The Foreign Service Journal, October 2010

32 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 1 0 tween the U.S. government and international broadcasting entities it funds: the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Alhurra, Radio Sawa, and Radio and TV Martí. It performs that function mainly by selecting the directors and presi- dents of these entities, but also provides general supervision, such as proposing the ad- dition or elimination of language services, and adjusting the investment in various media technologies. Confirmed by the Senate in early July, seven months after being nominated by President Barack Obama, the board’s eight new members join Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — the designated ex officio ninth mem- ber of the board — to bring the BBG up to its full com- plement for the first time since December 2004. (A list of current BBG members and their biographies is avail- able at www.bbg.gov/about.) As the board grapples with a host of challenges, it will find the BBC a useful benchmark. USIB is not exactly in competition with the BBC, because both provide news to countries where reliable news is not available domes- tically. The international services of the BBC do, how- ever, provide a point of comparison in terms of audience size and budget. In March 2010, BBC Global News claimed a record weekly audience of 241 million. To compare this mean- ingfully with USIB’s performance, first we must subtract the 61 million people who tune into BBC World News, an English-language global news channel, and the inter- national facing www.bbc.com Web site. These are com- mercial operations that aspire to be self-funding, and USIB is not allowed to engage in commercial interna- tional broadcasting. (CNN International is the U.S. com- petitor to BBC World News. These two, along with Al-Jazeera English, form the “big three” of global English news channels.) We can also subtract the BBCWorld Service audience of six million in the United States, which will never be a target country for USIB. This leaves the BBC World Service, the U.K. Foreign & Commonwealth Office- funded radio station broadcasting in 32 languages, plus television in Arabic and Persian, with a weekly audience of 174 million. The global audience of USIB, 171 million listeners weekly, is about the same as that of BBC World Service. However, USIB achieves that audience on a budget of $727 million, while the BBC World Service attracts the slightly larger audience with a budget of just $420 million. A common explanation for this discrepancy is that the World Service derives resources from its domestic parent, the BBC. In fact, the BBC is subject to a fair trading regime that does not allow for any cross-subsidy between its var- ious funding streams. The World Service must therefore purchase or barter services and content it gets from the domestic BBC, so that the U.K. television license fee is not used to subsidize an international service. U.S. Broadcaster vs. U.S. Broadcaster The much more likely reason the BBC World Service achieves a larger audience for the money it spends is that it is a single organization, while U.S. international broad- casting is the collection of entities mentioned above. Of the 60 language services of USIB, 22 of the languages are transmitted by more than one station. In the post–Cold War period, RFE/RL added Alban- ian, South Slavic (Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian), Arabic, Persian, Dari and Pashto, duplicating pre-existing VOA services in those languages. In January, implementing an earmark requested by Senator Sam Brownback, R-Kan., in the Fiscal Year 2010 budget, RFE/RL launched Radio Mashaal, broadcasting in Pashto in the Pakistan-Afghani- stan border region. Since 2006, VOA had been doing the same with its Deewa Radio. Radio Free Asia, created in 1996, transmits in Can- tonese, Burmese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, Ti- betan and Vietnamese — all languages that were already broadcast by VOA. Thus, in one of the most difficult re- gions to get news out of, and to get content back into, two U.S. stations compete for vital and scarce resources. For the most part, at least, they do not broadcast in the same language at the same time. The Radio Free stations have expanded based on a theory that dismisses VOA as limited to the advocacy of U.S. policies, descriptions of life in the United States and English-language lessons. The “surrogate” stations, on the other hand, provide the news about the target coun- try that would be available if the media in those coun- F O C U S As the Broadcasting Board of Governors grapples with a host of challenges, it will find the BBC a useful benchmark.