday broadcast.
 

Listen to the Voice of America Russian radio program for the web.

However, the audio of the VOA radio program for the Internet has not been updated for nearly a week. The day after the U.S. presidential elections it still featured a number of reports on pre-election campaign and polls. At the urgings of the former BBG chairman James Glassman and the BBG staff, the VOA Russian service is now producing short video clips for placement on its website and blogs. It is now difficult to find on the Russian-language VOA website any  in-depth analysis or even a summary of President-elect Obama’s views on Mr. Putin’s and Mr. Medvedev’s Russia and U.S.-Russian relations. There are, however, plenty of short video reports, which include brief and superficial interviews with individual American voters giving their overall impressions of the two candidates. In one of them, the service featured a young African-American voter who was a McCain supporter without explaining that the African-American community was overwhelmingly supporting Senator Obama. Glassman, an enthusiast of web contests and  other short-format for-web-video, is perhaps best known for co-writing the book Dow 36,000, published in 1999, which predicted that the stock market was greatly undervalued and would at least triple within a few years.

The production of serious analysis of U.S. politics and foreign policy had largely ended with the termination of  VOA Russian radio broadcasts in late July. Critics of the BBG strategy as pursued by Glassman and Trimble have argued that it has dangerously undermined the U.S. ability to communicate with audiences in Russia and in the former Soviet republics on serious political issues. FreeMediaOnline.org president Ted Lipien has called on the BBG to restore VOA radio broadcasts to Russia, to expand political reporting, and to refrain from any cuts in VOA and RFE/RL radio programs to Georgia, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan.

Of the six BBG members, only political radio host Blanquita Cullum was said to have opposed VOA radio cuts to countries with limited free media. Critics of the BBG argue that VOA is more likely to attract an audience in Russia with substantive political news content for radio and the Internet than with the current BBG-favored formula of entertainment programming, video blogs and online contests.

VOA Russian service journalists continue to be underemployed and are still being forced by the BBG staff to produce mostly noncontroversial short video clips and text for the Internet.

The new radio program has some political news content but it is a far cry from the longer-format news radio and political call-in shows which the Russian service was producing before the BBG pulled the plug on VOA news radio operations for Russia.

FreeMediaOnline.org has learned that the BBG may also be under pressure from some elements within the Bush Administration to restore VOA Russian radio programs to what they were before the Russian attack on Georgia. The BBG had also taken steps, some of which were later temporarily suspended, to eliminate VOA radio broadcasts to Georgia, Ukraine, and India.

One of the strongest supporters of cutting VOA radio has been the BBG’s most recent chairman, James K. Glassman, who is now the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. An enthusiast of the Internet and web contests, Glassman is perhaps best known for co-writing the book Dow 36,000, published in 1999, which predicted that the stock market was greatly undervalued and would at least triple within a few years. On December 11, 2007 Glassman was nominated by President George W. Bush to replace Karen Hughes as the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.

A critic of Glassman’s approach to international broadcasting and public diplomacy wrote for the Free Media Online Blog that “the latest manifestation of the endless reservoir of fantasy is a video contest on the subject of democracy in which the State Department is soliciting amateur video entries worldwide.  It doesn’t matter that this subject gets broad treatment on such video websites as YouTube.  But then again, originality has become one of the casualties in the fool’s paradise of mediocrity in the U.S. public diplomacy bureaucracy,” claims a critic of Glassman’s record as the former BBG chairman.

[audio=http://www.voanews.com/mp3/voa/eurasia/russ/panorama.mp3,VOA Russian Radio]

 FreeMediaOnline.org and Free Media Online Blog October 9, 2008, San Francisco – A little over two months after the Voice of America (VOA), the official U.S. international broadcaster,  had eliminated its radio programs to Russia to focus resources on its Russian-language website, the BBC Russian Service has announced an ambitious plan aimed at enhancing its Internet presence and expanding radio programming, taking both actions at the same time. In July, the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a bipartisan body which manages the Voice of America, had forced VOA Russian Service journalists to abandon all radio broadcasts, both on-air and even online. It also mandated cuts in regularly scheduled VOA television programs and told VOA broadcasters to pursue a no-radio, Internet-only strategy for reaching audiences in Russia.

