[Swprograms] Wall Street Journal Article VOA vs. State Department

[Joe Buch <josephbuch@xxxxxxxxx>]

Monday, April 18, 2011

The VOA Is Losing Its Voice Hillary Clinton: 'We are in an information war, and we are losing.'

By L. GORDON CROVITZ

China's state news agency, Xinhua, is building a broadcasting headquarters in New York's Times Square as part of Beijing's $7 billion investment in global propaganda, including a 24-hour news channel in English. Meanwhile, Congress recently held hearings on a plan for Voice of America to cut its Chinese- language news broadcasts in order to save $8 million a year.

If public diplomacy helps determine which countries are on the way up and which are on the way down, U.S. actions speak louder than the broadcasts themselves.

"We are in an information war, and we are losing that war," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted to Congress last month. That's the predictable result of unilateral disarmament. As China, Russia and Islamist groups have accelerated their efforts, America has been withdrawing. Reductions in VOA, including an end to Arabic-language programming in the Middle East, are especially dismaying given the leading role the broadcaster played in winning the Cold War against earlier information- suppressing ideologies.

According to research commissioned by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees VOA and other government-sponsored international broadcasters, 12% of Chinese are aware of the VOA, more than the BBC, CNN and Radio Free Asia (another U.S. government service) combined. On a recent VOA Chinese-language show about the planned cuts in service, a caller from Gansu province suggested that Chinese listeners would be happy to donate to keep the broadcasts going. 

In contrast to the U.S., where Chinese state-run CCTV already airs on many U.S. cable systems, Beijing jams VOA radio broadcasts, allows just two VOA correspondents in Beijing, and refuses to let the service open a bureau in Shanghai.

The VOA plan would eliminate the Cantonese-speaking reporting staff entirely, ending programming for the 60 million people who speak the language in southern China. Half the Mandarin-speaking reporters would also be cut. VOA says it plans to step up its presence online instead of on radio. But China is also the world leader in censoring the Internet. 

The proposed VOA cuts come as China is conducting its harshest crackdown on critics since Tiananmen Square. Hardliners reacted to the anti-authoritarian revolts in the Middle East by reinforcing the Great Firewall and arresting more than 100 activists and bloggers.

To its credit, VOA is one of the few parts of the U.S. government that has dared to use circumvention technologies, which allow access to the open Web. It has invested in software from services including Freegate and Ultrareach, and it includes icons on its websites around the world called "Getting Around Internet Blockage." These let people listen to VOA broadcasts and also then use their connections to surf the free Internet. 

Dan Austin, the director of VOA, told me last week that more than one million Chinese a month are using VOA's link to circumvention software in order to jump over China's firewall. Almost two million Iranians use these VOA circumvention tools. By some estimates, with modest new funding, VOA could help 50 million more people get access to the open Web. U.S. broadcasters recently sought bids from technology companies to push text messages into closed countries.

So far, VOA is managing this circumvention with less than $2 million. The State Department has dragged its feet in spending $30 million that Congress appropriated for circumvention tools. A Freedom House report issued last week, "Leaping Over the Firewall," provides a Consumer Reports-like set of product reviews of 11 different circumvention tools and surveys of users in Iran, Azerbaijan, China and Burma. It says some services are easier to use and others are more secure, but many work well to defeat censoring regimes. 

Some of the dysfunction in State Department priorities is structural. VOA and the other broadcasting services were independently run by the U.S. Information Agency from the 1950s until the early 1990s, when for the brief "end of history" moment after the Cold War it seemed these efforts were no longer as important. USIA was disbanded, but the diplomats of the State Department have little interest in upsetting other countries by defending broadcasting or circumvention efforts.

A focus on the Web for VOA, especially reinforced with circumvention tools, makes some sense, but it's wrong to think that new media completely replace what came before. The Web is important, but radio remains an essential medium in China, where most people still don't have access even to the censored Web. 

Firing the journalists who create the content in languages like Mandarin undermines both Web and radio efforts. "The Chinese people are our greatest allies, and the free flow of information is our greatest weapon," says Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.). This is a simple but persuasive argument for restoring planned cuts to VOA and re- engaging in the information war.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit

Gordon Crovitz is a media and information industry advisor and executive, including former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, executive vice president of Dow Jones and president of its Consumer Media Group. He has been active in digital media since the early 1990s, overseeing the growth of The Wall Street Journal Online to more than one million paying subscribers, making WSJ.com the largest paid news site on the Web. He launched the Factiva business-search service and led the acquisition for Dow Jones of the MarketWatch Web site, VentureOne database, Private Equity Analyst newsletter and online news services VentureWire (Silicon Valley), e-Financial News (London) and VWD (Frankfurt).

He is co-founder of Journalism Online, a member of the board of directors of ProQuest and Blurb and is on the board of advisors of several early-stage companies, including SocialMedian (sold to XING), UpCompany, Halogen Guides, YouNoodle, Peer39, SkyGrid, ExpertCEO and Clickability. He is an investor in Betaworks, a New York incubator for startups, and in Business Insider.

Earlier in his career, Gordon wrote the "Rule of Law" column for the Journal and won several awards including the Gerald Loeb Award for business commentary. He was editor and publisher of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong and editorial-page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe in Brussels. 

He graduated from the University of Chicago and has law degrees from Wadham College, Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes scholar, and Yale Law School. 

_______________________________________________
Swprograms mailing list
Swprograms@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/swprograms

To unsubscribe:  Send an E-mail to  swprograms-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe, or visit the URL shown above.