The Voice of America Will Sound Like Trump

Source: The Atlantic | June 22, 2020 | Anne Applebaum

Under the president’s control, U.S.-funded broadcasters could turn into a presidential propaganda machine.

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When the Cold War ended, many forgot about these tools. But through the 1990s, the 2000s, and the 2010s, VOA and RFE/RL kept working; Radio Free Asia, along with sister stations broadcasting into Cuba and the Middle East, were added to the group. They kept doing the same job, using the same principles, only in more countries than before. On relatively small budgets, sometimes in difficult conditions, they have kept operating as “surrogates” in countries that don’t have a free press, where journalism is dangerous and governments are not transparent, putting out hundreds of reports in dozens of languages. Through them, and thanks to them, some parts of the world learn about America, and sometimes about their own countries, too.

All of these institutions gathered under the U.S. Agency for Global Media umbrella have had their ups and downs. They have had better and worse leaders; there have been arguments about how much “popular” programming to do on the native-language stations, and how much “serious” news. There have been periods of low morale, staff problems, oversight issues. Last year, Radio Martí, which broadcasts into Cuba, put out some conspiratorial, anti-Semitic material about George Soros, after which eight people were fired. Successive White Houses tried to shape the broadcasters in various ways, and sometimes became annoyed by the output of one network or another. Until this week, however, no U.S. administration had actually set out to destroy America’s international broadcasters or remove their independence. But now, finally, one has.

The author of this action is Michael Pack: colleague of Steve Bannon, producer of a documentary film on Clarence Thomas, and a person so indifferent to the subject of international broadcasting that several people who have met him told me they thought he didn’t really want the job. (Because they still work with him, they asked to remain anonymous.) The Trump administration nominated him as the CEO of the Agency for Global Media two years ago, but his nomination languished in the Senate, not least because Republican senators were unenthusiastic; one congressional staffer who met Pack told me that he seemed to know nothing, had not bothered to “read a 101 on the agency.” Asked about his priorities for the complex broadcasting services, he would respond, according to another interlocutor, with vague phrases like “Give me some time” and “I need to think about it.” Pack is also under criminal investigation for allegedly misdirecting money from a nonprofit to his private company, normally the kind of thing that gives the Senate pause. But for reasons that are still unclear, President Trump finally got interested in his nomination this spring, started making calls, and leaned hard on the supine Republican Senate leadership to vote him in.

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None of these new board members has any background in international broadcasting. None of them has worked in any of the most relevant geographic areas (Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, the Middle East) or in the world of anti-censorship technology. I asked a spokesperson for the new Agency for Global Media leadership about them—he would not go on the record—and all he would say in their defense was that they are “interim.” He refused to say whether the institution intends to create bipartisan boards in the future.

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Thus has the U.S. taken some of its most powerful foreign-policy tools—technology that helps people in repressive countries access the internet; video and audio programs that are crucial to the fight against disinformation; trusted journalists who bring real news to people in closed societies—and stupidly handed them over to a bunch of people who don’t understand them, or may even intend to abuse them. This method of taking over an independent institution—fire all of its senior leadership, get rid of experts, bring in pliable ideologues—is well known in many of the countries where RFE/RL and RFA have long worked. Senator Robert Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and an opponent of Pack’s confirmation, told me that “pushing a partisan or political editorial agenda through a governing structure of hyper-partisan appointees risks making the USAGM no better than the state-run media outlets in the countries in which it operates.” I watched a group of extremists destroy Polish state media in 2015, and I am sorry to say that it wasn’t at all different.

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Whatever the real reason, the damage could be deep, wide, and long-term. In a world where airwaves are flooded with authoritarian disinformation, the effectiveness of American messaging depends on the perceived credibility and independence of the messengers. Anything that resembles “Trump TV” or even just old-fashioned propaganda will have neither. America’s international broadcasters are an important part of the face we present to the world. Thanks to congressional negligence, presidential malice, and general indifference, that face has just gotten uglier.

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