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| Opportunities & Exposures: Philanthropy |
Technical Difficulties
Sanford J. Ungar
09/01/2005
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In the dark, early days of World War II, not even three months after the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, officials in the U.S. Office of War Information
came up with a brilliant, disarmingly simple idea. To counter Nazi propaganda,
the United States would launch a radio service in German offering up an unusual
commodity: the truth. The Voice of America, as it came to be known, promised to
deliver the straight news daily, whether good or bad. Other broadcast languages
soon followed, giving the U.S. a rather effective instrument of what would today
be called “public diplomacy”—a means for the U.S. government to communicate
openly and more-or-less honestly with ordinary citizens of other
countries.
Today, with the United States’ image in steep decline and its
reputation under attack, we need an effective, respected vehicle for
transmitting American values and principles around the world. A multimedia news
organization that can be trusted to perform balanced reporting in these troubled
times might do more good than any number of attack helicopters or strident
speeches. The Voice of America still exists, and it remains one of the best
brand names the country ever had for carrying out public diplomacy. Yet at a
time when it should be strengthened and unleashed to do what it does best, it is
being subjected to systematic cutbacks. Its Arabic service, which fed
intellectuals and policymakers a steady stream of important news from around the
world, has been replaced by a commercial-style radio broadcast that recruits
teenagers with pop music. While its esteemed counterpart, the BBC, provides two
24-hour-a-day streams of news in English, the VOA is down to 14 hours
daily.
Political interference, kept at bay by generations of professionals,
has returned to haunt the VOA newsroom, prompting its reporting to become more
sympathetic to administration policy and to minimize bad news from Iraq. The
Broadcasting Board of Governors, intended
to serve as a firewall to protect
the VOA, is now part of the problem, and Congress (few of whose members have
ever heard a VOA broadcast) seems unwilling or unable to muster the financial
and political support that is needed to keep the operation strong. It is time to
find a new way to fund and sustain this vital American institution.
From Listeners Like You . . .
Media pundits have suggested in recent
years that private media organizations with global reach, such as CNN, could do
the VOA’s job just as well or better, especially because they would not have the
hiring and firing constraints of a U.S. government agency. But it is
preposterous to think that a commercial operation could or would sustain the
financial losses inherent in providing the news in 40 or 50 languages to mostly
poor people around the world.
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