Malign Coronavirus Narratives: The Yesteryear Soviet Template
That pithy reminder popped out near the conclusion of a January 23 public hearing as the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy (ACPD) issued its 70th annual report on the fine art many P.D. specialists spend their lives fostering —effective international dialogues and exchanges here and abroad: genuine two-way communication in many forums.
Three members of the advisory commission, Chairman Sam Farar, Vice Chairman William J. Hybl and Ann Wedner were briefed at the hearing by senior State Department bureaus of East Asia, Europe, Africa, Middle East, South and Central Asia, and Western hemisphere affairs.
Since 1948, the Commission has advised State Department bureaus, and recently, America’s taxpayer-funded international media. The mission: to support federal agencies and volunteer private citizens in designing and practicing up-to-date public diplomacy that is more cost effective, strategic, efficient and fact-based, year by year. At a recent First Monday Forum, ACPD Executive Director Vivian Walker compared the new report to its 69 predecessors, finding many consistent recommendations.
The ACPD principal recommendations for 2020:
- The appointment of an Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. “The efficacy and cost effectiveness of America’s PD operations”, the advisory commission says, “requires sustained leadership from an Undersecretary who both values the role Public Diplomacy can play in achieving U.S. foreign policy goals and has the management acumen to bring about the structural changes to unleash PD’s full potential.”
- Sustain investments in PD and global media programs, “given the growing importance of information statecraft as contained in the current national security strategy”. In 2018, public diplomacy funding constituted a mere 3.9 percent of the U.S. international affairs budget.
- The United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) previously known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors) should conduct an annual business review of its 61 language services to ensure that Agency resources are allocated properly to meet its priorities. USAGM’s 2018-2022 strategic plan calls for enhanced strategic cooperation between the networks: VOA, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Network and Radio-TV Marti to Cuba.
In its first meeting of this decade, held at the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center, the ACPD publicly unveiled its latest annual report and sought advice for the year ahead. In the 21st century, listening as well as telling is most effective — as in a genuine sharing of ideas (a telephone chat rather than a one-way megaphone-like conversation).
Examples abound, as the Advisory Commission heard from five senior State Department officers at the January 23 hearing:
- In State’s Young African Leaders’ Initiative, education is a top priority, linking U.S. and African universities, enhancing ties between American health, education, and women’s rights organizations and potential partners on both sides of the Atlantic.
- In South and Central Asia, there have been more than 70 university partnerships between U.S. and Afghanistan since 2010, and 22 cooperative U.S.-Pakistani higher education ventures. In Afghanistan, State and the U.S. Agency for Global Media have been particularly effective in encouraging the growth of independent, objective local media outlets.
- In Latin America, the first bi-national center established under State’s leadership abroad was in Buenos Aires in 1927. Today, State’s Young Latin America Institute (YLAI) trains 50,000 higher education students in the Western hemisphere in media literacy, and one of the themes is countering illegal emigration. State has offered internet access to university students, and continues to be an active partner in Venezuela on line since the U.S. Embassy there had to close because of the ongoing crisis.
- In the turbulent Middle East, State’s Near East Area Office has worked with local officials and USAID trainers to begin restoring war-ravaged cultural monuments in Iraq and Syria. Jordan last month signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation.
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On the same day as the Advisory Commission met, New York Times reporter Isabel Kershner in Jerusalem filed a dispatch that adroitly reflected the enduring power of sharing cultures across national boundaries. Only in this case, it illustrated the power of sharing images not only between civilizations but over the ages.
Egyptian heiroglyphs. Photo credit: NinasCreativeCorner, via Pixabay
Kershner’s article was headlined: “Emojis Meet Hieroglyphs: If King Tut Could Text.” She went on to display how an exhibit at the Israeli Museum in Jerusalem explores the stunning similarities between the hieroglyphs of antiquity and emoji, the lingua franca of the digital age.
It’s illustrated by ancient and modern images of two men waving at each other, one a sketch of a scantily clad Egyptian man in the pre-Christian era, armed raised, waving at a fully dressed 21st century man, waving back at his ancient counterpart. Another panel contrasts an image of a slender Egyptian horse with a curly tale, adjacent to a modern, somewhat bulkier 21st century horse, also facing left, each with remarkably similar curled tails.
“From the Valley of Kings, to the Kings of Silicon Valley,” the Times concludes, “pictograms rule the day.” Public diplomacy, it seems, spans millenia.
As a 36-year veteran of the Voice of America (VOA), Alan Heil traveled to more than 40 countries a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, and later as director of News and Current Affairs, deputy director of programs, and deputy director of the nation’s largest publicly-funded overseas multimedia network. Today, VOA reaches more than 275 million people around the world each week via radio, television and online media. Read More
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I generally agree with Mr. Heil on the need for a two-way communication in designing public diplomacy programs abroad. But some caution is needed. Foreign propaganda must not be allowed to influence U.S. public diplomacy and media outreach programs. This is the key problem rather than a largely non-existent threat of too much one-way communication or, God forbid, American propaganda.
