Clarifications are needed

When well-meaning academic reporting becomes misinformation

[Update at the bottom, October 2, 2024]

We examine past events to understand the motivations behind actions, the actions themselves, and their consequences. Historical events are not abstract occurrences. Individuals and groups have motivations that often require digging to collaborate or reject talking points. For ongoing and future academic inquiry, it is crucial to have reliable historical records, particularly those analyzed and presented by respected scholars.

Realizing the shortcomings in prior research into the historical record has been a feature of my research. Notable examples include finding “disseminate abroad” and “dissemination abroad” in the Smith-Mundt Act, which were words inserted into the legislation to provide blanket authority to the State Department to operate the information service without restriction abroad. It was not a prophylactic or restraint against domestic access.

Upturning the accepted wisdom, which at one time I also accepted based on a reasonable inference of several data points (and ignoring or being unaware of more significant data pointing in another direction), required digging into the archives from the mid-1940s to reveal the truth.¹ How incorrect interpretations of provisions of the Smith-Mundt Act became accepted as fact is a separate discussion.

I want to look at how a relatively recent event has been sterilized in a new book to mean something other than it did. The book is Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America by Kate Wright, Martin Scott, and Mel Bunce (Oxford University Press, 2024). 

Let me set up the passage I’ll focus on here. The discussion starts on page 50 with the Secretary of State testifying in 2013 that the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) “abdicated the ideological arena” and was “practically defunct in terms of its capacity to tell a message around the world.” The agency, the authors write, “was also widely seen by the Obama administration as operationally dysfunctional.” The governing board “rarely had enough governors to be quorate,” and since the governors served part-time (though not fixed) terms, the “BBG was often thought to be unable or unwilling to execute long-term strategic change.” 

While factually correct, what we see here is blame-shifting. I informed the authors, and they could have found, on their own, details that would not parrot contemporaneous talking points and instead would give their readers the necessary context and understanding of how the situation came to be as it was. This, in turn, would provide a better preparation for what followed. 

I had an insider’s seat to many of the activities I’ll discuss below as a BBG Governor. I was not new to this topic or this agency, having previously served as the executive director of the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy with the job of overseeing and reviewing these activities, and as an observer, writer, academic, and advisor in and around these activities for nearly a decade before. I spoke and emailed one of the authors at length, and I thank them for recognizing that in their acknowledgments and in the citations. However, they ignored what I believed was pertinent information that greatly affected their narrative. 

The blame-shifting they inadvertently perform is from the White House to the agency. The board members were nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and the overall design was the board would be constantly refreshed by new confirmees. They served on rolling three-year terms until they were replaced or quit.² Successive administrations failed to refresh the board with the intended frequency. This often meant members were serving beyond their intentions to serve and wanted to quit but couldn’t because then the enterprise’s business would grind to a halt without leadership. This was particularly true in 2009 and again in 2013, but the implication in the text is that this is a local (to the agency) matter. Let me explain. 

By the summer of 2013, the chairman of the board was no longer showing up to meetings. The originally designed chairmen from the 2009 refresh—who had insisted the whole board be announced at once, thus delaying installing new leadership at the time—had quit suddenly. (He left to write another biography many have read.) The replacement chairman said he didn’t want or had time for the job. The White House promised his chairmanship would be short, but as time passed and no relief came, the White House ghosted him. And he stopped attending meetings. This was a leadership problem above the level of the agency. 

In 2009, the new chairman of the board decided that it would make sense to have members adopt individual networks. The agency had already been more like a holding entity that infrequently thought of itself as a whole rather than a bunch of networks, and this made it worse.³ My first official engagement with BBG as a newly confirmed Governor to the BBG (I was confirmed in August 2013) revealed this defect in all its glory. On a budget call with the networks, I listened to networks and the headquarters staff speak in terms of zero-sum arguments between networks, not the agency’s mission or requirements. We, the new board, sought to fix this.⁴

I believe details are necessary, and reductionist narratives, as this book has, enable or even create outright incorrect interpretations of events. So, with some of the organizational challenges of the agency discussed above, here is the passage in the book I want to actually discuss. 

