Interweaving of public diplomacy and U.S. international broadcasting, a historical analysis.

• Author: Lipien, Ted

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Summary

U.S. policy makers have used traditional diplomacy, public diplomacy and government-sponsored journalism to promote America's interests and to influence public opinion abroad. On the journalistic side, the so-called surrogate radios: Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty - more independent and more confrontational - were established in the 1950s, while the Voice of America (VOA) - broadcasting since World War II - remained under greater control of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Gradually over many decades, VOA gained more journalistic freedom but still retained its semi-official status, while the surrogate radios dropped their link to the CIA as they continued their hard-hitting journalism in defense of democracy.

With the current efforts by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) to de-federalize the Voice of America, it may be worthwhile to look at the history of the gradual divorce between public diplomacy and U.S. international broadcasting over the past several decades. Relying on my own perspective as a VOA journalist employed by the United States Information Agency (USIA) to broadcast radio programs to Poland during the Cold War, this article describes the disappearing links between the two cultures in frequent conflict with one another but also successfully working in tandem to advance U.S. interests and support for human rights.

Changing this model by privatizing VOA and undermining the independence and specialization of the surrogate broadcasters would be bad for both public diplomacy and journalism on behalf of the United States in support of democratic change abroad. This article offers a short history of how journalistic and diplomatic cultures interacted in U.S. international broadcasting with a focus on several key players.

Arthur Bliss Lane

When in 1948 former U.S. Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane (1894-1956) published his book "I Saw Poland Betrayed," he put in two paragraphs about the Voice of America overseas radio broadcasts. A man of high social standing and strong convictions, he had resigned the previous year as U.S. Ambassador to Poland to protest the abandonment of Eastern Europe to Soviet rule at Yalta and to embark on educating Americans about the communist threat. While Lane was still ambassador, he had disagreed strongly though not publicly with FDR's handling of Stalin and later bemoaned what he considered the Truman Administration's insufficiently firm stand toward Moscow. Critical as well of his colleagues at State, he became convinced that the United States was not sending the right kind of message in diplomatic exchanges with the communist government in Warsaw, but also in VOA radio broadcasts to Poland. He retired at the relatively young age of 53 to be able "to speak and write openly, without being hampered by diplomatic convention." Dean Acheson allowed him full access to the Department's secret files to write his book, which turned out to be highly critical of U.S. foreign policy and the State Department.

What U.S. Government-funded stations should broadcast, under what management and on whose behalf were the burning questions when Arthur Bliss Lane was writing his book, as they are now. When "I Saw Poland Betrayed" was published, the term public diplomacy was not yet invented. Some of its tools, however, were used by American diplomats to influence public opinion abroad and they were far more integrated into the official policy than in later decades.

There was little doubt in anyone's mind that the contents of what Voice of America communicated at that time directly to the Polish people over the heads of their Soviet-imposed government was set at the State Department in Washington. State Department officials forbade, for example, any mention in VOA programs of Stalin's responsibility for the murder of thousands of Polish POVs in Soviet prison camps during World War II, referred as the Katyn massacre after the location of one of the camps where the murders took place. Offering the audience what it wanted to hear and could not get from its domestic media would have been good public diplomacy, but in those early years this concept was not yet universally accepted. An open dispute over the Katyn massacre would further complicate U.S.-Soviet relations. Some State Department officials preferred to keep this issue out of the public eye.

Arthur Bliss Lane understood, however, that VOA could support long term U.S. foreign policy goals in ways that could not be achieved easily through government-to-government diplomatic contacts or even through meetings of American diplomats with groups of private citizens. He became more and more convinced that under the State's guidance, VOA programs were not even remotely appropriate for their intended audience. "My opinion of their value differed radically from that of the authors of the program," he wrote. Still, he saw the Voice of America and later Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty as critical tools of public diplomacy "if appropriate material is used."

Lane objected particularly to the Department's policy in the 1940s of telling the people of Eastern Europe about the benefits of democracy in the United States. He thought that such programs showed a complete lack of appreciation of the psychology of those living under Soviet domination. "It was indeed tactless, to say the least," he complained in his book, "to remind the Poles that we had democracy, which they also might again be enjoying, had we not acquiesced to their being sold down the river at Tehran and Yalta." He wanted VOA to report more on the Soviet takeover of Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, but he also wanted to see a change in the official U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union.

While Lane disagreed with the State Department, he did not consider U.S. government-funded broadcasting as totally separated from traditional diplomacy. His concern about VOA programs to Poland showed that he viewed such radio broadcasts as important in supporting what he believed should be the right kind of U.S. foreign policy, certainly not something to be given up or ignored by policy makers. He not only understood the power of transnational radio, he was willing to use it to its full potential - not to help the U.S. to engage with the Soviet empire or to transform it, which would have been the traditional goal of diplomats, but to destroy it. His peer George F. Kennan, who articulated the policy of containment - with which Lane strongly disagreed because it did not call for encouraging a speedy liberation of Eastern Europe - likewise initially supported the expansion of U.S. radio broadcasting behind the Iron Curtain but with a somewhat different purpose and a longer timeframe. Lane would have been much happier with a single, clearly defined policy and a single public message.

Radio Free Europe

After his retirement from the Foreign Service, Lane became a public supporter of greatly expanding U.S. radio transmissions to the Soviet block outside of the State Department's control. He believed that what the Voice of America was putting on the air did not only send a wrong message, it was not nearly enough to help topple the Soviet regime. He joined a group of prominent Americans who in 1950 created and supported Radio Free Europe (RFE), a station run by the CIA and staffed with East European emigres. This group of organizers and supporters included General Dwight Eisenhower, General Charles Douglas (C.D.) Jackson, who later became President Eisenhower's advisor on countering Soviet propaganda, the hero of the Berlin Airlift General Lucius Clay, former U.S. Ambassador to Japan and former Under Secretary of State Joseph C. Grew, U.S. intelligence specialist Frank Wisner, future CIA Director Allen W. Dulles and many other distinguished members.

Having achieved his goal of helping to create the surrogate radios, Lane spent the rest of his life trying to protect RFE and RL, but also VOA, from what he perceived as a pro-Soviet bias among some of his former State Department colleagues. He and many others like him became convinced that the U.S. military and intelligence communities had people who were professionally better suited to manage foreign language broadcasting as a strategic weapon against communist expansion and as a Trojan horse against the Soviet Union.

According to many former Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty officials, Bliss Lane was right. What made the station successful was ample funding but without the usual U.S. government institutional controls under which the Voice of America had to operate at that time. There was also an additional benefit of maintaining an appearance of having a privately-run radio station. When communist regimes raised protests with American diplomats against the content of the broadcasts, the State Department could claim that RFE had no official links to the U.S. Government, although practically no one believed such claims.

From the very beginning, the surrogate radio enjoyed far more editorial freedom than VOA broadcasters working in Washington. Still, RFE commentators were monitored by CIA officers who often told them what they should cover and how, a practice which diminished greatly over the years. It did last, however, until 1971 when Congress finally removed the CIA link. RFE was based in Munich, West Germany, in much closer proximity to Eastern Europe than VOA. From a journalistic perspective, this was very important at a time when there was no Internet or even the ability to phone news sources behind the Iron Curtain. Better funded and broadcasting more hours than VOA, RFE soon had a much larger radio audience in Poland, but the station - as RFE's own clandestine surveys showed - was viewed by listeners as somewhat less credible than the more official and cautious Voice of America. RFE presented itself to its audience in Poland as a free Polish Radio. VOA remained an American government radio station broadcasting in...