The Foreign Service Journal, October 2009

52 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 9 F O C U S O N P U B L I C D I P L OM A C Y C HANNELING THE C OLD W AR : U.S. O VERSEAS B ROADCASTING he democratic revolutions that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 came to a stunning and violent end on Christmas Day in Romania with the execu- tion of President Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena. One of the first to learn was Gerd Kallhardt, a translator of the dictator’s speeches for Munich-based Radio Free Eu- rope/Radio Liberty. As the broadcasts streamed in from Bucharest, Kallhardt and a colleague tried to come to grips with the news. “We looked at each other and said: ‘What happens now? Communism is dead. There is no more use for the radio,’” Kallhardt recalled several years later. That sentiment reverberated more loudly at the end of 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. A triumphal period for the U.S.-funded stations like RFE/RL and the Voice of America soon gave way to uncertainty and what looked like the death knell for a number of language serv- ices. Barely one year after the Soviet disintegration, the U.S. government moved to cut RFE/RL’s roughly $220 million budget by two-thirds. By the end of the decade, overall funding for international broadcasting had dropped significantly, and the Clin- ton administration andCon- gress agreed on broader cutbacks to the U.S. public diplomacy apparatus. Yet two decades after the Berlin Wall came down, RFE/RL is thriving in a sparkling new headquart- ers in the Czech capital of Prague, broadcasting around the clock to new “target” countries such as Iran and Afghanistan. Another post–Cold War entity, Radio Free Asia, was set up in the late 1990s according to RFE/RL’s “surrogate” model and broadcasts to nine authoritarian states, including China. Prompted by surging interest in reaching Muslim audiences after the 9/11 attacks, Congress approved the creation of Arabic-lan- guage satellite television station Alhurra and substantially increased funding for initiatives like television broadcasts to Iran and radio transmissions to tribal areas of Pakistan. Expanded funding for Persian-language television (VOA’s Persian News Network) and radio (RFE/RL’s Radio Farda) was credited by a number of media experts with placing U.S. broadcasters in the forefront of interna- tional media efforts to inform Iranians when mass protests T HE NEED FOR A CLEAR MISSION IS AS APPLICABLE TODAY IN REACHING M USLIMS AROUND THE WORLD AS IT WAS WITH S OVIET - BLOC AUDIENCES . B Y R OBERT M C M AHON T Robert McMahon is editor of CFR.org, the Web site of the Council on Foreign Relations. He worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from 1992 to 2005 in a range of sen- ior editorial jobs, including terms as director of central news and United Nations correspondent. Doug Ross