For these reasons, an ambitious restructure was proposed in a bipartisan bill introduced in 2014 by Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) and Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) (Weed 2016; Metzgar 2013). The Royce-Engel bill proposed creating a new International Communications Agency within the State Department, headed by the CEO. It also proposed to amalgamate surrogate stations into a single network, which VOA would supply with content, as well as continuing to carry government editorials. Controversially, the bill proposed to revoke legislation seen by journalists as forming the statutory firewall: that is, the International Broadcasting Act (1994) and VOA’s Charter (1976). Instead, the bill proposed to introduce new objectives “clarifying” that the purpose of all US-funded international media was to support US foreign policy. [pp. 50-51]

This description needs to be more accurate for what the bill intended to do. Efforts to fix long-established defects in agency leadership, including establishing a full-time CEO position to manage the day-to-day operations, were ignored.⁵ Some people, including me, favored the idea of consolidating the grantees (RFE/RL, RFA, and MBN) into one grantee to eliminate unnecessary back office redundancies alongside one government operation, VOA, under which OCB was consolidated into.⁶ In fact, a consolidation plan had been drawn up in 2012 that was widely accepted but needed leadership to implement (which was absent in 2012 but arguably coming online in late 2013).⁷ I also shared a draft of a strategic plan I developed (see FN5 above) with committee and other staff, but that and other discussions didn’t matter.

What was clear was the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) wanted any change he could get. The wording in the paragraph above makes it appear the only problem was its effects on the International Broadcasting Act and the VOA Charter.⁸ There was no need for “clarifying” the purpose of the agency, which was established to support US foreign policy. One only needed to go back to the original authorizing legislation, the Smith-Mundt Act, to see that purpose was clearly spelled out. 

The bill was ambitious, though. Setting aside the lack of hearings, it was an effort to capture and privatize BBG’s operations to benefit individuals, including one of the chairman’s financial supporters. It verges on academic malpractice is a serious shortcoming that “Freedom News Network” (FNN) didn’t appear above.⁹ The consolidated private organization was to operate under the FNN name, a domain a Royce fundraiser bought before the bill became public. The bill initially intended to create the Liberty News Network, but when somebody realized the name was taken, they settled on Freedom News Network. 

More importantly, a major proponent—and likely major contributor to the bill’s language—was the Prague Freedom Foundation (PFF) and its sister organization L88. PFF was a relatively big name in DC at the time, holding activities with prominent Senators and Representatives, including an event at Washington’s National Cathedral in November 2014 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution and the legacy of Václav Havel, both noble causes. However, there was a lot more to PFF than its public face. 

PFF had a license from the foundation run by Vaclav Havel’s widow to use the Havel name in connection with fellowship PFF co-sponsored with the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. RFE/RL could not, on its own, use the Havel name for this fellowship unless PFF was included. In 2014, about when the bill above was introduced, PFF stopped making its promised payments to RFE/RL to cover the costs of the fellowship. In July 2015, PFF owed RFE/RL about $140,000 for fellowship related costs, which were never repaid. But this was just the tip of the iceberg.

While PFF was a non-profit, L88 was a business. The leadership was the same for both, with email from PFF leadership sometimes coming from an L88 email and vice versa. There was a business relationship between PFF, L88, RFE/RL, and BBG.¹⁰ Inexplicably, the BBG, before my joining the board, had sold RFE/RL’s Prague headquarters—and main operations— building to L88 and renting it back from L88. L88 attempted to further insinuate itself into RFE/RL’s operations by trying to take over IT and cleaning services. As a landlord, L88 required RFE/RL to give, rent-free, prime office space in the Prague headquarters to PFF. The PFF office was not just on the same floor as RFE/RL’s top leadership; it was directly outside of the main conference on the floor and for the building. 

PFF’s leadership, which is to say also L88’s leadership, often declared, before the death of the bill described above, in several forums that the grantees were already theirs. 

No, that bill did not pass the House as the book incorrectly claims. The authors cite an April 2014 Foreign Policy article on this claim, but the article accurately states the bill “will get a vote on Wednesday in the committee.” The takeaway in the book, however, suggests far broader support in the House since they claimed it passed the House, and was only the Senate’s concerns about VOA’s editorial independence prevented the bill from becoming law. This is inaccurate, and it reinforces a false reading of the legislation, though it parrots the talking points at the time, which were derived from the bill’s sponsor rather than the actual text of the bill. 

