When Walter Isaacson championed Voice of America’s decision to shut down its shortwave radio broadcasts to China — and shift those funds to the Internet, cellphones and other forms of digital media – he viewed it as the sensible updating of a propaganda playbook dating from the Cold War.
But nothing is simple in the world of government broadcasting. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a staunch critic of China, condemned the move, saying it would deprive Chinese listeners of unfiltered news. It amounted, he said, to a US retreat in the face of Beijing’s growing global influence.
“Who knew shortwave in China was a land mine?” said Isaacson, a onetime head of CNN who is chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America and its four sister networks.
With the Obama administration embarking on a fundamental overhaul of Voice of America and other official broadcasters — one that seeks to adapt their traditional diplomatic missions to the era of Facebook and Twitter — Rohrabacher’s response could be a foretaste of battles to come.
As part of its year long review, Isaacson’s board is seeking ways to streamline and modernise Voice of America and its sister networks: Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Alhurra, and Radio and TV Marti. Each service has its protectors in Congress — Cuban-American lawmakers defend Radio Marti, for example — and they are likely to view any change as a threat.
“It’s going to take some tilling of the ground,” said Isaacson, who brings the perspective of both a media executive and an aspiring diplomat.
While the need for the US to get its message across to an often hostile world is greater than ever, Isaacson said, digital technology risks turning these services into relics of a bygone era, when dissidents in closed societies huddled over their transistor radios for scraps of information from the West.
To be sure, the broadcasters have made significant strides. Voice of America is inviting listeners to file reports about the uprisings in Bahrain on Facebook, while Radio Free Asia is developing technology to circumvent firewalls that the Chinese government puts up to block its transmissions.
Yet in a brutal budget climate, the money for foreign broadcasting is shrinking. And the competition is relentless. In Egypt alone, 12 new commercial television channels have sprouted up since the January revolt.
“It’s not the neatly defined world of the Cold War,” said Robert McMahon, a former news director of Radio Free Europe, which reinvented itself after the fall of the Berlin Wall by beaming into countries like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. “It’s a crowded, chaotic media marketplace.”
©2011 The New York
Times News Service
