U.S. Station Seeks Ear of Iran's Youths

The typical listener is probably a male (but might be a female), most likely under 30 (but might be over), and is almost certainly listening in a house (but might be in a car). When it comes to knowing its audience, the U.S.-funded Radio Farda knows only two things for sure: that the audience is surreptitiously listening somewhere inside Iran, and that the Iranian government doesn't want anyone to hear what a U.S.-funded radio service has to say.

How, then, does Radio Farda -- which receives about $7 million in federal funding and is hoping for substantially more as the United States expands its push for democracy in Iran -- decide on what to broadcast to such an audience?

The answer can be found in an anonymous office building off Interstate 95 in Northern Virginia. There, past the guard, past the magnetometer, through the controlled-access doors and at the very far desk in a quiet room, Sara Valinejad is about to click a computer mouse and determine what any Iranian with an AM or shortwave radio, or an Internet connection, will be able to hear the following day.

The guiding philosophy: "In Iran, they don't allow you to be happy," says Valinejad, 30, who emigrated from Iran 10 years ago. Radio Farda, she says, is intended to do the opposite. "It puts you in a good mood when you listen to this radio station."

Click.

And so it is that in Iran they'll soon be hearing "Hung Up" by Madonna.

It is not frivolous, this decision of how best to portray U.S. values and ideals via radio transmission. From surveys of Iranian ex-pats to market tests in Dubai, Radio Farda has been a work in progress since its debut in late 2002. The one constant, for which it has been both lauded and criticized, is that unlike Cold War-era transmissions by the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe that relied primarily on news programming, Farda blends news and music as a way to reach a country where two-thirds of the population is said to be under 30.

"A little bit of entertainment" is how Bert Kleinman, a consultant to Radio Farda, describes the broadcast formula he helped design. "The core of the mission is news and information" -- in a typical hour, 16 1/2 minutes of programming is devoted to news -- but "we were tasked to reach out to the younger generation there. And quite frankly, you just can't do it with news."

So in addition to a 10-member news staff in Washington and a 28-member news staff in Prague, there is Valinejad, whose duties as the person in charge of the non-news include sifting through the 300 or so phone messages a day left by listeners who call in their responses to the interactive feature "What Do You Think?"

"We try in the American tradition to have respectful dialogue," Kleinman says of this feature, which airs twice an hour. An acceptable topic, he says, is, "What should be done to improve the relationship between Iran and the United States?" An unacceptable topic would be, "Should the mullahs be overthrown?"

There are also station promotions that air several times an hour, along with features about health issues (acceptable: "why Vitamin E is good for you," says Kleinman; unacceptable: "boil your water so you don't get bubonic plague").

More than anything else, though, there is music.