So Far, So Good: Feingold’s Defeat In Committee Points Way For Senate To Support Independent International Broadcasting

(Washington, D.C.): The U.S. Senate is
currently expected to complete work over
the next two days on legislation intended
to reorganize and streamline the Nation’s
foreign policy-making machinery. Most of
the attention concerning this bill has
revolved around the determination of
Foreign Relations Committee chairman
Jesse Helms to consolidate the functions
of several bureaucracies inside the State
Department.

As the Center noted last week, href=”97-D80.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾
the most valuable part of the legislation
Sen. Helms is co-sponsoring with his
ranking minority member, Senator Joseph
Biden, may ironically prove to be a
section that explicitly protects — and
expands — the independence from Foggy
Bottom of one of the United States’ most
formidable, but least appreciated,
foreign policy tools:
government-supported international
broadcasting.

What is At Stake

The danger inherent in subordinating
such broadcasting to the State
Department’s managerial and budgetary
control — and inevitably, therefore, to
its policy dictates — should be obvious.
First, for the government’s
own international services
currently run by the U.S. Information
Agency (the Voice of America, Worldnet
and Radio and Television Marti), the
demands of diplomacy would likely take
precedence over the dissemination of
information in support of freedom
overseas. This problem was bad
enough when USIA was a separate agency;
if its broadcast operations were
integrated into State, there would be
even less tolerance for reporting and
editorials critical, for example, of
totalitarians with whom the
Administration is interested in doing
business.

Second, for currently
independent, but government-supported,
broadcasting services like Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and
the recently established Radio Free Asia
(RFA), however, such an
arrangement would be worse than
compromising. It would likely be the kiss
of death. After all, the
audiences of these “Freedom
Radios” — which generally include
their respective countries’ political
elites and opinion-leaders, priority
targets for American public diplomacy —
place a premium on the objectivity and
reliability of RFE/RL and RFA’s
broadcasts. These are attributes the
Radios’ listeners associate inextricably
with information sources free of U.S.
government editorial control.

‘Freedom Radios’ — A
Proven Asset

During the Cold War years, the Freedom
Radios served as “surrogate”
national radios for populations denied
access to accurate news and other
information by their own,
communist-controlled media.
Unfortunately, there are some in the
United States Senate who naively believe
that the need for such instruments ceased
with the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Others disagreed with the earlier effort
to resist communist tyranny and resented
the pivotal role played by the Freedom
Radios in what Churchill called the
“Twilight Struggle.”

In fact, but for the leadership of
Senator Biden, the Freedom Radios might
well have ceased operations by now. In
1993, then-freshman Democratic Senator
Russell Feingold of Wisconsin made a
personal cause célèbre of
terminating all U.S. government
underwriting of RFE/RL. To support this
draconian action, he claimed that the
Radios were bloated and expensive relics
of the Cold War, operating — thanks to
an independent Board for International
Broadcasting — altogether too
independently of government oversight and
control.

In the absence of appreciable support
from Republicans, the best Sen. Biden
could do was to provide a stay of
execution for the Freedom Radios: a new
institutional arrangement that more
closely tied them to USIA and that set
arbitrary timelines for eliminating
government subsidies to RFE/RL and the
national foreign language services they
provide. Significant belt-tightening and
streamlining followed, making the Freedom
Radios today a model of efficient use of
government resources.

A Needed Tool for the
Future

In the interval, moreover, it has
become clear that the post-Cold
War world is — if anything — one in
which U.S. interests require an increased
capability to provide factual information
to the peoples of Eastern and Central
Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Equally clear is the requirement that
such information be disseminated in a
form that is not discounted by the
audience as mere propaganda put out by
mouthpieces of the American government.

One painful case in point has been the
Balkans, where control of most
information sources by totalitarians bent
on aggression contributed greatly to the
popular support for ethnic cleansing. It
is nothing less than tragic that U.S.
government policy toward the former
Yugoslavia prevented Radio Free Europe
from broadcasting to that region in
Serbo-Croatian at a time when the truth
may have undercut the sense of grievance
on which the likes of Slobodan Milosevic
relied to justify and sustain genocidal
campaigns.

A similar opportunity beckons today:
The recent, overwhelming defeat in Iran
of the candidate favored by that nation’s
fanatic theocracts is proof that the
Iranian people are yearning for an end to
“Islamic” tyranny. What they
largely lack, however, is information
which makes clear that such change is not
only necessary but possible;
that freedom-loving peoples elsewhere
support this goal and are willing to do
their part to help — at a minimum, by
providing news and analysis which both
encourages and equips the growing
opposition to the Iranian government.

Helms-Biden vs. Feingold

The good news is that Senators
Helms and Biden have recognized these
realities and taken steps in their
legislation to maximize the effectiveness
of U.S. government-supported
international broadcasting. They
propose not only to assure the continued
independence and viability of the
existing Freedom Radios, but have
authorized the creation of a new service
within Radio Free Europe to be known as
Radio Free Iran. The Helms-Biden bill
also promises to increase the impact and
reduce the costs of the Voice of America
and other government-run broadcasting
services by placing them along with the
Freedom Radios under an independent, but
accountable, Broadcasting Board of
Governors.

Interestingly, Senator
Feingold was massively rebuffed when, in
the Foreign Relations Committee last
Thursday, he tried to strike this
language. By a vote of 14-3, every
Republican and a majority of the
Committee’s Democrats supported their
leaders in affirming — and expanding —
the independence of the Nation’s
international broadcasting operations.

The Bottom Line

It is to be profoundly hoped that this
sort of bipartisanship will prevail in
the full Senate as well should Sen.
Feingold (or others) try yet again to
imperil some of the United States’ most
powerful, effective and inexpensive
instruments for promoting freedom around
the world.

– 30 –

1. See the Center’s
Decision Brief entitled
Freeing and Strengthening Freedom
Radios May Be Helms-Biden Reorganization
Initiative’s Most Important Achievement
(No. 97-D
79, 12 June 1997).