Piled High with Difficulty
Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and other U.S. international broadcasting services still provide vital information to people throughout the world
The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise—with the occasion.
(Abraham Lincoln, 1862)
Even on those rare occasions when the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) makes headlines, as it has been doing since March 14, when President Trump pronounced it “unnecessary,” the coverage is usually as skimpy as a Copacabana bikini. The current crisis has unfortunately proven the rule, not the exception. So far, most of the limited coverage has focused exclusively on Voice of America (VOA), the oldest network in what is admittedly a large and cumbersome bureaucracy. A few reports have praised the second-oldest network, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), for its ground-level reporting of the war in Ukraine. But the other three parts of the agency—the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB), Radio Free Asia (RFA) and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN)—have gone unsung.
Outside the Beltway, Americans know next to nothing about USAGM. Inside, there is a lot more opinion than knowledge. In the quaint belief that opinion should be based on knowledge, let me offer a modest corrective.
One reason for USAGM’s obscurity is the pesky word “radio,” which makes it sound like a Cold War relic using antique transmitters to broadcast right-wing propaganda (says the left) or left-wing propaganda (says the right). This is not the case. The agency’s 63 language services are quite savvy at matching platforms with audiences, from radio for impoverished rural areas and traffic-jammed cities, to up-to-date digital offerings for smartphone users. And in countries that block whole sections of the internet, USAGM’s Open Technology Fund provides cutting-edge tools of circumvention. Indeed, USAGM is more tech-savvy than most commercial news outlets, which do not even try to reach non-English speakers in remote and restricted parts of the world. Why should they, when such people are of no interest to advertisers?
Yet the question remains: Should Washington be spending $886 million a year on a system of global media that at best tells people what they may already know about America, and at worst spreads false or biased information? It is not enough to say that $886 million is peanuts compared to the $50 billion that will be spent on the latest U.S. fighter jet. We must also consider what the $886 million actually pays for.
The Truth, Both Good and Bad
The vast majority of USAGM journalists are not Americans. Instead, they are Chinese, Uyghurs, Iranians, Nicaraguans, Russians, Georgians, Ukrainians, Nigerians, Burmese, Arabs, Cubans, Venezuelans and others. And their mission is not to provide news and information about America. It is to provide what is called “surrogate news,” meaning accurate, objective coverage of events in Country X, reported to the people of Country X in the language of Country X—which is needed, because the media in Country X is censored or otherwise compromised.
Surrogate news has been central to VOA since February 1942, when the first U.S. broadcast into Nazi Germany began with the words, spoken in German, “We bring you voices from America. Today, and daily from now on, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good for us. The news may be bad. But we shall tell you the truth.” As VOA grew into a global network, it acquired two more missions: presenting a full and fair picture of American history, society, culture and politics; and explaining and defending U.S. interests, intentions and ideals. These America-centric missions are not vital to the other networks, but neither are they wholly absent from them.
When RFE/RL was founded (with covert CIA funding) in 1954, its mission was to provide surrogate news to parts of Europe under Soviet domination (RFE), and to the Soviet Union (RL). Congress took over the funding in 1971, and the three other networks (OCB, RFA and MBN) were subsequently founded with the same mission. Over the years, USAGM has waxed and waned, and gone by different names (for a long time it was known, confusingly, as the Broadcasting Board of Governors, or BBG). And some networks have shifted their regional focus, notably RFE/RL, which now serves unfree countries that (like Kyrgyzstan) were part of the Soviet Union, as well as others that (like Iran) were adjacent to it.
Through all these changes, success has been measured by the same standard: the quality and reach of the surrogate news being produced. This standard is rigorous and at times unforgiving. It is also increasingly difficult to uphold, because while some USAGM journalists are still able to work in their home countries, others have been murdered, imprisoned or forced into exile. Among the latter, many are subject to state-of-the-art surveillance by repressive regimes whose digital tentacles now reach into countries, including America, that used to offer safe haven.
Other difficulties are baked into the system. One is the tendency of critics to doubt the loyalty of emigre journalists. Doubt is sometimes warranted, because there is no sure-fire way to vet candidates from closed societies like North Korea (served by RFA). So due vigilance is crucial. Another difficulty is that some emigres are so hostile to the repressive regimes in their homelands, they would rather churn out polemics than news. Historically, these emigres were encouraged to adopt the norms and traditions of responsible American journalism. Needless to say, that is a tougher sell in this era of incessant mudslinging and virtue signaling.
