US government-backed radio and television broadcasts into Cuba reach a tiny audience there and suffer from poor editorial standards, a US Senate Committee said in a scathing report released Monday. Founded to give Cubans accurate, unbiased news programming, Radio Martú and TV Martí “have failed to make any discernable inroads into Cuban society or to influence the Cuban Government,” said the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The panel’s report, dated 29 April, notes that US government-sponsored research has found that less than two percent of Cubans listen to Radio Martí, and “claims that TV Martí has any stable viewership are suspect.” The panel, led by Democratic Senator John Kerry, sharply criticized the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB) that oversees both outlets of having “failed to adhere to generally accepted journalistic standards.”
“Both internal and external investigations have criticized OCB for broadcasting unsubstantiated reports from Cuba as legitimate news stories, for using offensive and incendiary language in news broadcasts, and for a lack of timeliness in news reporting,” the committee said. And “interviews with recently arrived Cuban immigrants show that among those who were familiar with the broadcasts, only a small minority thought they were ‘objective.”
The report, entitled “Cuba: Immediate Action Is Needed to Ensure the Survivability of Radio and TV Marti,” calls for moving OCB to Washington and integrate it with Voice of America (VOA) to boost its standards. OCB must also “clean up its operation” by implementing editorial standards and drawing better on-air staff and managers, and “spend less money on measuring audience size and focus more on quality programming.”
(Source: AFP/R Netherlands Media Network Weblog)