Last week saw a delightfully breathless editorial in the Washington Post, followed by an even more preposterous companion piece at Politico, claiming that legislation changing how the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and other U.S. government-sponsored broadcasters are organized is somehow handing dictatorial control of American media to Donald Trump.
Currently, U.S. government-controlled international broadcasters are run under the supervision of a CEO who answers to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, or BBG—a presidentially appointed board made up of four Democrats, four Republicans, and whoever happens to be secretary of state. “A radical change to that system is now coming,” warns the Post, a change that government-media propagandists “Vladimir Putin and Qatar’s emir might well admire.” The change is found in legislative language deep in the annual National Defense Authorization Act: The CEO will now have to answer to the president (the BBG will be abolished).
This prompted hyperbole from the Post: “If Congress’s intention was for U.S. broadcasting to rival the Kremlin’s it may well get its wish.” And hyperventilation from Politico: “Trump is finally getting his Trump TV—financed by taxpayers to the tune of $800 million per year.”
According to the Post, this nightmare scenario was accomplished in the dead of night, as a sneaky amendment was “quietly inserted” into the larger military authorization. But that would be news to the author of the amendment, House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Ed Royce, who back at the beginning of December put out a press release advertising that his reforms were on their way to becoming law.
The goal of the amendment, Royce said, was to make VOA and the other government broadcasters more efficient and effective in responding to the kind of propaganda being put out by Russia. Royce also, it should be noted, put out a press release in May when the actual amendment was added to the National Defense Authorization Act. In other words, this “insertion” was neither quiet nor even recent.
At least one member of the BBG is wildly unhappy about the changes. Democrat Michael Kempner gave this laughable comment to Politico: “Congress unwittingly just gave President-elect Trump unchecked control of all U.S. media outlets.” The way that sounds, you’d think that Donald Trump were being given the keys to ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, the History channel, Animal Planet, MTV, and all the others.
But the Voice of America is not a TV network like CNN or Fox News, which broadcast in the United States 24/7. Yes, VOA distributes radio, TV, and online content to millions around the world in dozens of languages. But the U.S. distribution of VOA content is infinitesimal, primarily such things as providing a small amount of Somali-language programming to the expat Horn of Africa community in Minnesota.
It’s even harder to argue that the legislation is some sort of Trumpian conspiracy. Not only has the change been in the works for some time, it was a bipartisan endeavor: At the end of its editorial, the Post notes, in best Emily Litella fashion, “The Obama administration—perhaps anticipating a Hillary Clinton presidency—supported these changes.” Politico, too, finally gets around to admitting that the thrust of its article is so much hokum. If you read far enough into the story (and who would, really) you get to a perfectly sensible quote from Jeff Shell, the chairman of the current board: “To have part-time board members to manage something like this is completely unrealistic, so I very much support the empowered CEO [rather] than a board.”
In other words, as long as Hillary Clinton was assumed to be Obama’s heir apparent, boosting the president’s control over government broadcasters was a perfectly reasonable, even enlightened idea. Now that Trump is about to occupy the White House, those very same reforms put the organizations at risk of being run by a “propagandist.” Is that because Donald Trump poses a unique danger, or just because when the left is pushing its agenda it never counts as propaganda?
