[Mb-civic] Muffling the Voice of America - John J. Schulz - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  Muffling the Voice of America

By John J. Schulz  |  February 24, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

MULTIPLE CHOICE question: Which of the following had the largest 
audience among global shortwave radio listeners between 1975 and 1995? 
The BBC? Radio Moscow? The Voice of America?

The answer, according to joint surveys done often by the BBC and the 
VOA, was that our Voice of America, broadcasting in as many as 50 
languages at times, was the leading international broadcaster for much 
of that period.

I served in the VOA vineyards as a news writer, foreign correspondent, 
and then as a senior news executive for 21 years during that era, and 
even did guest appearances on a weekly BBC radio broadcast for much of 
the two years that I was in graduate school at Oxford. Both services 
were dedicated to accurate, comprehensive, serious in-depth news reporting.

The difference was that, accents aside, VOA was prohibited by law from 
broadcasting to the United States. So our citizens never knew just how 
good their ''official" radio station was, unless they spent time 
traveling or living abroad, especially if they were in places where 
accurate news was hard to come by. Indeed, some of the biggest fans of 
VOA over the years were the generations of foreign correspondents based 
in Moscow and Beijing who found VOA reports a lifeline to news of the world.

Thus, it is with growing dismay that I read news of the latest spending 
plans being discussed by members of the Bush administration and their 
advisers for how best to influence Muslims and attitudes in the Muslim 
world. Congress is being asked for an additional $75 million to 
''support democracy" in Iran, and unnamed State Department officials are 
saying it will be used to ''improve radio broadcasts, begin satellite 
broadcasts, and include money for scholarships for Iranian students to 
come to the United States."

Nowhere is VOA mentioned.

News of this request comes only one day after I learned of the latest 
announcement by Bush-appointed officials that VOA will have to 
discontinue its worldwide English broadcasts, which have been on the air 
24 hours a day without interruption since 1942. Millions of people have 
learned to speak English by listening to VOA. It even broadcast a formal 
''English 900" language training program to China in the 1970s that was 
the most widely listened-to single program in the country, outstripping 
all the government sponsored broadcasts. During the ''solidarity 
strikes" against the communist government in Poland in the 1980s, 
surveys showed 85 percent daily listenership to VOA for more than nine 
months.

And for nearly five decades, people throughout the Middle East turned to 
VOA and the BBC for ''consistently reliable" and ''comprehensive" news, 
as mandated by the VOA charter. Yet recently, that organization, whose 
1,100 employees and 40 or so language broadcast services cost the 
tiniest fraction of 1 percent of that portion of the budget focused on 
foreign affairs (including the State Department), has faced cut after 
budget cut.

Meantime, the Bush administration has flailed about with various ideas 
designed to reach people in the Middle East, including a new ''teen-pop" 
radio station (Radio SAWA) and by appointing Madison Avenue ''experts" 
and others to take charge of ''promoting America and its image abroad."

One of the saddest of recent developments was news of the 
administration's effort to plant phony pro-American stories in the local 
Iraqi press, ostensibly written by Iraqi journalists but actually bought 
and paid for by the Lincoln Group, a new public relations firm that has 
flourished the last two years in Washington, thanks to the multimillion 
dollar contracts it has received from the Pentagon to do such work. We 
now know that the Lincoln Group was started by two men with a history of 
failed projects, who won the contracts on spurious claims of close 
connections to top military officials and reputable advertising and 
public relations firms, all of which are quoted as having only the most 
casual and distant of contacts with that group.

While abandoning VOA as a ''relic of the Cold War" and ignoring nearly 
50 years of reputation and good standing among Middle Eastern audiences 
(some of whom get VOA on local AM or FM relay broadcasts, as well as 
shortwave), the White House is casting about for ways to connect with 
Islamic audiences globally when the answer is just 10 blocks away at the 
VOA headquarters.

News of events and developments related to new propaganda-funding plans 
and revelations about the Lincoln Group would by laughable if it weren't 
so costly and downright tragic.

John J. Schulz is dean of the College of Communication at Boston University.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/24/muffling_the_voice_of_america/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060224/6dd8b661/attachment.htm