Voice of America to Concentrate on Mideast
Board Decides to De-Emphasize English Radio Broadcasts, Stress TV and the Internet

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 14, 2006

The Voice of America plans to silence many of its radio broadcasts in English and several other languages as the agency concentrates more resources on the Middle East and countries central to the U.S. effort against terrorism.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the government-owned broadcasting service, announced the moves last week, citing tight budgets and the need to focus on the most pressing national security threats. Its plans arose despite proposed budget increases of 13 percent for the U.S.-sponsored Middle East Broadcasting Networks and 5.3 percent for the VOA.

"Faced with the increased costs of expanding critically needed television and radio programming to the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world, the Board has had to make some painful choices," the broadcasting board, led by Chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, said in a written statement.

The plans angered many employees and VOA advocates, who say the move would eliminate long-standing English-language radio broadcasts everywhere but Africa, abandon other language broadcasts in some unstable parts of the world, and potentially leave many specialized journalists out of work. The changes come as Russia, China and the Qatar-based al-Jazeera network are adding television or Internet programming in English.

"I think this, coupled with other reductions, amounts to nothing less than a coup de grace for the nation's largest publicly funded overseas network," said Alan Heil, a retired deputy director of VOA and author of "Voice of America: A History."

"It is incomprehensible that in our own mother tongue -- the world's major language of commerce and the Internet -- that we would be going dark in four of five continents previously reached," he added.

Most painful, advocates say, is the prospective loss of News Now, the VOA's flagship English-language service. It broadcasts worldwide 14 hours a day and includes hourly news updates, correspondent reports and longer programs on science and other topics. The VOA would continue with English content on the Web and special broadcasts for limited English speakers.

Also scheduled for elimination are VOA radio broadcasts in Croatian, Turkish, Thai, Greek and Georgian. Radio broadcasts in Albanian, Bosnian, Macedonian, Serbian, Russian and Hindi would end, although television programming in those languages would continue. Russian and Georgian programming would continue on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-funded broadcasting service carrying stories of regional interest.

The broadcasts on the chopping block generally are transmitted over shortwave radio, a medium that studies show has a diminishing audience, said Larry Hart, a spokesman for the broadcasting board. He said the board wants to expand VOA operations over the Internet and on television, a more expensive medium that will more than soak up the budget increases.

At the same time, the board wants to shift resources to the Middle East, Iran and Afghanistan, regions central to the fight against terrorism where few people speak English and a free press is scarce.

"What we're looking at is who could benefit most by our services, and those are people, generally, that in many cases are not English-speaking or at least are not well versed in English, that primarily get their information in their native language, and that have the least available competitive sources," Hart said.

Critics say they fear that the administration is trying to put a more political stamp on VOA programming, as Tomlinson was accused of doing as a board member at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting before resigning under pressure in November.

Hart said the board, made up of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, decided unanimously and "with regret" that the changes were necessary.

The board, which is seeking buyout authority from Congress, would not say how many jobs could be affected or whether layoffs are likely. Budget documents show the number of full-time employees in international broadcasting operations, including Broadcasting to Cuba, dropping by 98, to 2,195 positions.

The proposed changes, which must be approved by Congress, include expanding service to Iran, where daily VOA television programming in Persian would increase from 30 minutes to four hours in prime time and the Radio Farda Web site would be improved. For Afghanistan, there would be additional Pashto radio broadcasts targeting the border region with Pakistan, and the VOA would develop a new one-hour TV program in both Dari and Pashto.

The board would increase to 24 hours a day (up from 16) news broadcasts from Alhurra, a two-year-old Arabic-language satellite television network that reaches viewers in 22 countries in the Middle East. And it would add more local news for Radio Sawa, an Arab-language pop music and news station funded by the United States.

Talk show host Inna Dubinsky, whose daily half-hour call-in radio show for the VOA's Russian language service would fall victim to the cuts, said she and other employees do not understand reducing service to Russia, a country where democracy's grip is tenuous.

"People are very frustrated," said Dubinsky, who said her job was safe because she could shift to VOA television work. "They say it defies any logic of the national security issues that are relevant for the United States at the moment."

Art Chimes, who produces a weekly science program in English for News Now, said that the agency should not retreat from shortwave broadcasts.

"Television is great, and we should be on television," he said. "The Internet is great, and we should definitely be on the Internet. But the rest of the world is not like the United States in terms of their access to this kind of information technology. There are places where there is no substitute for radio."