The Foreign Service Journal, January 2004

Republic with an office in Washington, was founded in 1950 as a Cold War tool to defeat communism. The Washington-based RFA was started in 1996. Both services are private, nonprofit corporations, wholly funded by Congress, but they are also supervised by the BBG. In addition, the BBG oversees the International Broadcasting Bureau, which manages the day-to-day oper- ations of VOA and the Marti services — a function previ- ously performed by the now-defunct U.S. Information Agency before its consolidation with the State Department. The IBB handles transmission, marketing and program placement for all broadcasting services, including RFE/RL and RFA. The IBB’s global transmission network includes short- wave stations in Botswana; Delano, Calif.; Germany; Greece; Greenville, N.C.; Kuwait; Morocco; Philippines; Sao Tome and Principe; Sri Lanka; Thailand; and the Northern Mariana Islands. High-powered AM transmit- ters, with a long reach, are used to reach places the BBG can’t penetrate with FM signals, such as Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia. (IBB has over 1,400 FM affiliates around the world.). IBB’s engineers also distribute radio and TV programs via satellite. Reporting the News The BBG’s mission is deceptively simple: “promote and sustain democracy by broadcasting accurate and objective news and information about the United States and the world to audiences overseas.” And that commitment has remained constant through more than 60 years of interna- tional broadcasting BBG’s broadcasters are journalists first. Every day, they reaffirmWilliam Harlan Hale’s maiden VOA broadcast on Feb. 25, 1942. “The news may be good for us. The news may be bad. But we shall tell you the truth,” Hale said. As Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the BBG’s current chairman and a former editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest , points out, U.S. international broadcasting is part of the public diplo- macy apparatus, but operates according to a separate set of rules. “International broadcasting … is called upon to reflect the highest standards of independent journalism as the best means of convincing international audiences that trust is on the side of democratic values,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early 2003. Yet when overseas listeners, particularly in the Middle East, are already skeptical or cynical about U.S. policies, it can be a daunting challenge to build an audience. Fortunately, the BBG has identified several tools with which to address this problem. Research is a building block in creating a flexible, multi-media broadcasting service that reaches the target audience. Each year, BBG hires an independent research firm to conduct research on the effectiveness of broadcast- ing in all languages as part of a program review process. In addition, the BBG itself annually reviews all language ser- vices to determine priority audiences, in accordance with U.S. foreign policy objectives. The process, conducted in consultation with State Department officials, helps the BBG allocate its resources more efficiently. In some cases, language services have been consolidated — RFE/RL’s Persian service was combined with parts of VOA to create Radio Farda for Iran. In other cases, the language services complement each other as in Afghanistan. Keeping up with technological advances is also cru- cial. Shortwave radio was once the only way to listen to U.S. international broadcasting. Today, more than 100 million listeners can receive news, information and enter- tainment by shortwave, FM, medium-wave, television, Internet and digital audio satellite in English and 64 other languages. The BBG is also moving to accelerate multimedia development, adopt updated techniques, control distribu- tion and develop multiple products for key areas. Finally, the BBG is moving to tailor content to the audience . “The one-size-fits-all approach no longer works as a model for U.S. international broadcasting,” says Governor Norman J. Pattiz, a radio pioneer who is also chairman of Westwood One, America’s largest radio network. “We have to use modern communications techniques to target our audiences.” Adds Tomlinson: “We need to keep in mind that no media market is monolithic. We have to make choices about which parts of the market we most want to reach.” For example, Congress has recognized “the particular importance of broadcasting in countries and regions undergoing democratic transition.” So the BBG’s five-year strategic plan, 2002-2007, spells out the following priority areas as the Middle East; Central, South and West Asia; China and the Far East; Southeast Asia and the Pacific 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 21 Brian Conniff is executive director of the Broadcast- ing Board of Governors.