Below are my comments, in bold, to President Steve Korn’s resignation letter  sent to the Board Of Governors, BBG/IBB Staff and RFE/RL employees around the world.  I make these comments  so that President Korn will know that his version of the facts are known to be, as he would call it, misinformation.
Jan Palach

  (pen name of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist)

Previous posts by Jan Palach in BBG Watch:

• Anonymous employee’s message to RFE/RL President Korn – treat your staff as professionals
• Does anyone care about Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty?
• Fewer journalists but executive offices fully occupied at Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty
• Message to Broadcasting Board of Governors: Yes, some of us are cowards and we are ashamed

Message to Broadcasting Board of Governors: Yes, some of us are cowards and we are ashamed
December 31, 2012
The Board of Directors
RFE/RL, Inc.
Vinohradska 159A
100 00 Praha 10
Czech Republic
 
Ladies and Gentlemen:
The first rule of journalism is never bury the lead. So here it is: I hereby resign as President and Chief Executive Officer of RFE/RL, Inc., effective as of the close of business on January 25, 2013. I submit this resignation with a heavy heart and solely for personal reasons.
Several of you know that my family was unable to move to Prague for a variety of reasons.  Christmas 2011 was the only time my three children were able to visit Prague.  At that time, slightly more than a year ago, I made a promise to my son that I would be home permanently in time for his 16^th birthday in February, 2013. I have never wavered in this commitment.  My closest associates at RFE/RL have known of my intention since early last summer when I began the first draft of this letter.
In addition, my father is ill. He is in his eighties and his time may be short. I am simply no longer willing to spend his last years separated by 5,000 miles and six time zones. (The one week a month you were away from Atlanta to be in Prague was too much to bear?)
As much as I believe in the mission of RFE/RL and as much as I respect the extraordinary people of this great company, my place is with my family and these considerations have made my decision to resign clear. (If you  respected RFE/RL employees, why did you treat your employees with what can be described as aloof contempt, punctuated with occasional fits of rage.)
I agreed to take this position because it presented the opportunity to apply a lifetime of experience in the news and media business to an exceptionally worthy mission. The mission of RFE/RL for over 60 years has been to bring a free press- unbiased, truthful and accurate news and information- to societies that lack freedom of press and expression. RFE/RL is a beacon of hope to oppressed people from Belarus to Pakistan and to most points in between. Through our work and steadfast commitment to our mission we represent the best values of America; a country that I have loved all my life, but have grown to love even more because of my experience at RFE/RL.  (What values did you represent, love of power?  You eschewed advice, punished dissent, and showed all the compassion of many  totalitarian rulers throughout the world.)
Like any organization, the heart and soul of RFE/RL is its people. It has been one of the great honors of my life to serve with and get to know the hundreds of dedicated people of the company. I have been awed and humbled by their commitment, fearlessness, courage and strength that are evident most every day.  From the Belarusians who have been beaten and interrogated by the KGB; to the Azeris blackmailed by their own government for exposing state corruption; to the Iranian thrown in solitary confinement for accepting an offer to work for us; and east to Afghanistan and Pakistan where our journalists face grave personal threats almost daily from the Taliban for the simple act of reporting the truth. These are the kind of people that make a difference in the world, but who too often go unnoticed.
The notion of “speaking truth to power” is used all too frequently in the U.S. to apply to cases where that act has very little in the way of negative consequences for the speaker.  The journalists of RFE/RL, however, “speak truth to power” every day in places where doing so can, and all too frequently does, mean imprisonment, torture or death. To me that is the very essence of courage. (Or in the case of RFE/RL under your regime, where “speaking truth to power” leads to being fired.)
It has also been one of the great lessons of my life to get to know so many people from countries where oppression is the norm who nevertheless conduct their lives with dignity, optimism, kindness and humor. It is a lesson which I will strive to internalize and one which I shall never forget.
If there is one lesson that I hope to have imparted to my colleagues it is that change is inevitable, constant and necessary to the continued vitality of RFE/RL. To be frank, when I arrived I found a degree of institutional inertia and insular self-satisfaction that I thought could be harmful to the future of the company. The company had become too comfortable with its past successes and current methods. (As you have shown, change for change’s sake can be significantly more harmful than sclerosis.)
Despite the expressed desires of some, RFE/RL is not a think tank. We are a news and information company with a very specific mission that competes against highly focused, better resourced competitors that often play by rules that we reject and abhor. We cannot rest on our reputation, past successes or the righteousness of our mission. As George Romney prophetically told his son Mitt in reference to the U.S. auto industry: “there’s nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success”.   (What RFE/RL is not  is some sort of transit point for passing along generic international news stories to put alongside locally generated fluff pieces to attract politically disinterested audiences.  Talented local journalists are happy to work at great personal risk to themselves if they can report the stories others won’t, not easy stories that everyone can.)
