By Patricia H. Kushlis
In her April 22 column in The Washington Post, Anne Applebaum laments the lack of support in Congress and the Bush administration for Radio Free Europe (RFE) which she erroneously claims was the “only source of independent information in Eastern Europe” during the Cold War.
Now I’m not either a proponent or opponent of Radio Free Europe or its Russian language counterpart Radio Liberty. Both were surrogate radio stations operated first by the Central Intelligence Agency then when their covers were blown around 1970 - openly by the U.S. government. Their task was to broadcast information in local languages to Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union not available because of Communist government censorship so that the peoples “behind the Iron Curtain” could hear the unvarnished news of what was happening in their own countries in their own languages.
That few Americans knew – or today know – of RFE’s existence let alone support its continued existence does not surprise me.
Its name, by the way, is RFE/RL, a post-Cold War amalgamation of the once-upon-a-time two separate services.
RFE/RL operates under the restrictions of the little known Smith-Mundt Act which supposedly restricts the US government from propagandizing its own citizens. This means a special Congressional dispensation is required for Americans to have access to US government media products produced by and directed at foreigners. This Act, enacted in 1948 and strengthened in 1972, was, I suppose, fine in its day. But with the Internet, satellite broadcasting and the rise of medium wave stations, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and today’s Europeanization of much of Eastern Europe, Smith-Mundt has now become a 12 inch soft plastic barrier to the American public’s right to know what its government is saying abroad but, as Mountain Runner suggests, it's like the elephant under the table, no one wants to deal with it.
An aside: I was looking at data on Amazon’s Alexa Internet rankings a couple of weeks ago and discovered that the State Department’s newly launched America.gov, an Internet page of indeterminate quality and usefulness aimed at the world outside the US, had a readership that was about 20 percent American. But quiet please, don’t tell anyone in Congress or America.gov’s State Department bosses. America.gov comes under Smith-Mundt and Americans aren’t supposed to know about it or have access to its contents despite the fact our tax dollars fund it along with other entities like RFE/RL.
Given The New York Times story on Sunday of the Bush administration’s successful manipulation of American media coverage of US policy in the Middle East through tainted “expert military analysts” aka retired senior military officers now also raking in the dough from arms manufacturers suggests that continued Smith-Mundting of US government international information sources like RFE/RL and America.gov is a penny-ante farce.
In reality, RFE and RL’s short wave services from Munich during the Cold War provided only one, of several sources, of information that flew through the air from western government media outlets into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. When I lived in Moscow during the late 1970s, we tuned in daily Voice of America, the most universally popular, as well as the BBC. The Soviets and their Eastern European counterparts were far more effective at jamming RL than either VOA or BBC (see excellent comment by Morand Fachot, a former BBC correspondent, on Ms. Applebaum’s column). VOA – as Fachot indicates - was by far the most popular of all.
VOA – like RL and RFE broadcast on short wave. Unlike RL and RFE it brought news of the world in English and other languages to Russians and Eastern Europeans who, wisely, did not trust Mayak and their other own information sources. VOA also carried the immensely popular late night jazz program by the now deceased Willis Conover whose popularity rankings in the Soviet Union placed him – well – up in the stratosphere with the demigods if not the angels.
Applebaum laments that RFE’s operating budget is now reduced to $75 million in rapidly depreciating dollars (the cost of four Apache helicopters according to Jeff Gedmin, its current president) from $230 million at its peak. She has a point. If the US government is going to do something at all, it needs to do it well and that means funding it adequately.
But it seems to me RFE/RL’s continued existence needs reevaluation to be undertaken in a comprehensive review of all US government international information operations and soft power policies once we have a new administration. Under the Bush administration, they have been in shambles for seven years and the two previous administrations did nothing to help.
US government international broadcasting is an underfunded, poorly administered, unmitigated disaster – but then so are almost all the operations and programs which underpin much of the rest of America’s soft power projection abroad.
Between then and now, however, it would be really nice to see more political appointees wash out of the system. This means Gedmin but it also includes Diane Zeleny, RFE/RL’s Director of Communications, who quietly slipped from a teacher’s pet, cushy job in the former Public Diplomacy Czarina Karen Hughes’ office to the RFE/RL staff in September 2007 but only after the American Foreign Service Association objected to her assignment to a career Foreign Service position in Brussels to which she was unqualified.
One might wonder about her qualifications for the RFE/RL job as well. At the very least she could have informed Ms. Applebaum that she has the broadcasting service’s name wrong: please try to remember for the future, OK, it’s RFE/RL not simply RFE.