Facing a similar set of challenges in the Russian media market brought on by the Kremlin’s crackdown on independent journalists, the BBC World Service took a different approach and has now announced a new multiplatform and multimedia strategy for Russia, which includes the expansion of both Internet and radio programming, as well as increasing the production of video for use on the Web. According to a BBC press release,  resources will be redirected to enhance a 24/7 news coverage on its Russian-language website. At the same time, the BBC World Service announced that the flagship morning weekday news and current affairs Russian-language radio program, Utro na BBC, will be increased by half an hour, to three-and-a-half hours each day. The afternoon weekday drive time news and current affairs radio program, Vecher na BBC, will be increased, by one hour, to four hours each day. 

As the political appointees at the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors contemplated ending VOA radio broadcasts  to Russia, independent experts warned them that expanding Internet programming not only does not require the elimination of radio and TV production but heavily depends on both to provide content needed to attract more Web users.  Ignoring such advice, the BBG took VOA Russian-language radio programs off the air just 12 days before Russian troops invaded Georgia and so far has rejected pleas from Congressmen, journalists and NGOs to resume them. The VOA Russian Service broadcasters in Washington, who until recently were producing several hours of radio and television programming daily, are now underemployed but still prevented by the BBG from producing regularly scheduled radio programs even for those who would like to listen to them online.

FreeMediaOnline.org, a San Francisco-based media freedom nonprofit,  reported that bureaucratic politics are playing a major role in the U.S. broadcasting board’s decisions on Russia and may explain why VOA is forced to pursue a no-radio, Internet-only strategy when most experts agree that the multiplatform and multimedia approach adopted by the BBC is far more prudent and more effective. According to FreeMediaOnline.org sources, several BBG members as well as the BBG executive director Jeff Trimble prefer to steer money to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a semi-private radio station, which is also managed and funded by the BBG and broadcasts from Prague and Moscow.

These Washington officials are believed to want to secure RFE/RL’s position as the only radio voice in Russia funded by the American taxpayers. Their actions appear designed to achieve this goal even though, unlike VOA, RFE/RL does not specialize in explaining U.S. foreign policy and American culture, and its ability to operate independently within close reach of Mr. Putin’s secret police has come under question. FreeMediaOnline.org president Ted Lipien has called on the BBG to offer RFE/RL journalists in Russia greater protection from the Russian security services and to allow Voice of America to resume its role as the Washington-based broadcaster offering authoritative U.S. news and analysis to on-air and online radio listeners in Russia.

FreeMediaOnline.org sources report that a BBG member, Ted Kaufman, a former chief of staff to Senator Joe Biden, has a special interest in RFE/RL since the station is incorporated in Delaware, Senator Biden’s home state. Biden’s Senate staff was said to have advised the BBG officials on how to take VOA Russian radio off the air despite strong opposition to this move among many members of Congress. The BBG also wanted to eliminate VOA radio broadcasts to Georgia and Ukraine. It was forced to suspend its decision only after strong pressure from Congress, Georgian-American and Ukrainian-American groups. To avoid such protests, the BBG staff took steps to terminate VOA Russian radio broadcasts without making any public announcements. They did not know at the time that Russian troops would soon enter Georgia, but even afterwards they continued to resist resuming programs to Russia.

Conservative radio talk show host Blanquita Cullum, a Republican BBG member, has consistently opposed these radio cuts, but she has been outvoted each time by her Democratic and Republican colleagues. BBG’s most recent chairman, James K. Glassman, a Republican appointed by President Bush, had allied himself with Ted Kaufman and another Democratic BBG member, Jeff Hirschberg, who was a director of the U.S.-Russia Business Council.  Kaufman, Hirschberg, and Glassman, who is now the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, have been the strongest opponents of resuming VOA radio broadcasts to Russia. 

Press Releases

BBC reinforces its Russian online output

 

BBC World Service has announced changes which will further reinforce its Russian-language output. 

The main thrust of the reprioritised investment is placed on strengthening the website, bbcrussian.com, which has become the key method for delivery of all BBC content in Russian. 

The website is having a significant impact in Russia where it is easier to access than the BBC radio services, and where demand for online news is growing and becoming increasingly sophisticated.

In August 2008, at the height of the conflict between Russia and Georgia, the number of unique users of the website increased dramatically to nearly three million, and many of these new users have remained with the site in September.

The audience is also accessing other platforms online: in August 2008, traffic to online audio content doubled while demand for video jumped six-fold to nearly 2,300,000 views.

Use of news from BBC Russian via wireless handheld devices also more than doubled.