Which raises another baked-in difficulty: the tendency of USAGM journalists to share the more progressive views of their peers in the Western news media, especially in the realm of sex and gender. This does not make them bad reporters. But echoing these views can limit the ability of these journalists to gain the trust of socially and religiously conservative majorities in their homelands. Indeed, America’s advocacy of gay liberation and transgender identity is more likely to redound against the U.S. than to help sexual minorities. Such advocacy also hurts NGOs and foreign-aid programs by providing fodder to authoritarian propagandists seeking to portray America and the West as morally decadent and hostile to family life. Russia is the major player here, and its posture as the last bastion of true Christian values plays well not just to right-wing parties in Europe but to MAGA voters driven by their loathing of “wokeness” into the arms of Russian operatives skilled in the art of manipulating such “useful idiots.”
Russia’s propaganda is not just carried on foreign-language radio and TV. It is also spread by the millions of Kremlin-supported trolls, bots and for-profit influencers that every day flood social media with texts, tweets, memes and videos. Needless to add, the last six weeks have seen this flood light up with praise and celebration of Uncle Sam’s abrupt capitulation to Tsar Vladimir the Grim. And this time around, the trolls don’t need to use deepfakes!
Considering the biblical volume of this flood and others like it, we might well ask what is the point of supporting humble, fact-based, open-to-revision news, both surrogate and nonsurrogate. Thomas Kent, a long-time editor at the Associated Press who served as president of RFE/RL, calls fact-based news the “basso continuo,” or steady foundational beat, of the 21st-century information sphere. But because this steady beat is easily drowned out by the roar of the Russian flood, Mr. Kent argues that America needs to create its own counterflood—a truth-based one that uses satire, parody and passion to debunk lies—not spread them—and to advance democratic arguments as aggressively as possible.
Mr. Kent has a point. And America has tried this before. For example, in the decades after 9/11, the idea of using social media to encourage opposition to jihadist violence was taken up not just by USAGM’s Arabic-language service MBN, but by other government entities, overt and covert, including at the Departments of State and Defense. But this effort to counterflood the zone was never a match for the hardcore “violent extremists,” as they were tactfully called. The same is true today, for the simple but vital reason that, while Russia’s method is to encourage every dog, no matter how vicious or rabid, to bark its head off, America cannot do the same, because it still (let us hope) has a good name to protect.
OK, you say, but there is no way America can provide the whole world with surrogate news. Why pick one country over another? A good question, and USAGM has made plenty of mistakes in its choice of strategic vs. nonstrategic countries. Indeed, insiders have long joked that the best way to predict a world crisis is to look at the regions where USAGM recently closed down its services. (The same joke has been made about the BBC World Service.) But it’s worth trying all the same. The basso continuo of surrogate news may not be a sufficient response to the aforementioned flood. But it is a necessary one, because it is the only form of news that ordinary people can test against their own experience.
The Need To Build Trust Locally
By way of illustration, I offer Cambodia. Ten years ago, I visited Phnom Penh as part of a research trip looking at best practices in USAGM. At the time, both VOA and RFA had a presence there, which I suspected was a wasteful duplication of effort. I quickly realized that it was not. Both networks had been in Cambodia for decades: VOA since 1962, RFA since 1997. And during that time they had come to fill different but complementary niches.
For example, the Khmer-language service of VOA focused on covering the government of Hun Sen, the former Khmer Rouge commander who defected to the Vietnamese side when that country invaded Cambodia in 1977. Hun became prime minister in 1985 and for the next 40 years ruled one of the world’s most corrupt, repressive autocracies. He recently handed power to his son, Hun Manet. But more than ever, his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) resembles the reticulated python, a massive snake native to the region that can squeeze its prey to death in minutes, then open its expandable jaws and ingest a carcass almost as large as itself. The metaphor is not perfect, because while the python must squeeze first and swallow second, the CPP can do both at the same time.
Despite its efforts to cover Cambodian politics, VOA had more luck with news reports from America—especially a series about the lives of Cambodian Americans. Meanwhile, RFA sent brave, scrappy reporters into the field to cover illegal land grabs, labor conflicts, environmentally risky dam projects and other excesses committed by the regime—pure surrogate news, which gained a large, loyal following among ordinary Cambodians.