In my experience, most former USIA PD officers performed well, including those who served at the Voice of America. They were much better managers than VOA managers promoted from within. As strange as it may seem, VOA journalists and officials who were not diplomats were more often misled and intimidated by foreign propaganda when they ventured into the area of international dialogue than public diplomacy FSOs who actually talked to dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. It may seem ironic, but the State Department also saved VOA from Soviet influence after World War II and tried to limit Soviet propaganda in VOA broadcasts during the war. My comments here are limited largely to public diplomacy as practiced through VOA radio programs during the Cold War and in recent years.
Mr. Heil is right to warn about propaganda as the megaphone used to blast nothing but “America is great” messages. However, I’m afraid that readers of his article might get a wrong impression that the Voice of America is really tempted to engage in such crude propaganda of American exceptionalism. That has never happened in VOA’s history to any significant degree. I did not observe it during my more than 30 years with VOA, USIA and BBG.
But I do remember some VOA officials and VOA English newsroom editors and reporters issuing dire warnings at the outset of the Reagan administration about an overwhelming threat of such pro-American propaganda. The danger never materialized. In VOA East European language services we did not take these warnings at all seriously and dismissed them as part of partisan politics at a federal workplace encouraged by longtime bureaucrats fearing losing their privileged positions.
The fears of our colleagues about propaganda were misplaced. The weekly reach of VOA Polish Service went up from about 10% before Reagan to about 50% at the end of his presidency. We did use the phone a lot, but we were calling dissidents, not regime officials. VOA bureaucrats who were concerned about “Reagan’s propaganda” were moved to less prominent jobs. USIA and State provided great assistance to VOA’s Polish Service where I was in charge during that critical period. We never received such assistance from our own internally-selected VOA managers in the 1970s or from USIA prior to the Reagan administration.
The danger to VOA has always come from a different kind of propaganda — usually Soviet and more recently of Russian, Chinese and Iranian origin. This is not at all clear from Mr. Heil’s article. He seems to imply that it is American or a U.S. administration propaganda which is the greatest threat to VOA’s credibility. History of U.S. international broadcasting does not support his argument. It is foreign propaganda that has been the greatest threat to VOA, more than it was to USIA exchanges and other public diplomacy programs, even though FSOs did serve in key positions at VOA during the Cold War. In my view, much of the damage to VOA’s credibility when it was under USIA and both before and after was done by VOA’s own managers and some of its journalists.
According to a report of the Working Group on Chinese Influence Activities in the United States prepared by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Center on US-China Relations at Asia Society in New York, “starting in the first decade of the 2000s, the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC, and the leadership of VOA’s Mandarin service began an annual meeting to allow embassy officials to voice their opinions about VOA’s content.” (https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/chineseinfluence_americaninterests_fullreport_web.pdf)
I don’t think this would have happened if public diplomacy FSOs were still advising VOA management in the 2000s.
The American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) 2017 Study of BBG’s Persian-Language Broadcasting commissioned by the BBG concluded: “This dynamic, on the whole, perpetuated to audiences the appearance of pro-regime propaganda, rather than objective reporting, on the part of both the VOA and Farda.” (http://bbgwatch.com/bbgwatch/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/AFPC_Persian-Language-Broadcasting-Study_synthesis-report.pdf)
This could have happened at VOA if USIA still existed but it would not have happened at RFE/RL if it remained an independent entity. Mr. Heil seems to think that more cooperation between VOA and RFE/RL within USAGM is good. I don’t agree. VOA’s failures, such as a recent hiring of a former Russian propagandist, were also forced on RFE/RL under the current arrangement because the journalist also appeared in RFE/RL programs.
During President Obama’s “Reset” with Russia, another BBG-commissioned study by an independent Russian media scholar concluded that Voice of America Russian Service website had acquired a “pro-Putin bias.” (http://bbgwatch.com/bbgwatch/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Pro-Putin-bias-Evaluation-of-VOA-Russian-Website-by-Dr-Nikolay-Rudenskiy.pdf)
This happened at VOA before but never at RFE and RL during the Cold War. Ironically, not being able to travel to the countries behind the Iron Curtain and not being able to phone communist officials worked to RFE’s and RL’s advantage. In most countries behind the Iron Curtain, RFE and RL had larger audiences than VOA
Until very recently VOA Russian Service employed a TV personality who according to foreign and U.S. media reports produced in his previous career anti-U.S. Russian propaganda films with conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic overtones. This would have never happened at VOA when it was under USIA or at RFE and RL during the Cold War.
