[Imc] VOA (fwd)

[John Martirano]

>From todays NY Times:

October 8, 2001

Voice of America Under Pressure to Toe U.S. Line

By FELICITY BARRINGER

The 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."