The Foreign Service Journal, January 2004

the Personal Services Contract. Radio Sawa is the creation of BBG Governor Norman Pattiz, founder and chairman of Westwood One, the nation’s largest radio syndicator. Using the business acumen and salesmanship that turned a small business into a mul- timillion-dollar media empire, Pattiz led a campaign on Capitol Hill and in the corridors of the State Department to sell his vision of a network designed to attract Arab youth with music and then inform them about the United States with short news, interviews and opinion pieces. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Pattiz found a receptive audience will- ing to appropriate $35 million to put Sawa on the air. And more funding is promised for an around-the-clock Arabic-language TV service, the Middle East Television Network, to compete with the Qatar-based Al- Jazeera and the 44 other Arabic-lan- guage satellite channels that blanket the Middle East. A New Model of Success? In its literature and public state- ments, the BBG regards Radio Sawa as an unqualified success, pointing to the results of an ACNielsen survey that showed it is the leading international broadcaster in five Middle Eastern countries, with a 31-percent listener- ship. But what is the audience hear- ing? It is true that at the height of the Iraq War, Sawa’s four streams increased news coverage, but it contin- ued to air at least 14 hours of Arabic and Western pop music as U.S. bombs fell on Iraq. Radio Sawa now offers at least one 30-minute news program on its Iraqi stream. However, the bulk of news is delivered in hourly five-minute and 90-second increments. This is hardly sufficient for comprehensive news coverage or for in-depth discus- sion that will foster greater under- standing of the United States. The board says it will continue to layer more substance onto Radio Sawa, but in Jordan, where Sawa’s easily replicat- ed format is already receiving compe- tition from a local military station, news programming is being reduced not increased. As FMmarkets continue to open in the Arab world, we can expect more stations to copy the successful Sawa model but jettison the American news content. There is precedent for this. Backed by a million-dollar research study, VOA Europe was launched in 1985 in an effort to attract a new gen- eration unaware of the U.S. role in reconstructing the new Europe. Its “music and more” format had some success, especially as media markets began to open in Central Europe after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. But it didn’t take long for young, would-be media moguls in Europe to pick up on the format and, given the easy avail- ability of CDs on the commercial mar- ket, to replace VOA Europe with their own brand. The quality of Sawa’s transmission also has something to do with its listen- ing rate. Despite repeated appeals from VOA managers for improved transmission facilities, VOA’s Arabic Service — Radio Sawa’s predecessor — was relegated to barely audible short-wave and medium-wave signals to the target area. In the days of the Cold War and in the budget-tight 1990s that followed, no money was ever appropriated for better radio cov- erage to the Middle East. Yet with a one-time capital expense of $16 million, the BBG built and improved AM transmissions, estab- lished FM transmitters in nine Arabic- speaking countries, including four in Iraq, and leased audio channels on popular regional satellites. We will never know what kind of audience VOA Arabic would have garnered dur- ing the Iraq War if it had had similar transmissions at its disposal. Instead, audiences seeking substan- tive VOA information had only one source—an eight-minute newscast on the VOA Arabic Web site that drew not from Sawa news output, but from double-sourced and carefully edited VOA central news material. And the producers had much to choose from. The VOA newsroom output during the 22 days fromMarch 19 through April 9, 2003, comprised a total of 1,563 news items and 847 reports and backgrounders; about two- thirds of the output reflected U.S. poli- cies and statements. Understaffed and underfunded, the VOA newsroom rose to the occasion in the finest Bernie Kamenske tradition. The over- all content of this material was judged “accurate, objective and comprehen- sive” by an inside review panel and by four outside experts. A Public Diplomacy Mandate In recent months, a series of reports have been released document- ing the failure of American public diplomacy since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. To name a few, they include reports from the Council on Foreign Relations, the Heritage Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trust, and the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World. All have concluded that anti-Americanism is widespread, particularly in the Muslim world. While each takes a different approach to addressing the problem, none has given adequate recognition to what a properly funded, staffed and supported Voice of America could con- tribute to improving international understanding of the United States, its values, its institutions and its policies. VOA tells the American story within a regional and cultural context and in the 50-plus languages its audiences speak. The BBCWorld Service is not going to tell that story. No other entity under the purview of the Broadcasting Board of Governors has the well-defined public diplomacy mandate that is 14 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 4 S P E A K I N G O U T