by Doreen Carvajal
International Herald Tribune
For generations of listeners, the Voice of America and its crackling international shortwave broadcasts are heirloom memories of huddling around radios to mark the Allied landing at Normandy or the toppling of the Berlin Wall.
Today, the VOA headlines are delivered as mobile phone news alerts, satellite television shows or Webcasts streamed over the Internet. But the 64-year-old international broadcasting service of the U.S. government is still searching for relevance with a brand new director and an increasingly fierce market with rivals from commercial networks to public broadcasters jostling for global influence.
"I'm afraid that I'm not listening to Voice of America," confessed a participant from Madras, India, last week in the VOA's own global open forum on international broadcasting. "The shortwave is not so good, so I've switched over to NPR on satellite."
Last month, the VOA service - which reaches about 115 million people weekly in 44 languages - received fresh leadership after the abrupt departure of its director, David Jackson, a former Time magazine foreign correspondent, and the appointment of Danforth Austin.
Austin, 60, is a former chief executive of Ottaway Newspapers, a community newspaper subsidiary of Dow Jones. He was appointed to the top spot by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a politically appointed group.
In his first few weeks in his new post, Austin said during an interview, he was hoping to bring his organizational skills to bear on an institution that has been buffeted in the past year by proposed budget cuts and plans to reduce English-language programming to divert resources to Arabic-language services.
"There is a proliferation of media, and it's not just government-funded services," he said. "How could the United States not want a broadcast service in the midst of all that, which keeps and maintains the kind of journalistic values that really reflects who we are as a country?"
Austin is a newcomer to international broadcasting, although he worked outside the United States on short-term assignments as a reporter. He said that the notion of taking over the VOA from its Washington headquarters was "not on my radar screen" because he had just taken a retirement package from Dow Jones in March.
"I was contemplating taking some time off, reading. I've done some work for charity kinds of things and then through an acquaintance who knows one of the governors on the board, they asked me if I had any interest in the Voice of America," Austin said.
Given his newness, Austin's plans for the VOA remain largely vague and general beyond trying to make sure that the news agency is responsive to its audiences. "For some people, shortwave radio is and will remain very important," he said. "For others, it's through television and the Internet."
He added: "We look at markets. We decide what to provide based on what those audiences want and how they use information."
Critics, though, complain that the VOA is an institution that is too slow-moving and hampered by its strategy of issuing government editorial newscasts on topics ranging from President George W. Bush on Iran's "intransigence" to Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, on the pursuit of nuclear weapons in North Korea and Iran.
Jonathan Marks, a radio consultant and former executive at the international broadcaster Radio Netherlands, is among those critics. "Don't you think that John Stewart on YouTube has more impact on the way people see America than anything VOA could muster on radio or TV?" he asked.
He complained that the VOA's Now 24/7 program in English has been nicknamed "VOA Now and Then" because of reduced programming. "Both times that Saddam Hussein has been world news with his capture and death sentence, VOA English has been off the air," Marks said. "To be fair, its radio in Arabic and Farsi was running."
With control of the U.S. Congress shifting to the Democrats, many VOA employees and supporters are hoping that reductions in the $166 million annual budget will be restored to avoid further cuts in English-language programming. As it is, VOA continues to offer slower-paced "special English" programs to reach non-native English speakers.
Ted Lipien, a Voice of America employee who retired last April as a marketing director for Europe and Asia, created FreeMediaOnline.org, a foundation to support independent journalism. He is lobbying against some VOA cuts.
"They have focused on the Middle East and taken money away from programming for other regions," he said. "Once your audience goes down, it creates a vicious circle." He added, "The soft power of information and news is grossly under-appreciated."
To a certain extent, though, the VOA is facing some of the cold realities of the end of the Cold War. Simon Spanswick, chief of the Association of International Broadcasters, said the VOA has taken the approach that "it's not worth trying to compete in saturated markets with highly competitive broadcasters."
(Source: International Tribune/Kevin Redding/Cumbre DX)