Paul Seabury has sent me a copy of a brief memorandum he wrote to the
Reagan Transition Staff on the evening of election day recommending an
approach to the RFE/RL–BIB
problem.2 Combined with the Freedom House report which
should be released any day now, it gives the new Administration a good
workable set of proposals for coping with this problem which has proved
beyond the capacity of the present Administration.—We have at least
achieved these two results from our otherwise abortive effort to draw
Leo Cherne and
[Page 237]
Paul Seabury
into radio activities last spring.3 This curiously dialectic process may
in the long run turn out to be more effective than the solution we aimed
at and failed to bring about.
Attachment
Memorandum From Paul Seabury of the University of
California, Berkeley, to Monroe Browne of the Ronald Reagan
Transition Staff4
Berkeley, California, November 4,
1980
RE
-
U.S. OVERSEAS
BROADCASTING
The new Administration should establish a Presidential Commission to
review and report on the state of U.S. overseas broadcasting activities. Priority should
be given to broadcast stations targeted on the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe: Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe.
These stations play an enormously important role by conveying to
people in those areas a continuous and objective view of political
and social reality which their Soviet rulers seek to deny them. As
an earlier Presidential Commission on this subject reported in 1973,
the Radios
. . . by providing a flow of free information and interpretation,
have enabled the people to whom they broadcast to remain informed
and to judge for themselves which policies may contribute to . . .
genuine improvement of peaceful relations.
5
Such a review should focus upon three topics: budget, program
content, and administrative oversight. Of the three, the latter is
the most urgent and immediate.
Budget. While the stations maintain a high
caliber performance, they have been seriously injured by budget cuts
at a time when inflation and the declining value of the dollar on
international exchange have severely constrained them. This issue is
all the more acute if one assumes the need for a significant expansion of broadcast activities,
[Page 238]
especially in the Soviet
Union and especially toward minority areas such as Muslim
regions.
Program content. The popularity and
credibility of RL/RFE in recent years has been due to their high
caliber reportage of news from within the Soviet-dominated world,
which is “looped back” in radio programs. As currently constituted,
the radios are not information organs of the
U.S. government in the sense
that VOA is. They have a special
mandate, and the operative constraint is that their programs are not incompatible with the aims of U.S. policy.
As evidence of the awesome outward thrust of Soviet power
accumulates, the question now arises as to whether the program
content of RL/RFE should pay greater attention than now to matters
directly related to East-West relations. Soviet domestic propaganda,
since the Afghanistan war began, more than ever has sought to place
the blame for increased international tensions on the West, and the
U.S. in particular.
Last year, for example, East-West relations were discussed only .8
percent in Russian and 4 to 10 percent in other languages. Nearly
all news and discussion focusses upon intra-bloc events in the
Communist world. The value of this emphasis is undeniable: the
radios provide reportage on current reality in the world which the
listener knows first hand; they offer a means to make an enlightened
comparison between open and closed societies; they demonstrate
through individual experience the hypocrisy and unreliability which
are hallmarks of official communication in a communist state. In
particular, they provide a crucial feedback look for Samizdat communications without which
dissidents would remain hopelessly isolated.
The question now is whether these invaluable functions of the radios
should be supplemented by a more vigorous exploitation of East-West
relations, to countervail Moscow internal propaganda. (This question
is not unrelated to the question of whether current VOA broadcasts to the U.S.S.R. have been (as Solzhenitzyn and
others have charged) vapid and inconsequential.)
Oversight. Radio Free Europe and Radio
Liberty for twenty years were separate and largely supported by the
Central Intelligence Agency. Now they are funded by Congress and
governed by a Board of Directors composed of private citizens. This
board, in turn, has been overseen since 1973 by a five-member
Presidentially appointed Board for International Broadcasting.
This clumsy structure has been an invitation to struggle for the
privilege of supervising the Radios. The reason for this Rube
Goldberg arrangement
originally was that, on the one hand, a private board would enhance
the credibility of the Radios, in assuring listeners that
[Page 239]
they were not CIA creatures; a Presidential
supervisory board, the BIB, would
serve to confirm the Radios’ accountability to Congress.
In practice, this oversight structure has led to protracted conflict
between the two boards and to well-confirmed charges that the
Washington-based BIB interferes
constantly in day-to-day operations of the Radios. Both the chairman
of the BIB and the BIB’s staff director have repeatedly
made it clear that they regard such direct supervision as part of
their mandate. Moreover, they have repeatedly exerted pressure, both
on Capitol Hill and in the White House, to block appointments of new
board members not sharing their view of their prerogatives.
This impasse cannot be permitted to continue indefinitely. It
distracts the attention of Radio executive personnel from their
central tasks, and has had a demoralizing effect on broadcasting
personnel.
Thus a Presidential Commission should directly address the question
of ways to resolve this administrative impasse. But the Commission
also—by enlarging its agenda to include the Voice of America—could
also chart new guidelines for U.S.
informational activity overseas for the difficult years of the
1980’s.
I wish in closing to draw attention to a detailed report recently
completed by Freedom House on the subject of RL/RFE. This document
has been withheld from publication until after the elections. It was
prepared with the assistance of Leo Cherne, John Richardson, Howland
Sargeant and myself.