In 2015, after the bill died, PFF still hoped they would come to own a piece of BBG. Let’s look closer at what the bill intended to do and unpack the authors’ claims above of breaking the “firewall” and “clarifying” the agency’s mission. 

Below is an email I wrote to a colleague in July 2015 about H.R. 2323, which Royce introduced in May 2015. This was the revised form of H.R. 4490, the bill described by the authors above. 

On the topic of H.R. 2323, I think it’s worth highlighting the destruction of the agency and more importantly of the USG’s ability to leverage its tax dollars. The purpose of BBG’s broadcast entities has been press freedom and empowerment of audiences through access to and sharing of news and information. 2323 changes that. It puts both a revised VOA and a revised grantee on the track of being advocates of democracy promotion and mouthpieces of government. Instead of being about empowering the target audience, the VOA mission becomes a loudspeaker for USG (namely State) and the grantee transforms into an advocate of ‘democracy promotion’. Both will fall directly into the trappings of propaganda, in spirit and function. Whereas this charge was easily dismissed before, no longer will the backbone, the raison d’etre,  be professional journalism to break through the ignorance and propaganda and empower with facts. 

A closer read of 2323 exposes some serious defects that are apparently willful, especially considering this is a second edition of the bill, having been revised from 4490 in the previous Congress. It should be troubling that the board of FNN is selected by the grantee organizations. The ‘appropriate committees’ in Congress are consulted, but objections from Congress may only come in the form of enacting a ‘joint resolution of disapproval.’ (Section 221(b) and 221(c), p54-55). 

Further, the proposed FNN may not be managed or guided, directly or indirectly, through grant management or other means, by the federal government, including the ‘parent’ of the revised BBG (proposed to be USICA). According to Section 221(d), p55, 

At no time may the United States International Communications Agency add requirements to a grant agreement with the Freedom News Network that could be construed as inappropriate supervision, oversight, or management in accordance with section 108(d). Nothing in this title may be construed to make the Freedom News Network an agency, establishment, or instrumentality of the United States Government…

Under Section 110(c), the CEO of the new USICA, formerly known as the BBG, may, after consulting the USICA Board and ‘the appropriate Congressional committees’, determine that FNN is not carrying out the mission as described in Section 212 and found to be not adhering to the standards and principles in Section 213. After that, the CEO may then solicit and consider applications from ‘eligible entities’. The ability of USICA to manage by grant is nearly impossible with even the nuclear option — of terminating the grant — nearly impossible. 

The new grantee may take on whatever mission it wants, including taking over VOA markets seemingly at will. Under Section 132, USICA is to provide its equipment, services, and personnel, and in-country access, to FNN for a ’temporary broadcast surge’. Surges, which are not defined, are often not measured in days or even weeks, especially in BBG’s markets. 

FNN may make whatever contracts it wishes, with whomever. Considering the present known role of L88/PFF, two entities that are one and the same, where PFF actively operates as a lobbyist for both L88 and 2323, serious questions should be raised about the true purpose and beneficiary of 2323. It does not appear that the audience, nor USG or the tax payer, are the beneficiary here. 

The Royce legislation “clarifies” the mission of BBG by effectively removing it from government control. That is not what the authors above tell the readers. 

PFF, despite its high profile in DC, disappeared almost overnight in 2015. They had provided false bank statements to RFE/RL for building reserve and other accounts, funds that were later found to be zero or minuscule rather than containing sometimes millions of dollars for future improvements. This pillaging by L88 hindered RFE/RL’s ability to move into video to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine since some of the money was to be used to build out a video broadcast studio. Further, L88 pocketed RFE/RL tax payments that L88 was to send to the Czech government. There are more examples, but one that is interesting is the head of PFF/L88 had contracted with a Prague architect to spec a hotel to be built on a part of the RFE/RL headquarters property, which, apparently, L88 was going to subdivide once the Royce bill passed. That architect was also not paid, like so many contractors, not to mention the deferred maintenance L88 didn’t perform, breaking its contractual obligations. The scam likely would have worked had the bill passed, and control of the grantees passed to PFF/L88, which was the expectation.¹¹

There was little in the way of public reporting on this. Tim Mak, now writing on Ukraine but then at The Daily Beast, was able to get his editor to allow an article on this in June 2015. 

