Muffling the Voice of America
MULTIPLE CHOICE question: Which of the following had the largest audience among global shortwave radio listeners between 1975 and 1995? The BBC? Radio Moscow? The Voice of America?
The answer, according to joint surveys done often by the BBC and the VOA, was that our Voice of America, broadcasting in as many as 50 languages at times, was the leading international broadcaster for much of that period.
I served in the VOA vineyards as a news writer, foreign correspondent, and then as a senior news executive for 21 years during that era, and even did guest appearances on a weekly BBC radio broadcast for much of the two years that I was in graduate school at Oxford. Both services were dedicated to accurate, comprehensive, serious in-depth news reporting.
The difference was that, accents aside, VOA was prohibited by law from broadcasting to the United States. So our citizens never knew just how good their ''official" radio station was, unless they spent time traveling or living abroad, especially if they were in places where accurate news was hard to come by. Indeed, some of the biggest fans of VOA over the years were the generations of foreign correspondents based in Moscow and Beijing who found VOA reports a lifeline to news of the world.
Thus, it is with growing dismay that I read news of the latest spending plans being discussed by members of the Bush administration and their advisers for how best to influence Muslims and attitudes in the Muslim world. Congress is being asked for an additional $75 million to ''support democracy" in Iran, and unnamed State Department officials are saying it will be used to ''improve radio broadcasts, begin satellite broadcasts, and include money for scholarships for Iranian students to come to the United States."
Nowhere is VOA mentioned.
News of this request comes only one day after I learned of the latest announcement by Bush-appointed officials that VOA will have to discontinue its worldwide English broadcasts, which have been on the air 24 hours a day without interruption since 1942. Millions of people have learned to speak English by listening to VOA. It even broadcast a formal ''English 900" language training program to China in the 1970s that was the most widely listened-to single program in the country, outstripping all the government sponsored broadcasts. During the ''solidarity strikes" against the communist government in Poland in the 1980s, surveys showed 85 percent daily listenership to VOA for more than nine months.
And for nearly five decades, people throughout the Middle East turned to VOA and the BBC for ''consistently reliable" and ''comprehensive" news, as mandated by the VOA charter. Yet recently, that organization, whose 1,100 employees and 40 or so language broadcast services cost the tiniest fraction of 1 percent of that portion of the budget focused on foreign affairs (including the State Department), has faced cut after budget cut.
Meantime, the Bush administration has flailed about with various ideas designed to reach people in the Middle East, including a new ''teen-pop" radio station (Radio SAWA) and by appointing Madison Avenue ''experts" and others to take charge of ''promoting America and its image abroad."
One of the saddest of recent developments was news of the administration's effort to plant phony pro-American stories in the local Iraqi press, ostensibly written by Iraqi journalists but actually bought and paid for by the Lincoln Group, a new public relations firm that has flourished the last two years in Washington, thanks to the multimillion dollar contracts it has received from the Pentagon to do such work. We now know that the Lincoln Group was started by two men with a history of failed projects, who won the contracts on spurious claims of close connections to top military officials and reputable advertising and public relations firms, all of which are quoted as having only the most casual and distant of contacts with that group.
While abandoning VOA as a ''relic of the Cold War" and ignoring nearly 50 years of reputation and good standing among Middle Eastern audiences (some of whom get VOA on local AM or FM relay broadcasts, as well as shortwave), the White House is casting about for ways to connect with Islamic audiences globally when the answer is just 10 blocks away at the VOA headquarters.
News of events and developments related to new propaganda-funding plans and revelations about the Lincoln Group would by laughable if it weren't so costly and downright tragic.
John J. Schulz is dean of the College of Communication at Boston University. 
