Why do we still have VOA, RFE/RL, and the other broadcasters under USAGM?
That's a good question, especially when one doesn't understand what "telling America's story" means
A decade ago, I was a Governor on the formerly-named Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). That agency has since been renamed the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) after the board was abolished through a bill that had no public comment, no hearing, was kept secret from the public, was withheld from most of the board, and supporters apparently deceived other stakeholders to support the proposed change to the agency.
The board was the real firewall for preventing the politicization of agency’s broadcast operations. The firewall was not and is not the Voice of America (VOA) Charter. This Charter is enshrined as 22 USC 6202 as “standards” and “principles” that are unenforceable and subjective. They can and have been subverted through benign neglect, incompetence, malpractice, willful actions, and malice.1 Enforcement is through leadership, whether at the language services, or higher managers, network presidents, and headquarters staff and ultimately the board.
My board cohort finally made the long-overdue decision to hire a CEO to run the agency. By design, the CEO worked at the pleasure of the bipartisan board and not the White House. Now, however, the CEO has the potential to politicize the agency through hiring and management decisions without any meaningful or timely oversight that can quickly exercise real (corrective) authority.
The complete lack of oversight over the agency by the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy is, at this point, unsurprising.2 There was a lack of awareness and insight regarding the agency and its utility from different parts of the executive branch. For example, a proposal from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) I received firsthand proposed the BBG running ads on its networks. The OMB hoped this revenue could provide half of the agency’s operating budget, thus reducing the appropriation by 50%. It seemed the argument (made by me) that the nature of the BBG’s markets (my shorthand then and now for describing the BBG/USAGM markets: those places where DOD’s Special Operations Command is operating, was operating, or may soon be operating) means limited advertising potential and likely significant reliance on large multinational whose products remain in these markets, like Coca-Cola. These advertisers would likely influence the programming choices of VOA, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia (RFA), Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB), and the Middle East Broadcasting Network (MBN). That didn’t seem to be persuasive, but the argument from my fellow board member did seem to kill the idea: the agency would need more money to set up and run an ad management function.
Then there was the time—while I was still a BBG Governor—I was at Stuttgart, Germany, for meetings with European Command and Africa Command. I was invited to listen to a wargame in progress and heard they were (in the wargame) establishing a public radio station to broadcast news and information to the people in the region. Apparently, they had asked State for a list of local broadcasters, and none fit the bill for the wargame participants (DOD side, not a red team), so they created their own. I asked why they didn’t use VOA. “What’s VOA?” was the reply. The pain from this was particularly pronounced since VOA was the dominant news and information source in the target region.
Why do we still have these Radios?
It is a good question that is not discussed enough, and when it is, I find the discussion to lack insight and awareness of the intended markets and the agency’s intended utility. For now, I’ll answer the question with an email I wrote to an editor at a national newspaper in December 2016 regarding the future of the then-Broadcasting Board of Governors. The context of the exchange was discussing the bill to eliminate the board (that I was then a member of) and make the CEO a Senate-confirmed Presidential appointee. The bill had been included in the National Defense Authorization Act the month before and was set to be signed by President Obama in days, with less than a month left in his term.
The email has been lightly edited for clarity.
I appreciate your interest in this. The impact of BBG’s networks, including its internet freedom programming, is generally misunderstood, that is when it is even known. As a journalist, you appreciate the power of journalism to inform and empower an audience.
The people in the BBG’s target markets do not know or understand many of the fundamental concepts on which democracy is built. Whether it is VOA, RFE/RL, or one of the other three networks, the BBG operates as a surrogate: the agency is the people’s news agency providing them with news and information from their perspective. That last bit is the critical contextual element too many pundits and legislators fail to appreciate. VOA, RFE/RL, etc all report on the news in the context of the local audience. This is not merely translating into their language but unpacking the elements of the story to convey deeper messages. The Detroit bankruptcy told to a Russian audience will explore elements of the affair that enlighten the audience: civic authorities can be held accountable, for example. Ferguson gives an opportunity to not just talk about race relations, which some target audiences read as ethnic or religious divisions as they project the story onto their own experience, but a chance to discuss police accountability and the grand jury system.
A vignette to “tell America’s story” is not really about us but about the target audience: explaining how an American pays a speeding ticket is dull to us, but even in 60 seconds, the audience can see an alternative system of law where a policeman doesn’t walk away with cash in hand. (In a meeting in Beijing, the number 2 of the Communist Party’s information office, the Communist party’s propaganda department, yelled at me to not tell Chinese how to vote when I shared the vignette — in concept — of how an American registers to vote.)
There is so much more about this, but I think you get the gist. The agency’s motto of ‘… support freedom and democracy’ is misleading. The BBG does not ’support’ freedom or democracy. It creates an understanding of both and encourages people to pursue the fundamental elements that lead to both.
The BBG is a messaging platform, but one of ideals and of example. However, it can provide the White House and State Department, as well as societal leaders, a bullhorn into the markets. But this, too, is commonly misunderstood. The BBG doesn’t just permit an injection of the message into the marketplace, but through the long-standing relationship with the audience, and at the time of delivery and subsequently, the language services unpack concepts our leaders employ in their statements. This is more than a translation service.
A common refrain I heard was that CNN, MSNBC, Fox, BBC, whatever can and does the same thing VOA, RFE/RL, etc do. Wrong. CNN etc may be in the language (though it is not common, considering the BBG is in 59 languages now, a drop in two over the past 3 years), but they do not report from the perspective of the audience. Worse, these other agencies do not have reporters who are from and live in the target markets. The commercial enterprises parachute in and run away, while the BBG’s reporters are from there, live there, and often risk their lives for the sake of journalism for their target audience.
