The Foreign Service Journal, January 2004

tions — much less what the IBB does, or how it relates to the rest of the acronym-laden alphabet soup of interna- tional broadcasting? I thought so. Well, here’s the story. America was the last major power to enter the world of international broadcasting, setting up the Voice of America in 1942 — well after Radio Moscow, the official service of the Soviet Union (1929), Vatican Radio (1931), the British Broadcasting Corporation (1932), and Nazi Germany’s Rundfunk Ausland (1933). Yet despite that relatively late start, today VOA broadcasts around the world (except for Western Europe and the United States) in 55 languages to an estimated audience of 91 million people each week. Its programming travels via short-wave and medium-wave radio, on television via satellite (14 hours a week), and on the Internet. Now we jump ahead half a century to the International Broadcasting Act of 1994. That legislation brought VOA and all the other radio, television and Internet resources of U.S. nonmilitary international broadcasting under the aegis of the nine-member Broadcasting Board of Governors. It also established the International Broadcasting Bureau as the administrative armof the BBG (not to be confused with the BBC!). The IBB not only manages the day-to-day operations of the three govern- mental broadcasters (the Voice of America, Radio Marti and TV Marti), but also provides technical support to all the other official U.S. broadcasting entities the BBG man- ages: Radio Sawa, Radio Farda, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and WORLDNET Television (which is now being folded into VOA). We hope our coverage will provide a solid frame- work for understanding the bureaucratic structure of U.S. international broadcasting, some of the issues it faces, and how most of its components operate. But that is a far cry from being able to assess its effective- ness. Are the fruits of America’s governmental broad- casting effort worth the approximately half-billion dol- lars the BBG spends annually? How Effective Is the Effort? Consider the following statistic, cited on the BBG’s home page (www.bbg.gov) an d quoted in several of the articles on the following pages: “Every week, more than 100 million listeners, viewers and Internet users around the world turn on, tune in and log on to U.S. international broadcasting programs.” That’s a nice, round figure. But like most statistics, it raises as many questions as it answers. First of all, given that a large portion of our “target audience” resides in countries where tuning in to U.S. broadcasters can be dan- gerous, it is impossible to know for sure how accurate that estimate is. But assuming that many more people would listen if their governments did not jam our signals — for instance, Fidel Castro’s regime does such an effective job of jamming Radio and TV Marti that as few as 1-2 percent of Cubans can receive those broadcasts — let’s triple the figure to 300 million worldwide “customers” per week. Impressive as that hypothetical number is, it represents barely 5 percent of the six billion or so people in the world. On the other hand, if they are “opinion leaders” (in Foreign Service parlance) who disproportionately influ- ence their compatriots to understand and (ideally) appre- ciate America and Americans, then that would be a real success story — particularly if they are located in volatile regions such as the Middle East that are difficult to reach otherwise. Complicating the issue further, one must also bear in mind the increasingly stiff competition VOA and its sister services face on the international airwaves from dozens of other governmental broadcasters, such as the BBC World Service, Radio France International, China Radio International, and the Voice of Russia (Radio Moscow’s successor). Even more formidable is the challenge from the commercial media that have mushroomed around the world in the past decade or so — from the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya and Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite TV chan- nels to the private FM stations in Africa. Suddenly, Everything Changed … During the four decades of the ColdWar, the scope and mission of international broadcasting was simple and straightforward. The Soviet bloc and the Free World bat- tled to sway each other’s domestic populations and the populations of developing countries, and nobody much questioned the budgetary outlays involved. Getting an audience was not very complicated either: there weren’t many broadcasts to be picked up on the shortwave dial, so just putting a strong signal out there meant you’d be likely to get listeners. Jamming, of course, was a problem, but F O C U S J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 17 Steven Alan Honley is the editor of the Foreign Service Journal. An FSO from 1985 to 1997, he served in Mexico City, Wellington and Washington, D.C.