Recent VOA directors have received or visited foreign leaders known to be corrupt. According to U.S. media reports, several VOA African Service journalists accepted bribes from a foreign government official. Past BBG Board members had corporate financial interests in China and Russia.
Sometimes it is better not to use the phone or meet certain people just to have a dialogue if it leads to being fooled by their propaganda. Ultimately it all depends on what kind of leaders are put in charge and on the selection, training and management of VOA journalists.
The primary danger to the Voice of America, which comes from foreign propaganda, not the megaphone of American propaganda, is intensified when VOA managers and journalists do not have in-depth knowledge of both American and foreign cultures and a lot of international experience. VOA officials, editors and reporters who fail to learn, understand and appreciate traditions of American liberalism can harm VOA’s credibility because they can be easily misled by foreign propaganda. In a then secret memo to the FDR White House, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles had already warned about this in April 1943, barely a year after VOA went on the air:
“It has been the theory of this Department that, outside of Soviet Russia, most of the groups struggling for expression desire freedom and a chance to find their own way, and that they have looked to the United States, rather than to the Russian collectivism, as offering the hope of achieving both social advance and individual freedom.”
An attachment to his memorandum also warned that the director of the Voice of America John Houseman was “responsible for placing Communists in key position in foreign radio sections.” The State Department refused to give Houseman a U.S. passport for official travel to force his resignation.The U.S. Army Intelligence agreed.
John Houseman hired not only foreign communists. He also recruited a pro-Soviet American communist (not yet a Party member but soon to become one) to be the chief VOA English news writer and editor. His name was Howard Fast and he immediately reached for the phone and called the Soviet Embassy.
This is what Fast wrote in his memoir “Being Red” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990), pp. 18-19, about his work at the Voice of America.
“I established contact at the Soviet embassy with people who spoke English and were willing to feed me important bits and pieces from their side of the wire. I had long ago, somewhat facetiously, suggested ‘Yankee Doodle’ as our musical signal, and now that silly little jingle was a power cue, a note of hope everywhere on earth…”
Fast was also the future recipient of the Stalin International Peace Prize (1953), future member of the Communist Party USA (from 1944 to 1956) and a reporter for the party’s newspaper “The Daily Worker.”
Not too many Americans or even today’s VOA journalists know that the first head of the Voice of America news department had received the Stalin Prize.
Also a successful writer of best-selling historical novels, Howard Fast was among many fellow travelers, communist propagandists and Soviet sympathizers at the wartime Voice of America. General Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in his post-White House memoirs that these early VOA journalists, duped by Soviet and communist propaganda, were guilty of “insubordination” toward President Roosevelt. Even though FDR was himself more than willing to appease Stalin, he and General Eisenhower would not tolerate Soviet propaganda in official VOA broadcasts putting the lives of American soldiers at risk. They did not manage to eliminate all of it but they put a stop to some of it. VOA was not fully reformed until the end of the Truman administration.
Among Fast’s colleagues at the Voice of America during the war were other fellow travelers, some of whom later worked for communist regimes in Poland and Czechoslovakia. They were already engaging in pro-Soviet propaganda while still working for VOA, as described by one Polish journalist who monitored VOA programs in London during the war.
“With genuine horror we listened to what the Polish language programs of the Voice of America (or whatever name they had then), in which in line with what [the Soviet news agency] TASS was communicating, the [1944] Warsaw Uprising was being completely ignored. I remember as if it were today when the [Warsaw] Old Town fell [to the Germans] and our spirits sank, the Voice of America was broadcasting to the allied nations describing for listeners in Poland in a happy tone how a woman named Magda from the village Ptysie made a fool of a Gestapo man named Mueller.”
It took about a decade to get rid of these pro-Soviet VOA journalists. One of them was Stefan Arski who was employed by VOA until 1947 as Artur Salman. Here is a short example of the type of anti-U.S. propaganda he produced in communist Poland in 1952. In his propaganda diatribe he was referring among others to anti-communist Polish refugee journalists who had replaced him and his colleagues at VOA.
“Reactionary Polish emigrants are the enemy who are at the same time both ridiculous and disgusting. It is the enemy who would have been long ago shattered into nothing if it were not backed by, financed by, inspired by, and directed by imperialists and warmongers. Let us remember that this is the enemy who has no limits, no scruples, for whom no villainy is unfamiliar. These people were born on the Polish soil. They once spoke Polish and considered themselves citizens of this country. They later rejected their fatherland and denied their Polishness… There are no greater knaves and villains than the renegades, the apostates and the deniers. No other enemy wheezes with such hatred toward Poland and Polishness than those who have separated themselves from their nation.”
That is what real propaganda sounds like and it was written by a former Voice of America journalist. The biggest threat to the Voice of America is not and has never been American propaganda but foreign propaganda infecting its programs under bad leadership and bad management.