Further, most of the markets the BBG operates in commercial media do not reach. After all, by design, the BBG targets those markets of interest to U.S. foreign policy and lacks a free local media. Indonesia, for example, is a rare example of an open media market, but the journalism and news organizations are in very bad shape and desperate for professional help and products. But US media — CNN — that goes there is not reporting on China’s impact on the region and report on the salacious stories rather than newsworthy stories from the U.S. Most markets are not open, without any perceptible ROI for commercial broadcasters, and often require significant infrastructure outlays in niche (from the perspective of major media) languages, which is where BBG comes in.
This leads to two quick anecdotes showing how this administration does not understand what the BBG does. First, there was the effort to make the BBG reliant on commercial advertising. Besides the overhead of managing commercial advertising, there are only a few advertisers that will be interested in our markets, mostly internationals like Coca-Cola. At what point then, as the WH wanted the BBG to rely more on advertising and less on budget allocations, would the BBG market selection and content be beholden to internationals, whether Coca-Cola or Google or Toyota?
Second, there was the notion the BBG can reduce to a few languages, say 5, and surge into the others as needed. This is not how the information, let alone news, business works. This ties into the effort a couple of years ago where the Administration tried to kill the BBG’s Balkan services. Why? Because the Senate appropriators missed the mention of the intent to close the service two years before. But the Balkans were crashing on press freedom, and with rising Russian influence and oligarch propaganda, they needed our journalism. That did not matter, the administration saw the chance to reduce the BBG’s budget.
Overall, the issue of oversight is key with regard to Congress. We can share with them what we do, but we can’t make the horse drink. I’ve met with many Members of HFAC and most hadn’t a clue what the BBG was or did. While the BBG was terribly — not just poorly — managed for years and had worse relations on the Hill than State, a hard to believe fact, that does not absolve responsibility of the oversight committees. You mentioned that hearings were held on the bill. That’s true but misleading. SFRC held one hearing, Nov 2015 (effectively triggered by my HASC hearing the prior month) that was nothing more than “hey, whatcha doing?” HFAC held a couple of hearings, but they never discussed details or impacts of proposed “reforms,” requirements or capabilities that were missing, or anything of that nature. They were filled with polemic rants. One hearing in Jan or Feb 2014, several months after Jeff Shell, Ryan Crocker, and myself were confirmed as part of the new board, HFAC had a hearing with three *past* governors. We asked to be included, I asked that we have hearings since… call me/us up to the Hill and grill me, hold me accountable. Never happened.
This bill [to eliminate the BBG board] is a vanity project: “anything I can get passed so I can claim that I reformed the BBG.” It may be interesting to look back at Royce’s earlier bill, like the one to split RFE/RL, RFA, MBN into a private entity untouchable and undetectable by the executive branch or the rump of BBG that was left so that it, the combined RFE/RL/RFA/MBN could do anything it wanted anywhere it wanted with a self-perpuating leadership beyond WH or Congress’s reach… [ed: see this post as a starter on that bill, which didn’t pass]
Regardless, whether anyone supports my view and vision of the agency is really besides the point. What is the point is that there has been no analysis or examination of how the proposed structure, developed in secret and apparently willfully withheld from (at least) a majority of the board will effect operations and recruitment and serve U.S. foreign policy.
I believe two members of the board were aware of the bill and actively supported the bill. The deception involved claiming the board supported the change, when the majority of the board had clearly and unequivocally stated it did not support the changes as proposed before Congress’s 2016 summer recess, and instructed the agency CEO to make that clear in any further conversations or inquiries related to this issue. One member was a bit equivocal on the question. My conversations with people at State and in the Senate, they all said they raised questions about the bill but were told the board supported it, which suprised them but since “we” endorsed it, they didn’t object. Except “we” didn’t.
The Parting Shot
An example that combined incompetence with malpractice was when VOA posted a story that read as if Russia’s foreign ministry had written it. The story was subsequently edited 18-24 times, and the headline changed often, though not as often as the story was edited. (I have the precise figures somewhere as I had the agency run an audit on this specific story.) As the VOA Director told me, the URL never changed as VOA then considered their stories as living documents. Readers were expected to revisit the same URL and, it would seem, expect to see a new story even though their browser would show the link as visited and a cache may not refresh to show the updated content. This is also why stories didn’t have time stamps, let alone “updated on” time stamps. One can quickly see the problem as VOA implemented timestamps on their website afterward. It wasn’t malice or a pro-Russia interest at work here, but a combination of bad practices that remained unchecked, bad management that failed to catch and correct these practices, and ignorance at how audiences consume content.
When I was the commission's executive director, I proposed to the commissioners that they take a deep look at the then-Broadcasting Board of Governors operations. One commissioner expressed shock, saying it was outside the commission’s scope. No, in fact, the reason the commission exists was to provide timely, relevant, and expert advice to Congress, the Secretary of State, and the White House on the Voice of America. This was the advisory commission on information, established through the Smith-Mundt Act. A sister commission providing similar oversight to the exchange programs was also established then to reflect the different nature of the information program from the exchange program. These two commissions merged in 1977 to form the advisory commission on public diplomacy. Today, what value is the commission providing anyone other than the academic community? Seriously, do the commissioners even do anything? It seems from the transcripts that, if they even attend a meeting, they do not have any meaningful questions, comments, or advice.