Voice of America Under Pressure to Toe U.S. Line
" The State Department, sympathetic to the critics, tried, unsuccessfully, to stop the V.O.A. from broadcasting any of its recent interview with Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader.
After that quarrel, the Bush administration replaced the agency's acting director last week
with another Voice of America official with strong conservative credentials. Its governing board awaits the appointment of three new members."
October 8, 2001
From The New York Times
By FELICITY BARRINGER
he Voice of America, born during World War
II, nurtured in cold war propaganda and
remade in the 1990's as a source of objective
information for a global audience, is under renewed
pressure to be a salesman for government policy in
the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
Suddenly, as attacks on Afghanistan begin, people
all over Washington have opinions on the mission
and quality of an agency often ignored as a
bureaucratic backwater. That is because in
countries whose people have limited access to
objective news, radio services like the BBC and the Voice of America attract substantial audiences.
But as the V.O.A. reaches out to distant countries, the hatreds fed by those countries' wars reach back into
the V.O.A.'s studios. Its Pashto-language broadcasts are under constant attack by anti-Taliban émigrés, who
call the service the Voice of the Taliban. The State Department, sympathetic to the critics, tried,
unsuccessfully, to stop the V.O.A. from broadcasting any of its recent interview with Mullah Mohammad
Omar, the Taliban leader.
After that quarrel, the Bush administration replaced the agency's acting director last week with another Voice
of America official with strong conservative credentials. Its governing board awaits the appointment of three
new members.
Congress is also considering legislation creating a new service, Radio Free
Afghanistan. Its need for experienced Pashto- and Dari-speaking
broadcasters could drain resources from the V.O.A. In the midst of these
developments, a core question is being asked: what role should the agency,
with its credo of dispassionate reporting, play now, when the Bush
administration is passionate about fighting terrorism with every available
weapon? It is a question likely to frame a hearing on Wednesday of the
House Committee on International Relations.
The Voice of America's core work for the last six decades has been
broadcasting news, sports, entertainment and official government opinions
around the world via shortwave radio. Some V.O.A. broadcasts are in
English, but most of its 800 journalists work for the services that broadcast to
tens of millions of people in 53 languages.
The agency's corner of the diplomatic bureaucracy has undergone two major
changes the last six years. In 1995, its governing board was reconstituted as
a firewall between the agency and the administration. In 1999, the Voice of
America was spun off from its parent, the United States Information Agency.
The broadcast group's 1,200 employees are used to having international and
bureaucratic controversies seep into their daily lives. But there is a new
intensity to today's debate. In a recent e-mail message to his staff — before
his boss was replaced last week — the V.O.A.'s news director, Andre
deNesnera, wrote, "During the past few days, there has been a systematic
attack on the Voice of America — more specifically, an attack on Article
One of our charter, which states that we should be a `reliable and
authoritative source of news' and that our news should be `accurate,
objective and comprehensive.' "
Mr. deNesnera's probable new boss, Robert R. Reilly, seemed to echo these
sentiments last week.
Mr. Reilly, a conservative in the information agency's policy division —
essentially, the government's editorial page — was named last week to
replace the acting director, Myrna R. Whitworth. (His appointment is
expected to win quick approval by the board of broadcasting governors.)
In staff meetings and a later interview, he said, "I would not allow the integrity
of our news operation to be compromised." To do so, he said, "would be a
devastating blow to the public diplomacy of the United States and a
squandering of the fund of trust that has been developed over the decades in our overseas audiences, who
turn to V.O.A. for accurate and objective news."
The words, which Mr. Reilly used at a staff meeting and repeated in the interview, were welcomed by the
journalists. But some expressed concern about a 20-year-old memo reflecting Mr. Reilly's onetime view of
V.O.A. The memo, written to Charles Z. Wick, the Reagan-era head of the United States Information
Agency, concluded, "It is time we recaptured the words `balance' and `objectivity' from the rhetorical
excesses of the left and re-established them to stand for the full truth about this country — the last and best
hope of freedom in the world."
Asked about the memo last week, Mr. Reilly said: "It's a wonderful document of the cold war era. This is a
different war and a different era."
But some are still willing to make the same case. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Florida Republican
who is chairwoman of the subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, said of V.O.A.
broadcasts, "If we turn this into a PBS documentary — seesawing on every side and being balanced — that's
not promoting democracy."
One of the most visible critics of the agency has been the New York Times columnist William Safire, who has
urged the creation of a Radio Free Afghanistan.
Questions of objectivity have always dogged the Voice of America because it is a government agency and
because its foreign-language services have always had to deal with echoes of homeland conflicts when they
recruited broadcasters multiethnic states.
For years, broadcasts in Pashto, the language of Afghanistan's central region, from which the Taliban
emerged, have been attacked as pro- Taliban by followers of the Northern Alliance. The rebel coalition is
dominated by ethnic Tajiks, for whom the V.O.A. broadcasts in Dari.
In 1999, a Pashto reporter fanned claims of bias when he disrupted a news conference, yelling at young
women who had recently left Afghanistan and were discussing their physical and psychological oppression by
the Taliban. The reporter, who loudly accused the women of lying, was disciplined by V.O.A. officials.
Both Mr. deNesnera and the agency's former director, Sanford J. Ungar, now president of Goucher College
in Maryland, praised the overall work of the Pashto service. "It does a good job under very difficult
circumstances," Mr. Ungar said.
The service's contacts with the Taliban government gained it the interview with the Taliban leader. Its critics
within the V.O.A. quickly let the State Department know. Within two hours, members of the board of
broadcasting governors were hearing the State Department arguments that the mullah's words should not be
aired. Divided, the board did nothing.
Four days later, the V.O.A. defied the diplomats and broadcast parts of the interview. Asked Friday if the
service should be free to interview anyone, its prospective director, Mr. Reilly, said: "Of course. That's part of
a journalist's job." But, he added, "Andre and I will insist equally that those interviews be placed in a broader
context."
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