As I have said many times to the people in the company, change is not a choice. The only choice is whether we initiate and control the way we change; or whether we become the victims of change by external conditions and competitors. If we do not relentlessly choose the former, we will be buried by the later. (To embrace change, there must be a vision as to where that change may go.  In your view, the buggy whip company should have tried to manufacture blinders, harnesses, reigns, yokes, etc. until they found a product the market wanted like perhaps rear view mirrors for automobiles.  Of course, this approach would have been expensive, and bankrupted the company before they realized success, just like the trial and error approach you champion to find what will work at Radio Liberty in Moscow, which is killing the website and our reputation.)
This has been the constant theme of my stewardship of RFE/RL. It has driven our strategic and audience targeting plans for each of our language services. It is the reason for our emphasis on multimedia distribution where necessary or feasible. In addition to safety, it has been the motivating force behind the new facilities we are building in Moscow, Tbilisi, Yerevan and Almaty, our plans to upgrade our video capability in Baku and our plans to build three fully equipped video studios in Prague. We have reorganized our central news room operation and placed greater emphasis on its role in servicing our language services, rather than Washington think tanks. As I told you in a memo last fall we have changed our emphasis to look to the east to our broadcast region in direct support of the journalism that is our raison d’être. We are increasing the investment in our bureaus and the people who work tirelessly in them. We have and continue to provide them with new equipment wherever possible. For the first time we have created a fund to help protect and aid our journalists in trouble. We have expanded the Havel Fellowship program and solidified its financial future. For the first time in our history, we have secured health insurance for our bureau employees. The lack of such coverage was a shameful condition that I am most proud to have remedied.  (Thank on behalf of the employees in the bureaus for the health insurance, for continuing to provide funding for journalists in trouble  and moving to safer bureaus in Tbilisi and Yerevan.   The value of video studios in the Internet age is debatable.)
Change is inevitable and smart, strategically sound change is imperative. While I have chosen to make the necessity for change the basic thrust of my tenure, I know well that many people find change difficult. We are all, to some degree, creatures of habit. I know also that those who have opposed our course of innovation, especially in Russia, will view my resignation as some sort of victory. I am convinced, however, that when all of the dust has settled, the histrionics have abated and the biased misinformation falls of its own weight, that the change we have implemented will be proved to have preserved, strengthened and advanced our core mission. (As they say, “The truth will out,”  and once the rest of your spinmeisters are forced to leave RFE/RL, and the full story is told, it will tell of a cocktail of arrogance mixed with ignorance and a dash of ineptitude that lead to your quote/unquote resignation.  There are many who do not believe you or Julia Ragona or Dale Cohen are capable of recognizing the truth, or at least relaying it.  If you did, maybe you would not have continued down a flawed path, and you would still have a job.)
I think it is also well worth noting that that all of these changes have been accomplished without one penny of additional funding. It has all been achieved through careful management of our allocated budget. To be sure, we are under resourced. To pay for the changes we have implemented we have had to make smart, strategic and sometimes painful choices about how and where to spend our funds.  We have done things like reducing or not filling vacancies for nine senior management positions. We subleased one of the two floors we occupied in our Washington office because the additional space was a luxury we could not afford and did not need. The sublease alone saved us $500,000 per year which we have been able to plow back directly into our mission. Similarly, we downsized our Washington presence in favor of moving resources east to Prague and the bureaus. We reduced certain building services in Prague and reallocated those funds to direct support of our journalists. (Wow, now that the plants in the Prague offices were removed, the bureaus must be flush with cash.  Oh wait, didn’t you spend that money on increasing salaries for your VPs as well as funding their business class travel?)
These choices in no way obviate our need for greater funding. As I noted, we are severely under resourced. As you know well, the current budget environment makes adequate funding difficult to imagine and reduced funding difficult to avoid. Nevertheless, reduced funding imperils the mission and puts an unfair burden on our people who are, in almost all cases, inadequately compensated for their efforts. Beyond compensation, we struggle with paltry budgets that make basic things difficult and at which our competitors would no doubt laugh. I am certain you share my views on this issue. I can only wish you nothing but success in the budget battles to come.  (Unfortunately  your bad decision making squandered good will at home and abroad, and made it that much easier for funding to be redirected elsewhere.  Thank you for the wishes of good luck, because of you RFE/RL will need it more than ever.)
