A story like this drives me up a tree. How can we be so incredibly stupid?
washingtonpost.com
Casey Kasem or Freedom?
By Jackson Diehl
Monday, December 16, 2002; Page A25
After an Iranian court sentenced the reformist academic Hashem Aghajari to death last month, the largest and most sustained student demonstrations in years erupted in Tehran. As they grew, day after day, U.S.-operated Radio Azadi, or "Radio Freedom," was their favorite medium. Every day, student leaders would call by cell phone from the roiling campuses to the radio's headquarters in Prague and narrate the latest developments live. Each night the radio would broadcast a roundtable discussion, patching together students and journalists in Tehran with exiled opposition leaders to discuss where the reform movement was going. So instrumental to the rebellion-in-the-making did the radio become that pro-regime counter-demonstrators recently held up a placard reading "Who does Radio Azadi talk to?" -- a taunt taken by the station's staff as a badge of honor.
The protest movement, now five weeks old, rolls on, spreading from students to workers and from Tehran to other cities. Some see parallels to the popular movements that overthrew the Communist regimes of Europe in 1989 -- with a big dose of help from U.S.-sponsored Radio Free Europe. In this case, however, the tottering dictatorship has gotten a big break: Two weeks ago, Radio Freedom abruptly disappeared from the air. Iranians were no longer able to hear firsthand reports of the protests or the nightly think tanks about their country's future. Instead, after two weeks of virtual silence, the broadcasts are being replaced this week with tunes from Jennifer Lopez, Whitney Houston and other soft-rockers.
How did the mullahs pull off this well-timed lobotomy? They didn't: The U.S. government, in the form of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, did it. In an act that mixes Hollywood arrogance with astounding ignorance of Iranian reality, the board has silenced the most effective opposition radio station in Iran at a time of unprecedented ferment. In its place, at three times the expense, the United States now will supply Iran's revolutionary students with a diet of pop music -- on the theory that this better advances U.S. interests.
Even the name of the station has been sanitized. Instead of "Freedom" -- regarded as too political by the programmers -- the radio will be called "Farda," meaning "tomorrow." Never mind that "freedom" is what thousands of young Iranians have been risking their lives to shout every day on the streets. "The assumption of the people who did this back in Washington is that Iranian young people, like young people in most places, don't want to hear news," says Stephen Fairbanks, the ousted director of Radio Freedom. But this is not most places -- this is Iran, where young people are leading a rebellion against a dictatorship that has stifled opposition media. The student leaders who used to phone in, Fairbanks says, now tell him that "they are losing their voice."
The "people back in Washington" Fairbanks referred to are led by Norman Pattiz, a Los Angeles-based commercial radio mogul and generous Democratic contributor who was rewarded by President Clinton with an appointment to the broadcasting board. As the chairman of the board's Middle East committee, Pattiz initially focused on the Voice of America's Arabic service, which he deemed out of touch in a region where there is growing popular hostility to the United States. His solution was to replace what he called the "old-style propaganda" of VOA with Radio Sawa, a pop-music station that debuted last March. Sawa broadcasts five minutes of news twice each hour, along with Whitney, Britney and a few Arabic balladeers.
The jury on Sawa is still out. The good news is that the station seems to have captured a fairly large audience in countries such as like Jordan and Dubai, where American culture is popular even if American policy is not. But Pattiz and his Washington-based program consultant, Bert Kleinman -- a former producer of Casey Kasem's hit countdown -- have yet to prove that they can sustain the audience while "layering in" more news. In fact, they have yet to deliver on promises to Congress that the news programming will be significantly increased.
Their argument that young Arabs in cities such as Amman and Beirut are more likely to be captured by American music than by canned documentaries is not unreasonable. What's inexplicable is the extension of that logic to mullah-ruled Iran. Yes, Jordan's young population, governed by a pro-American dynasty, is angry at the United States; but in Iran, where an anti-American dictatorship is clinging to power through sheer brutality, the United States and its policies are wildly popular, especially among young people.
So was America's radio station, until recently. "This is not the Cold War era, where oppressed people were under the thumb of tyrants, and they would stand with one foot in a bathtub holding a wire hanger to hear what we would say," Pattiz smugly told the Boston Globe. Maybe not in Egypt, but that's exactly what was happening in Iran -- until Washington pulled the plug. "We made extraordinary inroads," says Fairbanks. "Everyone started to see us as a forum. Each day there were students who would report live to us from their mobile phones. It's a measure of how bold they have become that they would do that."
"Or did."
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