The Foreign Service Journal, October 2009

54 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 broadcasters were independent of direct U.S. government control and operated under a requirement to provide accurate and objective in- formation to ensure credibility. Many of them functioned in ways similar to those of an opposition press, scrutinizing everything from government harvest reports and communist party purges to incidents of religious persecution or human rights violations. Writings smuggled out of the Soviet Union—known as samizdat —and important works such as The Gulag Archipelago , Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s tow- ering account of life in the Soviet prison system, were se- rialized on RFE/RL broadcasts. The aim of such coverage was to reveal the weaknesses of the communist system, ap- peal to national identity and promote the emergence of other centers of power. From the beginning, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty set up research and evaluation sections within in- dividual broadcast services. By the early 1980s they had evolved into more formal research entities that issued reg- ular situation reports on countries in the region and came to be regarded by both American and international audi- ences as the finest of their kind. The prodigious research and monitoring effort utilized translators like RFE’s Kall- hardt to gather clips of more than 1,000 newspapers and periodicals from communist states, as well as enormous reference libraries on personalities and institutions from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The last vestige of RFE/RL’s research and analysis di- vision was discontinued in 2008 due to funding constraints, just after producing a series of widely lauded reports on ji- hadi information sources, but its example remains rele- vant. A. Ross Johnson, RFE’s director from 1988 to 1991, says the research unit underpinned the credibility of the broadcasters. “The point that’s relevant today is if you’re going to do in-depth broadcasting focused primarily on so- called target countries, you’ve got to be terribly well in- formed on the situation there,” Johnson says. “You can’t do that on the fly. You’ve got to have people with the cultural, linguistic and area expertise, as well.” “A Chaos Developed” The collapse of the Soviet bloc turned the concept of monitoring on its head. The challenge was no longer pars- ing the tightly controlled official speeches and news reports of total- itarian states, but instead sorting through a dizzying array of new media, much of it unreliable. “A chaos developed,” says Kallhardt, who continued to monitor media from Eastern Europe and the for- mer Soviet Union in the post-com- munist period. The U.S. broadcasting infra- structure itself had become increasingly unwieldy. By the end of the 1990s it included a cluster of separate broadcast entities and federal agency and grantee organizations, in- cluding RFE/RL and RFA. Each had its own manage- ment and, in some cases, what appeared to be duplicative staff and functions. Meanwhile, the budget for such broadcasting was on a steady decline, from $573 million in 1994 to about $420 million by the end of the decade. Mission drift was also a problem. With the end of the Cold War, U.S. international broadcasters were operating under a variety of mandates, some coping with increas- ingly outmoded transmission methods and questionable program formats. Audience surveys showed alarming drops in listeners in some key areas. A review of VOA’s Arabic service found it was registering barely a whisper, its audience mired at about the 2-percent level for years. Congress revamped the administrative structure of U.S. international broadcasting in 1994, creating the Board of Broadcasting Governors to oversee all non-military U.S. international broadcasting. The 1994 act also set up the International Broadcasting Bureau to consolidate some broadcast operations within the BBG. IBB provides trans- mission services to all broadcast operations and has a direct role in support services and audience research for VOA and Radio/TV Marti, directed at Cuba. In addition, for the first time the Voice of America and Radio Free Eu- rope/Radio Liberty were brought under the same organi- zational heading. The bipartisan BBG consists of eight members from the fields of mass communications and foreign affairs, ap- pointed by the president but reporting to Congress. The Secretary of State is an ex officio, non-voting member. Sit- ting board members serve part-time and may continue in their regular occupations. The previous entity overseeing the activities of RFE/ RL, the Board for International Broadcasting, had been F O C U S Soon after taking office, President Barack Obama set out to engage global publics, especially in the Muslim world.