I appreciate the need to reduce the details to make the discussion accessible. You had to slog through about 4,000 words just to get to this sentence. And, I summarized a lot and left some meat out even as I took the authors to task for largely just for one thing. 

Talk about “capturing the news”! The authors had word limits, and I’m not going to offer a better way to have written what was necessary. But this was one of several errors in their “Section 2.5: Transferring authority to a single political appointee.” 

This deep dive into (mostly) one paragraph of their is important as it highlights the reality behind this bill was more than what their parroting of talking points suggested. Though the key actors were different, some of the behind-the-scenes proponents who did not rise to the level of enablers for the Pack appointment and tenure were the same. And even in the case they weren’t, the authors, by failing to actually dig into the details miss the underlying currents that enabled Michael Pack’s appointment. Pack was an inappropriate pick, but logical if we have a better view of the trajectory and ignorance surrounding the agency’s purpose and value. Even an ardent Pack supporter admitted to me that he was a terrible manager, which is core responsibility of the CEO position.¹²

Other substantial errors include labeling the amendment to abolishing the board, empowering the CEO with all of the board’s authority, and making the CEO a political appointee as mere “horse-trading.” This was an extreme reduction of what I told one of the authors, who cite me as the source of this description, which is misleading by leaving out the lying, deception, and power-grabbing that enabled that horse-trading to succeed. 

I am thankful the authors reached out for my comments, but I wish they had found a way to communicate the underlying issues and efforts accurately. The way they did it is simply misleading and leads to a misinformed audience, and that’s unfortunate. 

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October 2, 2024 Update:

On September 30, 2024, I posted a follow up to this post, “Losing sight of the forest because of a few trees.” The negative reactions to the post above, “Clarifications are needed,” that I received came from a couple of people, and these were focused on the sordid details around PFF and L88. Perhaps I could have been more clear in this original post. The issue was the 2014 the bill the authors said was about creating the US International Communications Agency (USICA) was really about creating the Freedom News Network (FNN). What I didn’t mention above, but I did in “Losing sight,” is in addition to creating FNN, the bill intended to debilitate USICA, arguably an effort to strangle it to ultimately kill it. The focus on USICA is misleading and was unnecessary considering the information available to the authors. This is the basis of my frustration with that paragraph.

I did not address the authors’ statement that USICA would be “within the State Department” because I already had enough distracting detail. The bill explicitly states USICA would remain an independent federal agency. The call for enhanced coordination with the State Department, including greater ability for the State Department and the White House to influence USICA output, does not place the organization within the State Department. The authors statement led to a question to me whether this “new” USICA would cause some organizational or operational change on other former US Information Agency elements in the State Department since USICA would be “within the State Department.” My answer to the inquiry was a flat no since a) USICA would not be within the department and, b) the bill makes no mention, explicitly or implied, of these other programs, bureaus, or offices. I do not know where the authors came up with “within the State Department.”

1. The indicators the accepted wisdom was not accurate include my last entence in the prior footnote. Examining the record, one also finds virtually no concern about the information program being aimed at Americans. Those few—as in a couple—Members of Congress who raised “but CPI” like arguments that modern analysts are wont to do, were marginal this legislative process and inconsequential in the draft or final wording of the bill. There was far more concern about the taint of exchange programs, both sending Americans abroad and bringing foreigns into the US, by relevant Members of Congress than any concern about the information program. Further, what concerns there were about the information program almost entirely focused on the radio operation, the Voice of America, and secondarily which books were selected for the US Information Service libraries abroad than the rest of the massive information program. That the State Department and Congress’s intent, starting in October 1945 and in process by December 1945 was to move the radio operation into a private organization funded by the government also factored into evaluating the bill’s language. After all, the authority for the non-profit was going to be separate from the Mundt bill.

2. There is probably a better term than “rolling,” but each seat had its own three-year cycle flowing from the first board members who took their seats in 1995. (No, the BBG was not created in 1999 when USIA was abolished. The BBG was under USIA and then became an independent federal agency in 1999.) To stagger the terms of the initial members, two members were to have one year terms, three others would have two year terms, and the remaining three would serve three years. Since Governors serve until replaced, not when their term ends, it has been common for Governors to serve long past the end of the term. When I wrote about the Obama administration’s first “refresh” of the board in November 2009, the terms of the then-remaining four Governors had ended between 3 and 5 years earlier. This is a leadership failure that happened above the agency.