Use of forums and interactive traffic has also grown and during the recent conflict was at record levels.

Head of BBC Russian, Sarah Gibson, explains that the BBC wanted to improve its Russian-language offer to serve audiences whose media consumption habits are changing rapidly.

She says: “Our aim is to deliver a fresher, more relevant service for our audiences in Russia and the wider post-Soviet market – a trusted, high quality website with the kinds of features the audience expects, and news and current affairs programmes at key times of day, available online as well as through more traditional radio platforms.

“It’s clear that audiences like our multiplatform offer more and more, and our challenge now is to improve this offer and to give audiences more formats that they enjoy and engage with.

“That is why we are focusing resources where they will have most impact.”

Resources are being focused to enable the BBC to improve its rolling 24/7 news offer on bbcrussian.com.

The BBC will also increase the number of high-quality video reports, underpinned with original journalism from Russia. These, too, will be updated 24/7.

The BBC is also strengthening resources for bbcrussian.com during the morning peak periods and is increasing the resources for interactivity round the clock.

Reprioritisation also means boosting the Learn English section of bbcrussian.com – a tool which helps millions of Russian-speakers to master English in a simple and engaging manner.

The BBC Russian radio also changes, with re-focusing of resources on peak listening times and with more investment in flagship news and current affairs programmes.

Key daily radio programmes on short and medium wave will be expanded to make up a simpler schedule tailored for peak morning and evening drive-time audiences.

The flagship morning weekday news and current affairs programme, Utro na BBC, will be increased by half an hour, to three-and-a-half hours each day.

The afternoon weekday drive time news and current affairs sequence, Vecher na BBC – which includes the hour-long BBSeva hosted by Seva Novgorodsev – will be increased, by one hour, to four hours each day.

New weekend editions of Vecher na BBC will be launched, on both Saturday and Sunday, to take the place of current short updates.

There will be changes elsewhere in the radio schedule to fund these improvements.

The production of some short news bulletins, which were designed for Russian FM partners, will cease as the BBC no longer has these agreements.

Longer format feature programming will cease; their themes and issues will be incorporated into mainstream news and current affairs content. 

The reprioritisation also enables the BBC to develop extra newsgathering resources in Russia, resulting in increased reporting and analysis of Russian affairs.

The BBC will also increase the current affairs reporting of British cultural and social affairs, as well as reporting on the former Soviet Union, for all programmes and platforms.

Sarah Gibson sums up: “We believe that a fuller multimedia news offer will strengthen the impact of BBC Russian and that, as a result of these changes, BBC Russian will become the most trusted and influential international news provider in Russia, serving audiences in the global Russian-speaking community, across borders and platforms.”

BBC World Service Publicity

 

 FreeMediaOnline.org and Free Media Online Blog Commentary by Ted Lipien, October 7, 2008, San Francisco – U.S. public diplomacy is in crisis, as is U.S. international broadcasting. Officials in charge of both, including James K. Glassman, the current Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, put their hope in the Internet, other new media platforms, and heavy marketing to help them reach foreign audiences and create a more positive image of the United States. Wanting to promote democracy to young Internet users abroad, the State Department launched a global video contest about democracy, which the officials hope will attract a large number of participants who are used to uploading their  home-produced videos to platforms such as YouTube. As a sign of the importance that Under Secretary Glassman attaches to this new media video initiative, an image link to a special web page promoting the contest was placed on the home page of the official U.S. State Department  web site.

The officials, who designed the “Democracy Video Challenge” with the help from well-paid outside contractors, ask potential contestants around the world to create a video short that completes the phrase “Democracy is…” The main prize is an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., New York, and Hollywood. The eight winners from different parts of the world will have their videos screened and will meet with leaders of the U.S. film and television industry. They are also promised meetings with democracy advocates from government, the media and civil society. The submission deadline is January 31, 2009.

Before being appointed to the public diplomacy position at the State Department by President Bush, James K. Glassman, was the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which manages U.S. international broadcasts. In that position, he voted to eliminate the Voice of America radio broadcasts to Russia, Georgia and Ukraine in favor of more Internet-based programming. Despite strong opposition in Congress to this move, VOA Russian-language broadcasts were taken off the air 12 days before Russian troops entered Georgia thanks to advice and support from the Senate staff of Senator Joe Biden.  Even after the Russian invasion, Glassman said that these broadcasts would not resume, although under pressure from Congress, human organizations and Voice of America journalists he agreed to let VOA continue radio broadcasts to Georgia and Ukraine for the time being. When the Voice of America Russian Service journalists pleaded with him to let them counter the Kremlin’s propaganda using multiple media, including radio, he told them they would not be allowed to do any more radio programs and confirmed last week that “we are effectively starting to shift our Russia strategy to the Internet.”