At every turn since I joined RFE/RL I have supported and, indeed defended, the Board’s strategy for USIB, even as others have resisted your vision for the agency. Your vision for consolidation and elimination of language service duplication was rejected by many, but I thought it was smart and necessary and said so publicly when doing so was not the most popular position to take. Unfortunately, these efforts are, at best, stalled. We have found ways to cooperate with our colleagues at VOA. As you know, Radio Farda recently launched a terrific new morning show, Breakfast with News, on VOA’s Persian News Network. I believe this effort will serve as a model for future cooperation between the entities of USIB. When we open our new state of the art facility in Moscow in a few weeks, VOA’s Moscow bureau will move into our facility at no cost to VOA.  This collocation should also serve to facilitate joint projects between RFE/RL and VOA. RFE/RL has led the way in sharing and implementing our home grown content management system, Pangea, with the other USIB entities, save one, to great success. This project alone has saved the agency upwards of seven figures.  (Your announcement from day one that you were for the consolidation plan as presented to you by the Board of Directors shows that you were unqualified to lead RFE/RL.  A true leader would have investigated the company, its mission, versus those of the other entities and then decided the value of consolidation.  .  He would have gathered the facts to plot an informed course, instead of drinking Kool-Aid served to him by an old friend who chaired  a part time board. Instead you let it be known that you were willing to sacrifice what makes RFE/RL unique in order to crowned king of the consolidated entity.)
It is all too painfully known to everyone involved with U. S. International Broadcasting that the organization suffers from structural dysfunction that has a significantly negative impact on the entire agency. There is  constant internecine warfare over issues large and small. There are indeed serious battles to be fought. If, however, we spend all of our time fighting among ourselves over petty issues, then our real adversaries and competitors will waltz to victory in the “information war”.  I hope that you will find a way to heal USIB so that the good people who have devoted their lives to the agency’s important mission can do their jobs and receive the Board’s support. Perhaps the imminent public release of the Inspector General’s report on the BBG will provide the impetus for the change that is so sorely needed if the mission is to be accomplished.  (If the OIG report is to do any good it will be a scathing rebuke of the selection of senior staff and consultants at BBG/IBB and the broadcast entities based on cronyism  rather qualifications.  Look at all the ex-CNNers now working (or in the case of some, receiving salaries for no measurable contribution) for USIB.  Chairman Isaacson brought you and other of his cronies into the mix, and you in turn brought in your buddy Dale Cohen, while others brought in friends equally unqualified.  Many of you did not have the journalistic background, sense of history and/or mission to take on the tasks you were assigned, yet you received positions of great responsibility at which many failed and continue to fail in their  own unique ways, yours just being the most public.)
At my initial meeting with the Presidential search committee I said that if they wanted to hire someone to merely babysit RFE/RL, that I was not the person for the job. I explained my views about the role of a CEO as a change agent and described the way I went about change at two other media organizations at which I had worked. I explained that change was an ongoing process and that we should never be satisfied with our past successes. The committee indicated that the approach I described was consistent with its view of what was required from the next President of RFE/RL.
Similarly, in the first speech I gave to the RFE/RL staff in Prague on June 6, 2011, I said: “we will never be complacent or become satisfied with what we have accomplished. In 60 years we have accomplished remarkable things, but if we focus excessively on past achievements we dishonor our own history and disable our future… every day when I wake up I will be motivated by one question: What can I do today to make RFE/RL better? How can I advance the mission?”
I leave my post as President of RFE/RL knowing to a moral certainty that I have kept faith with that pledge. (This is why Governor Ashe calls you delusional.  You were hired to move RFE/RL forward, whereas your actions have set it back in several of RFE/RL’s broadcast countries. Is it true that even at the late hour in your tenure that you cannot at least admit, “mistakes were made.”)
To both those who may be heartened and those who may be disheartened by my resignation, I would point to the words of Theodore Parker, the American theologian and abolitionist who, in a speech in 1858, said: “ I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight, I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”  (As for the moral universe curving towards justice, this would only be true if upon your return to Prague you were met by members of our guard team, and escorted to your office where you would box up you effects, then marched out the door without being able to say goodbye to whatever friends you have made during your time at RFE/RL. – Reference to how Korn, Ragona and Cohen fired Radio Liberty journalists in Moscow. They also prevented them from saying good bye to their radio and online audiences of many years. RFE/RL executives made sure that Korn’s lengthy, 2192 words, resignation letter was made accessible on the RFE/RL English news website without any balancing information.)
My term at RFE/RL has been Dickensian. It has been the best of times; and it has been the worst of times. Yet, I am honored and have been enriched by and am thankful for the rare opportunity you have given me to lead RFE/RL. I will, of course, work with you and my successor (whose selection I whole heartedly applaud) in any way you or he may desire to assure a smooth and professional transition. (You have already been a great help to your successor as a negative example, but please feel free to not add any more help in the next four weeks.)
I remain,
Very Truly Yours,
Steve