When I was nominated to the board in April 2013, as part of the Obama administration’s second “refresh,” I took the seat of Dana Perino, who had previously resigned from the board well after her term expired. (I was a Republican being appointed to a Republican seat on the bipartisan board. My sponsors were Senators Tom Coburn and Mitch McConnell. My fellow nominees were Jeff Shell and Amb. Ryan Crocker, with Ken Weinstein following soon after) When I was confirmed in August 2013, the remaining time on my term was two years, but I served, as permitted by law, until I resigned in January 2017.

3. The authors quoted Emily Metzgar as saying the agency was an “illogical patchwork” of networks. This is inaccurate. As were other reports, such as an earlier one from the Government Accountability Office, that suggested severe operational overlap. The real overlap was bureaucratic, which prior boards had created, permitted to continue, and even encouraged to expand. For example, the Middle East Broadcast Network was formed by ripping the Arabic service out of the Voice of America after RFE/RL was rejected taking on the job. Instead of fixing the organization, the board, after 9/11, decided to create a new organization and did so quickly and with expected negative consequences. There was logic behind the operations. For example, the GAO said RFA and VOA’s services to Myanmar (Burma) were redundant, except RFA and VOA had different audiences, different tones (as in style and format), and covered different topics. There was no functional overlap. That’s a different conversation than addressing the back office support.

4. In April 2014, I began to write an actual strategic plan for the agency, with help from Rob Bole. The BBG’s prior strategic plans were neither strategic nor plans, which was plain as day on glancing them. Getting inside, I learned the plans were generally developed by asking the networks what they wanted to accomplish, a set of goals that in turn were generally established by asking the language services what they wanted to accomplish. My draft plan, which was signed off by all the network chiefs later in 2014, was blocked by the BBG chairman, who interpreted the plan, without reading it as he told me, through his lens of corporate restructuring, a task he wasn’t willing to take on. I may publish the plan on this substack later since I have shared it with anyone who was interested, both then and after.

5. Part of the functional defect of the agency’s leadership structure was the partial empowerment of the head of the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) as a kind of Chief Operating Officer, but only over some elements of the operation. When the board was established, it was to provide strategic oversight and guidance over independent network operations. As reality set in, the networks demanded more of the pie for themselves, as bureaucracies do. The IBB director was poorly empowered to deal with the grantee networks (RFA, RFE/RL, and MBN, each non-profit organizations funded by the government was outside of IBB’s direct control). The result, in part, was the networks playing governors against each other and running to the Hill to play Members against the IBB, and thus BBG. A full-time CEO authorized to oversee all of BBG’s operations was considered necessary by my fellow board members and me.

6. Moving the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB) into VOA was considered a bridge too far due to the Cuba lobby, another example of the politicization of the bureaucracy.

7. This 2012 plan estimated a ten million dollar annual savings starting in FY2014 with a one-time implementation cost of $4.5 million in 2013. It was estimated there would be no negative impact on programming. And, as I argued later, effectiveness of the agency as a whole could increase by removing additional layers of bureaucracy interested more in their subdomain rather than the overall needs of the agency. This consolidation plan recommended hiring a CEO.

8. I have long argued that attention on the VOA Charter as some kind of firewall is wrong and misplaced. The Charter is a set of guidelines without enforcement. The real firewall was the bipartisan board.

9. The original name for FNN was “Liberty News Network,” but that name was taken.

10. The property manager for the RFE/RL was CEEMaC, which L88 owned.

11. There was clear collusion within at least two grantees. One, not RFE/RL, continued to have a functional relationship with PFF despite clear orders from its board of directors—until the 2009 board, the 2013 board I was on mirrored the BBG board onto the grantee boards—and actively hid this relationship. PFF reasonably expected to capture FNN once established.

12. This supporter, who I had known and collaborated with for many years before, reached out after they saw my interview with Brian Stelter regarding Pack’s nomination to the CEO job. I was strongly opposed to his nomination.