When the U.S. officials in charge of persuading foreign audiences must themselves be persuaded by the Dalai Lama not to end Voice of America radio programs to Tibet, it is apparent there is something rotten in the management of U.S. international broadcasting.
The Broadcasting Board of Governors, the federal agency in charge of VOA, has been taken over by career bureaucrats with a self-centered agenda. Like the spineless State Department officials who coaxed Chinese human rights activist Chen Guangcheng out of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, BBG staffers seem to think they know best what serves America’s interests — and as it happens, it coincides with what’s best for them.
According to these bureaucrats, producing English lessons with juvenile humor to be placed on iTunes in China is more important than VOA news. They wanted to cut news broadcasts to generate more nonpolitical online content that Beijing’s cyberpolice will not try to block.
These permanent executives have found some allies among the presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed board of five Democrats and four Republicans. At the same time, they kept other members of the part-time board out of the loop as they hatched plans to limit congressional oversight.
At least on China and Tibet, their plans were blocked, first by bipartisan votes in Congress, and most recently by the board members themselves. These presidential appointees were finally shamed by numerous protests and a powerful plea from Holocaust survivor Annette Lantos, who continues the human rights advocacy work of her late husband, Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif.
But it took relentless efforts by the BBG’s senior Republican, former Ambassador to Poland Victor Ashe, to persuade his colleagues that the executive staff is taking the agency in the wrong direction.
Ashe was supported on Tibet and China by two Democratic members of the BBG — Michael Meehan and Susan McCue, who even suggested that broadcasts to Tibet should be paid for from cuts in management expenses. Eventually, all the BBG members voted to restore funding for Tibetan and Cantonese broadcasts.
The struggle for public control of taxpayer-funded U.S. international broadcasting is, however, far from over. The BBG staff, with the support of some board members, is still pushing forward with the proposal to merge the independent surrogate broadcasters — Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks — under a single administration headed by a new CEO who would not be directly answerable to Congress.
This is yet another power grab attempt by BBG staffers. They explained cutting VOA broadcasts to Russia (just days before Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia) and to China as a discarding of “brand name properties.” These bureaucrats act as if they own these names, which rightly belong to all Americans, and which are associated around the world with America’s support of freedom.
Ashe doesn’t buy the argument that the merger proposal would save money to be used for news programming. He has called the merger scheme one of the most important decisions the board will make, and he has thus asked for public comments and a congressional hearing to evaluate the staff’s proposals.
He is worried that BBG officials, rated by the Office of Personnel Management as the worst leaders and managers in the entire federal government, want to limit public and congressional oversight of America’s most effective “soft” national security asset.
This freedom-generating asset is far too important to be left in the hands of failing and power-hungry bureaucrats.
Ted Lipien, a former Voice of America acting associate director, is co-founder and director of the Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (cusib.org).
