http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/26/opinion/the-pitch-of-americas-voice.htmlThe Pitch of America’s Voice
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
MAY 25, 2014
Vladimir Putin’s aggressive return to Cold War propaganda is feeding congressional momentum for a bipartisan overhaul of Voice of America, the federal broadcast outlet that has long jockeyed between providing independent, credible news and meeting its statutory mission as official supporter of the United States. This is not always an easy balance, and a measure approved last month by the House Foreign Affairs Committee would explicitly tighten the definition of the V.O.A.’s mission so that its news “is consistent with and promotes the broad foreign policies of the United States.”
The measure has strong support in both parties with a parallel Senate effort underway. It is critical that the sponsors guarantee the American public as much as the world that standards of professional journalism will not be sacrificed in favor of a simplistic propaganda megaphone.
The V.O.A.’s credibility will not be put at risk, insist the committee’s chairman, Ed Royce, Republican of California, and its ranking Democrat, Eliot Engel of New York. They say a remake of the agency has long been needed to meet rapid changes in communication technology that find Russia and China seizing the initiative in the modern information arena.
The V.O.A.’s nine-member board of part-time governors has been criticized repeatedly for mismanagement and dysfunction. While serving as secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton complained last year that the board was “practically defunct in terms of its capacity to be able to tell a message around the world.” The House bill would downgrade the board to an advisory role and create a full-time chief executive to oversee a broadcasting agenda in 43 languages to an audience of 123 million people. Three Radio Free outlets would be consolidated.
The proposed overhaul has understandably alarmed members of the V.O.A. news staff who fear that it will undermine a congressional mission enacted in 1976 that, far from a propaganda agency, set its role as an “accurate, objective, and comprehensive” source of news. Sponsors insist there will be firm safeguards against the government dictating news content, which will ultimately depend on the ability of the new chief executive to thread between the needs of news and government policy.
Topic: Momentum for an overhaul of Voice of America (Read 1303 times)
