In an act of gross neglect of their mission and their audience, U.S. officials in charge of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, or BBG, and key Voice of America, or VOA, managers who are also senior government executives failed to boost shortwave and medium wave radio broadcasts to North Korea for the duration of the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore.
Even before the summit, I started hearing rumors that Obama administration holdovers still running U.S. overseas broadcasting were not planning to give the North Koreans an extra chance to hear in real time what was happening in Singapore. North Korean listeners to U.S. radio broadcasts would get only their usual very few hours on shortwave and medium-wave radio frequencies, as if nothing of special importance was happening.
I heard afterwards that while the U.S. president and the North Korean dictator were signing their negotiated agreement, neither VOA nor the separately managed Radio Free Asia, or RFA, was on the air broadcasting to North Korea at all. The agency’s central management did nothing to enable their broadcasters to cover the historic event live with radio programs in Korean.
To me it was an incredible failure of leadership — a failure of senior U.S. government executives to bring American news in real time to the people forced to live behind the curtain of total censorship and unspeakable repression.
Shortwave radio broadcasting is no longer the preferred medium of reaching audiences in many foreign countries, but it is still much needed and cannot be successfully replaced by any other media platform in North Korea. Transnational radio is the only way the North Koreans are able to learn what is happening in their own country and in the outside world without being exposed to a considerable risk of imprisonment or death. Even listening to radio in the privacy of one’s own home in North Korea is dangerous, but it is far safer than any other means of quickly getting uncensored outside information.
Although a few North Koreans can access the Internet, no one except for Kim Jong Un and his spies can safely surf VOA or RFA websites. I was amazed that BBG and VOA officials would ignore this fact and do nothing to bring more news quickly and in real time to the people of North Korea during the Singapore summit.
The much better managed Radio Free Asia at least went on the air with substantial live coverage during its limited shortwave radio hours that are normally used for repeat programming. BBG executives should have also expanded RFA radio transmissions to North Korea by assigning to the station extra time and additional frequencies. I am told that they did not. RFA and VOA broadcasters had to do their best with what limited radio airtime they had.
From what I could tell, BBG and VOA officials were primarily interested in getting Greta Van Susteren, who does pro bono work for VOA, to do a television interview with President Trump, which she did. I suspect they had to use her because some regular VOA Newsroom reporters have been caught in public calling President Trump “a joke,” along with obscene names on social media that cannot be reprinted in a newspaper op-ed. One actual VOA report compared Trump to Stalin and Mao. Other VOA journalists have posted unseemly jokes about first lady Melania Trump.
Now the BBG and VOA officials who did nothing to prevent such unprofessional behavior at the Voice of America wanted a VOA interview with the president, presumably for publicity purposes in the U.S., and only Greta Van Susteren could get it. While they saw to their bureaucratic fiefdoms, North Koreans seeking VOA news were out of luck, due to a lack of increased radio transmissions to North Korea at least during the Trump-Kim summit.
I assume that the Greta Van Susteren-Trump interview was eventually translated into Korean and broadcast by radio after some delay, but there was no VOA Korean Service reporter standing next to Greta who could have asked President Trump a few clarifying questions specifically for the North Korean audience. That’s what should have been done to limit the misinterpretations and controversies which the Greta Van Susteren interview has indeed produced.
I asked the Voice of America management for an explanation and was told initially that they would get back to me. When I did not hear anything for several days, I also wrote to the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Again, there has been no response for three days. American taxpayers pay their salaries. The president’s budget request for Fiscal Year 2019, sent to Congress on Feb. 12, 2018, includes $661.1 million for the BBG.
The lack of response leads me to believe that the information I received from many sources is true — the Broadcasting Board of Governors and the Voice of America leaders have failed to do what managers previously in charge of U.S. international broadcasting would have known to do without even thinking about it.
I had worked at VOA in the 1980s, when Kenneth Y. Tomlinson was the director appointed by President Ronald Reagan. I did not have to go to Ken Tomlinson to ask for more shortwave and medium wave radio hours when Pope John Paul II was planning a visit to Communist-ruled Poland. He came to me and the Polish Service, and asked what he could do to help.
This is the kind of leadership that the agency and the Voice of America desperately needed for the U.S.-North Korea summit but did not get from the Broadcasting Board of Governors. What it shows is that the change of management in charge of U.S. international media outreach is now long overdue and could not come soon enough.
President Trump has proposed Michael Pack to be the new CEO for the BBG. Almost immediately, Pack was viciously attacked by anonymous BBG sources who denounced him to CNN for being conservative and a collaborator in producing a documentary film with former Trump aide Steve Bannon. Michael Pack happens to be, however, far more experienced in public service and public diplomacy than any of the current top executives in charge of the BBG and VOA. As an award-winning film documentarian for PBS and a former director of Worldnet television in the former U.S. Information Agency, he would be unlikely to tolerate the kind of extreme partisanship and dysfunction which have taken root in the last several years at the Broadcasting Board of Governors.
The U.S. Senate should confirm Mr. Pack in a bipartisan vote as soon as possible to prevent a repeat of this Singapore disaster, and to give the U.S. a chance to be competitive in its media outreach against censorship, propaganda, and disinformation in the digital age.
I also happened to notice that Russia’s propaganda channel, RT, beat the Voice of America English website in posting news about the signing of the U.S.-North Korea agreement. Michael Pack, if he is confirmed by the Senate, will face a difficult task of reforming a highly dysfunctional federal agency whose ability to fulfill its mandate seems to be nonexistent at the moment. We can only hope that he will soon be able to do this job, and that he will succeed with bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress.
Ted Lipien is a former Voice of America acting associate director.