In pushing the Internet-only strategy, the BBG staff is now preventing VOA from producing regularly scheduled political radio programs to Russia that could be broadcast on shortwave, a still available medium wave transmitter in Moscow, or even put on the Web. The Broadcasting Board of Governors under Glassman’s chairmanship continued a policy initiated by a former BBG member, media mogul Norman Pattiz, that placed a high premium on expanding audience reach through broadcasting music and making programming less political, less controversial, and less intellectual. Pattiz has been Senator Biden’s friend and supporter.

Neither the State Department officials nor BBG bureaucrats understand how new media works, which has resulted in programming initiatives that foreign audiences are likely to view as embarrassing the United States. What works well for independent NGO-driven media is rarely effective when new media strategies are employed by government bureaucrats working with outside marketing consultants.

The “Democracy Video Challenge” is likely to be no exception, although a much more limited and more focused program could produce some benefits if it were designed and implemented by NGOs or even by diplomats with area expertise who know what  kind of Internet promotion is appropriate for a given target audience.

The State Department is not the only victim of marketing experiments favored by its public diplomacy chief. Strictly journalistic organizations, such as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, were significantly more effective in the past when they could produce programming according to the real news needs of their audiences rather than be forced by the BBG and its former chairman to dumb down their message, use flashy marketing schemes, and limit their program delivery options.

 FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog Commentary by Ted Lipien, October 4, 2008, San Francisco – James Glassman, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, gave incomplete and misleading answers when asked Friday whether the elimination of vernacular broadcasts to Georgia, Russia, and India is going to hurt his “war of ideas” effort. Speaking in Washington at a National Press Club luncheon on “The New Age of Public Diplomacy,” Glassman seemed surprised and annoyed by the question.

His answer that the U.S. is not eliminating but increasing broadcasts to Georgia was clearly misleading since as a former chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) he had voted earlier to eliminate Voice of America (VOA) Georgian and Ukrainian radio broadcasts and was forced to reverse his position only after Russia attacked Georgia. 

Glassman also gave an incomplete, convoluted and misleading answer on the elimination of VOA radio broadcasts to Russia. He failed to mention that he had approved the ending of VOA radio to Russia just 12 days before Russian troops entered Georgia. He continues to oppose their resumption.

Glassman also failed to mention that the BBG staff working under his guidance and with the support from the Senate staff of Senator Biden acted with great urgency and in great secrecy to take VOA Russian radio broadcasts off the air in late July. The secrecy was needed to prevent alerting other members of Congress and human rights and press freedom organizations who have been overwhelmingly opposed to this move and have warned him not to proceed. He ignored these warnings.

Glassman was also disingenuous in saying that the Voice of America is now pursuing a program delivery strategy using the Internet because only about 2 percent of Russians listen to shortwave broadcasts and Mr. Putin has closed down most of the affiliates who were rebroadcasting VOA and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty programs on FM. While his comment about shortwave listenership and FM affiliates is essentially accurate, Glassman failed to mention that the BBG staff, headed by former RFE/RL acting president Jeff Trimble, is preventing the VOA Russian Service from producing any kind of radio broadcasts, even for the Internet. Glassman was Executive Vice President of U.S. News & World Report, which also employed Jeff Trimble. Glassman and Trimble have worked together and with Senator Biden’s former chief of staff Ted Kaufman, a BBG member, to eliminate VOA’s ability to produce radio broadcasts to Russia. Glassman, who is a Republican, was a Bush Administration appointee to the BBG.

While making the point of the importance of reaching a target audience in Russia, Glassman also failed to mention that when he had voted to cut VOA radio broadcasts in Russian the service was still able to use an AM transmitter in Moscow.  The AM transmitter continues to be available and can utilized to reach decision makers in the Russian capital. RFE/RL still uses an AM transmitter in Moscow.

Glassman also failed to mention that while he is preventing the Voice of America from broadcasting radio to Russia on shortwave, he together with Senator Biden supports such broadcasts by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. RFE/RL is incorporated in Delaware, Senator Biden’s home state.