The reason for this following is simple but often overlooked. Trust in a news outlet is not based primarily on its national or international coverage, which most people have no way of verifying. Instead, it is based on the outlet’s local coverage, especially when borne out by facts on the ground. For example, when rice farmers and fishermen in central Cambodia hear on RFA that a Chinese crew is illegally chopping down hardwood forests to their north, and in the process eroding the soil and choking the Mekong with silt and debris, the harm to their crops, their catch and their livelihood is all the verification they need. Having come to trust RFA’s reporting on issues that affect them directly, those farmers and fishermen are more likely to trust it on more distant issues. By the same token, they are likely to distrust some other outlet, whether controlled by Hun Sen or the CCP, that has lied to them about what they can see with their own eyes.
At the time of my visit in 2015, smartphones were all the rage in Cambodia, and because of the role Facebook had played in the election of 2013, it was embraced as a tool of resistance. Indeed, prior to that election, which was hotly contested by the main opposition party, Hun Sen had banned RFA from the radio stations that carried its programming. But that didn’t silence RFA, because the youth were already accessing it on Facebook. Indeed, on the day of the election RFA’s Facebook page went viral with citizen reports of intimidation and other abuses at polling stations. And when Hun Sen declared himself the winner, that same page brought tens of thousands of ordinary Cambodians to a protest march in Phnom Penh.
Then came the backlash. Over the next few years, the opposition party was crushed. New laws were passed against foreign NGOS, human rights organizations and independent media. A China-enabled “cybersecurity” system was set up to turn the Cambodian internet from a humming web of free expression into a stifling blanket of censorship and surveillance. RFA was expelled from the country, and two of its reporters were sentenced to 15 years in prison. It was, as The Economist wrote at the time, a “descent into outright dictatorship.”
But RFA didn’t quit, because that is not what these language services do. Like many others before them, the staff of RFA’s Khmer service took the banning as a tribute to their effectiveness, and kept their operation running from a location outside Cambodia’s borders. All the more ironic, then, to see RFA banned by the country that created it.
The Lifeblood of Democracy
A free press is the lifeblood of democracy. This statement is intoned so often, you might guess it comes from Jefferson, Lincoln or Churchill. In fact, its origin is unknown. That does not make it false, but its equally true corollary is that democracy is the lifeblood of a free press. A newspaper’s bold expose of high-level wrongdoing can be dramatic. But for that wrongdoing to be corrected, a couple of less dramatic things have to occur. The public must demand action through organized political pressure, and the system must respond in a reasonably constructive and transparent way. While it’s obvious to say, these next steps are far more likely to occur in a liberal democracy than in an authoritarian state—which is why VOA, RFE, RFA and the rest are so important.
Every day, we hear about the information war being waged between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. As in the arms race, the capabilities of the two sides are typically measured in dollars. But if that is the measure, America has always been the loser. During the Cold War, Washington spent much less than Moscow on foreign-language media. Today, the true total of Russia’s spending on overseas information operations remains uncertain due to opaque reporting. But a composite estimate for 2023 (based on figures from the Wilson Center, Debunk.org and OpenSecrets) is roughly $2 billion, with more billions likely going to related covert ops.
So again, USAGM looks puny by comparison. But the principles it stands for loom large. In July 2024, Amanda Bennett, the eminent journalist who headed VOA under President Obama and USAGM under President Biden, testified before Congress that, despite being outspent by the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), “USAGM’s networks surpass Russia and the PRC’s local-language brands in key markets, including in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.” Among the examples she cited was Cambodia, where “Despite a government crackdown on press freedom ..., RFA and VOA together reach 16% of all adults, compared to the PRC’s state-controlled network, CGTN, at less than 2%.”
Just as it is worth trying to conserve Cambodia’s forests, it is worth trying to conserve America’s tradition of journalism that is free enough to speak truth to power, and of power that is constrained enough to listen and respond. Throughout its 83-year history, U.S. foreign-language media have, with some lapses, reported truthfully about global, regional and local events, while striving to speak honestly about “America’s story.” Truth-telling is a hard principle for any government to follow, because all governments lie to some extent. But—this is important—they don’t all lie to the same extent. Authoritarian regimes and criminal gangs do everything they can to crush the distinction between objective truth and official fiction; the U.S. government should do everything it can to uphold it.