The Foreign Service Journal, January 2004

with sufficient funding it could be worked around. The fall of communism and the end of the Cold War transformed the world’s political geometry. Many interna- tional broadcasters cut back on their hours and foreign lan- guages, and were generally forced to scramble for govern- ment funding. The Voice of Russia, for instance, discon- tinued six languages and laid off 30 percent of its staff in 1995. In the U.S., foreign policy premises and goals were thrown into turmoil, and many questioned the continued need for public diplomacy of any sort. Suddenly, interna- tional broadcasting was fighting for its life, at the mercy of lawmakers for whom budget restraint had become an overriding preoccupation. Perhaps more significant, this crisis coincided with an explosion of communications technology that fueled a commercial media boom around the world and fierce competition for audiences everywhere. Satellite technolo- gy, in particular, gave broadcasting a global reach. The growth of the Internet and developments in digital tech- nologies linking television and computers point to the con- tinuing nature of this revolution. Few governmental broadcasters have the budgets to proceed with all of the program delivery options simultaneously, so choices have to be made and priorities set. And, because listeners worldwide now have more choice in private and governmental media offerings to tune into than ever before, programming content has become a critical issue. How do you win and hold a grow- ing audience share, and at the same time get a particular editorial message across? Content In Contention Two of the BBG’s new market-based projects — Radio Sawa, aimed at Arab listeners, and Radio Farda, aimed at Iranians — exemplify a trend toward down- playing news and information in favor of popular music and other “softer” programming. Early indications are that this approach is successfully inducing younger lis- teners to tune in. A late-November survey conducted by D3 Systems Inc., of Vienna, Va., in Baghdad, Mosul and Basra, Iraq’s three largest cities, found that Radio Sawa’s average listenership was 48.9 percent of the population, compared to 39.2 percent for Radio Monte Carlo and 30.4 percent for the BBC. But is Britney Spears truly the best cultural diplomat we have in our arsenal? And it may not take long for local commercial media to copy the format, leaving out the “content” altogether, as for- mer VOA Assistant Director Myrna Whitworth notes in her Speaking Out column (p. 13). Further, the introduction of a commercial approach has given a new twist to the old tension between the public broadcaster’s role as an instrument of U.S. policy and as an exemplar of free and independent journalism. This funda- mental tension is still alive and well. Al Kamen’s column (“In the Loop”) in the Nov. 19 Washington Post reprints an internal VOA e-mail, for instance, expressing high-level displeasure with a report on President Bush’s visit to England that focused on the millions being spent for secu- rity during the trip, the numbers of police to be deployed and protest activities, rather than the substance of the visit. Here are the final two paragraphs from that missive: “Do you think the listener in North Korea or India or Nigeria understands or cares that $9 million will be spent on security, or that 5,000 police will be deployed? “If you were the Khmer or Dari or Swahili language service chief, would you even bother translating these sto- ries? I know that slightly more substantive stories about the visit were sent out yesterday, but that was yesterday. The users of today’s stories have been given no clue why this visit is occurring or what these national leaders are planning to talk about. Did the White House not have a pre-trip briefing on the trip? Where is that information?” Such complaints are not new. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors put intense pressure on VOA not to air a news report that included excerpts from an interview with Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar. Nonetheless, News Director Andre de Nesnera authorized the release of the report as one part of VOA’s overall coverage. For his courageous efforts to defend VOA’s charter and preserve the integrity of its news broadcasts, AFSA honored de Nesnera in June 2002 with the Tex Harris Award for con- structive dissent by a Foreign Service specialist. The Challenge of Public Broadcasting The BBG’s five-year strategic plan issued in December 2002 attempts to address the new challenges. The plan, “Marrying the Mission to the Market,” was prompted by declining audience share in key markets such as Russia, and historically static performance in critical strategic regions such as the Middle East. In the early 1990s, for instance, the BBG had a 21-percent market share in Russia; in recent years that has declined to about 4 percent of the adult audience. For decades, the VOA’s Arabic ser- F O C U S 18 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