Human rights and media freedom organizations have been raising questions whether RFE/RL, which has a large staff of local reporters in Russia, can be effective and independent while the Kremlin’s security services are monitoring and intimidating Russian journalists. A Russian human rights organization has also criticized RFE/RL for giving extensive airtime to an extremist Russian politician known for his racist views.

In giving his superficial and misleading answers Friday at a National Press Club luncheon, Glassman was clearly counting that the audience does not have the necessary background information to evaluate his facts and analysis. The Voice of America and the BBG  employees’ union described Glassman as unwilling to admit a mistake. Here is what the AFGE Local 1812 reported on its website:

DATELINE: Washington, 08/13/08.  James Glassman, the former Chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and the current surrogate for the Secretary of State on the BBG, visited the Voice of America (VOA) Russian and Georgian Services late in the afternoon on Tuesday, August 12th.  Both Services assumed that he was coming to announce that the BBG had acted rashly when it announced in July that it was going to end the Russian and Georgian radio broadcasts, among others.  The BBG had ended the VOA Russian radio broadcasts on July 26th.  The VOA Georgian radio broadcasts are as yet still on the air.

The employees had misinterpreted the reason for his visit.  Glassman announced that he was visiting them just to thank them for all their hard work.  Both Services informed him that the Russian media were broadcasting old Soviet style propaganda.  The VOA Russian Service members announced that they were ready and eager to begin broadcasts again in order to counter the Russian propaganda. They were told that a reallocation of funds had taken place and that would not change. When asked if the Georgian Service would continue broadcasts after September 30th, he told the employees that he didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up.

Watch Video:

Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs James K. Glassman at the National Press Club luncheon, September 3, 2008. Comments about China and  U.S. broadcasting to Russia, Georgia, and India start about 39 min. into the video.

 FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog September 30, 2008, San Francisco – Sources say that the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) tried to recruit John Cochran of NBC, then ABC News, as their high profile public relations guru. According to earlier reports, the BBG also tried to recruit Paula Zahn, who turned them down.

The yearly cost of such a position is well over $100,000. The same bipartisan Board, which manages U.S. government-funded international broadcasts, terminated the Voice of America radio programs to Russia and wanted to end broadcasts to Ukraine and Georgia. Most members of Congress are strongly opposed to these cuts.

Despite Russia’s attack on Georgia in early August, the BBG continues to oppose the resumption of VOA Russian-language radio broadcasts, but its plan to cut radio programs to Ukraine and Georgia has been put temporarily on hold due to strong protests from foreign policy and human rights groups. Earlier, the BBG had tried to reduce radio broadcasts to Tibet and China but was forced by Congress to cancel these plans.

The money which the Board proposes to spend on its new public relations initiative would pay for  VOA radio broadcasts to at least one country near Russia’s borders. The Voice of America Russian Service already has sufficient resources to produce radio programs, but the BBG prevents it from resuming radio broadcasting to Russia. The Board keeps VOA Russian staff underemployed and wants to limit their work to producing a website in order to save money for its other projects.

Ted Lipien, president of media freedom nonprofit FreeMediaOnline.org, criticized the BBG’s decision saying that a VOA website will not have any significant impact on the Russian government leaders or the Russian public opinion. Only one of the current six BBG members, radio broadcaster Blanquita Cullum, was reported to have voted against program cuts to Russia, Georgia, and Ukraine.

The program cuts and the hiring of a new spokesperson were supported by the former BBG chairman, James Glassman, who is now the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Cullum was reported to have strongly objected to spending money on public relations campaigns while programs to countries without free media were being cut. Both Cullum and Glassman are Republicans.

All Democrats on the Board have supported program cuts. One of the strongest advocates of ending VOA radio programs to Russia was Ted Kaufman, Senator Joe Biden’s former chief of staff who now works on his vice presidential campaign. Voice of America radio to Russia has been off the air for over two months. Last week, Senator Sam Brownback (R-KA) proposed legislation that would abolish both the Broadcasting Board of Governors and the position of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs and create a new agency in charge of U.S. public diplomacy.

Even if the information given by the VOA director was fully accurate, which it is not, the logic of his argument is appalling, to say the least. According to this line of reasoning, Mr. Putin will be rewarded for his crackdown on the local media by VOA’s decision to stop radio broadcasts not only on the affiliate stations in Russia but also on shortwave and the Internet.  

