Saturday, April 26th 2014
Author: David S Jackson
Russian troops are threatening the sovereignty of a bordering country while its anxious neighbors look West for support… Chinese bellicosity is prompting similar concerns from its neighbors… Iran’s nuclear ambitions are raising fears of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East….
At a time when our government needs all the tools of national influence and diplomacy that we have to let people around the world know what’s at stake, and where the U.S. government stands in these crises, our best public diplomacy tool – U.S. international broadcasting and online media – is wrestling with its own challenges.
In recent weeks, there has been a growing debate about the proper roles of the Voice of America (VOA) and its fellow government-supported broadcasters Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio & TV Marti, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks of Radio Sawa and Alhurra TV. Columnist Anne Applebaum wrote in The Washington Post that it’s time to “rethink the funding and governance” of the broadcasters, while former Reagan Administration Soviet affairs advisor John Lenczowksi charged in The Wall Street Journal that the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which oversees the broadcasters, “has greatly diminished America’s capacity to fight the Putin propaganda machine.” Lenczowski was even more critical at a Heritage Foundation panel discussion last week, where he called the BBG “dysfunctional” and in need of “an entire overhaul.”
While all this has been going on, BBGWatch.com, a public blog site which frequently airs grievances from current and former employees, has been launching daily broadsides against senior managers at VOA and the International Broadcasting Bureau, an internal supporting agency.
Some of the issues that have been raised are not new: Funding (there’s never been enough to do everything); shortwave radio, and what role it should play (some veteran employees still regard television as a new-fangled extravagance); and news coverage decisions.
via What is the Mission of U.S. International Broadcasting? | The Public Diplomacy Council.
Filed under: Information operations, Public Diplomacy Tagged: public diplomacy 