While it is true that Mr. Putin can easily close down all affiliates in Russia, both VOA and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty still have access to AM frequencies in Moscow. RFE/RL continues to use its AM frequency while VOA now uses its AM frequency for VOA English programming only. BBC and RFE/RL did not stop their radio programming in Russian because Mr. Putin closed down most of their affiliates, and neither should VOA.

The VOA director knows or should have known that the decision to stop VOA Russian radio programs had very little to do with Mr. Putin, and a lot to do with bureaucratic politics that damage U.S. national security and public diplomacy. If anything, VOA should be now greatly expanding shortwave and Internet radio broadcasts in response to Mr. Putin’s crackdown on the Russian media. Instead, Mr. Austin is helping the BBG and its executive director to undermine America’s ability to safely and effectively communicate with the Russian people.

Mr. Austin knows that the BBG staff led by Jeff Trimble is preventing VOA Russian service from having any radio production, not even for the Web, in order to protect RFE/RL. Perhaps, there would be nothing wrong with that if RFE/RL could indeed do VOA’s job. But the Russian managers of this semi-private broadcaster, based largely in Moscow, express confidence in Mr. Putin’s leadership and give extensive airtime to racist Russian politicians who verbally attack Africans, Jews, and other minorities. I have warned that RFE/RL needs to protect its journalists who live in Russia with their families from the intimidation by Mr. Putin’s secret police. Journalists working under such conditions in Mr. Putin’s Russia can hardly be expected to accurately and objectively present American views and opinions. As U.S. government officials, Mr. Austin and Mr. Trimble had an obligation imposed on them by the American people and the U.S. Congress to seriously consider this issue before stopping VOA radio broadcasts to Russia. 

If Mr. Austin is concerned about the lack of radio affiliates in Russia, he should be even more concerned about the Internet-only strategy being forced on the VOA Russian service by Mr. Trimble, who was formerly RFE/RL’s acting president. Shouldn’t he be somewhat curious why Mr. Trimble is not advocating Internet-only strategy for RFE/RL but only for VOA?  If RFE/RL can have an outstanding Russian website, which it does, and still produce tons of radio programming and even video, why is the VOA Russian service staff, about 20 full time employees plus a number of stringers and purchase order vendors, only capable of doing a website with some video and nothing else. Mr. Austin should be concerned that these talented professionals are now woefully underemployed and that he, together with Jeff Trimble and the BBG members, is responsible for wasting U.S. taxpayers’ money.

The BBG staff would like, of course, Mr. Austin to believe that the Internet requires as many if not more resources than producing regularly scheduled radio and TV programs. If that were the case, RFE/RL and most other broadcasters around the world would have long ago be forced to stop their core broadcasting functions and use all of their resources for developing their Internet presence. If Mr. Austin believes in this myth, then the Voice of America is really in deep trouble. The so called VOA Russia Options paper produced by the BBG staff, which advocated the Internet-only option for VOA, is based on so many naive and misleading assumptions that any intelligent person could see that its only purpose was to prevent VOA from producing radio programs in Russian. Among other things, the paper advocated using Internet companies known to be controlled by the Russian security services.

When asked later why that question about VOA broadcasting to Russia was raised during a meeting with VOA director Dan Austin, a member of the Ukrainian Service said that “we are all Americans and it is important that we broadcast to Russia in Russian.” It is ironic that a Ukrainian VOA broadcaster would defend VOA broadcasts to Russia while the VOA director says that Mr. Putin has won the battle. Let’s hope Mr. Austin does not really believe the arguments, which were clearly prepared for him by the BBG staff. Those who know how the BBG operates say that the VOA director’s position is too weak for Dan Austin to stand up to Jeff Trimble.

We can only hope that Mr. Austin will find the courage to say to the BBG what needs to be said: the Russian Service of the Voice of America is one of the most important of VOA services and its radio broadcasts will be resumed and put on shortwave, the AM frequency in Moscow, and on the Web. The message from Mr. Austin should be that even if Mr. Putin closes down every single affiliate in Russia and blocks the Internet, VOA will broadcast radio to Russia on shortwave and satellite.

To do anything short of that would be a major failure for U.S. public diplomacy and would reward the enemies of media freedom. Let’s hope that Mr. Austin will find enough wisdom and courage to do what the American people and the supporters of democracy in Russia expect from the leader of an organization committed to promoting free flow of information to countries without free media.