63. Statement by the Director of the United States Information Agency (Reinhardt) Before the Subcommittee on International Operations of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee1

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee:

I am pleased to be here this morning at your invitation to participate in your discussions of international communications questions. For most of my career I have been personally interested in this field and officially involved in the practice and the theory of international communications.

In thinking about how to start my presentation I recalled a few sentences from the speech the Soviets did not allow Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to deliver several years ago when he was awarded the Nobel Prize.2 He said: “Mankind has become one . . . not steadfastly one as communities or even nations used to be, not united through years of mutual experiences . . . not yet through a common native language—but surpassing all barriers, one nevertheless through international broadcasting and printing.” At the same time, he continued, we know that “suppression of information leads to atrophy and total destruction.”

I quote these few lines because to me they epitomize the challenge for the future and, at the same time, the threat facing us if we do not meet this challenge. Certainly we agree that the continuing free flow of information and the potential of today’s communication revolution to serve the needs of humanity is a matter of utmost urgency and importance. So I am extremely pleased at this Committee’s initiative, and I am pleased as Director of the Agency charged with explaining abroad the policies and culture of the United States, to participate in these discussions.

Since the very beginnings of our history as an independent nation we have had the strongest commitment to the maintenance of the right [Page 166] of free speech for all. And we continue to follow most fervently this commitment to the fundamental right of every individual to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any medium and regardless of frontiers. Today more than ever before, this reaffirmation is important because, on the one hand, the major developments in communication technology have produced an information explosion the potential of which is dazzling and, on the other hand, because we are encountering unprecedented attacks on this basic philosophy.

Some of the dimensions of the revolution in technology are almost beyond comprehension. Coaxial cables capable of 10,800 channels each are soon to be replaced by millimeter waveguide systems of ultra-short frequency which will carry up to 250,000 channels. Compounding the increase in the number of channels with the increase in the capacity of each channel means that the capacity to transmit “bits” of information per second per channel will jump from 648 million in a coaxial cable to 15 billion in new systems. And when laser systems now on the drawing board or already in preliminary testing come into operation, the figure may jump to 100 billion.

These technologies enable the mass of human knowledge to be indexed, stored, retrieved, transmitted and shared by people all over the world. Wisely used, such information systems can accelerate development in the poorest countries. Potentially, today’s technology can afford new levels of educational and cultural enrichment to the earth’s inhabitants. More profound and widespread understanding among peoples must inevitably flow as another consequence of the fulfillment of this communication revolution.

With this enormous potential so obvious to us, with our background, education and traditions of free speech going back to Thomas Jefferson and the Bill of Rights, with the United Nations incorporating commitments on the free and open exchange of ideas in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights,3 it is difficult for Americans to comprehend, let alone be concerned with the mounting criticisms of these concepts in recent years. Yet these criticisms are coming from several quarters and are based on different arguments.

From our ideological adversaries has come the argument that information and communication are not only “sovereign rights,” but monopolies of the state. They hold this position, we believe, because they recognize the power of information in maintaining control over their populations, and contrariwise the power of outside, uncontrolled information. From their beginnings, they have been aware of the importance of mass media but most recently as they have promoted the idea of [Page 167] detente abroad, they have intensified their internal struggle against what they choose to label “reactionary bourgeois ideology” but which, in effect means the Western ideal of freedom of thought, freely expressed. This, despite the solemn pledge of all signatories to the Final Act at Helsinki,4 in 1975, to “facilitate the freer and wider dissemination of information of all kinds.” As we believe that free speech is democracy’s chief weapon against tyranny, so do the leaders of these totalitarian states believe that control of free speech is a vital weapon in preserving their structure.

In promoting this objective the Soviets and their allies have taken full advantage of the recent flood of conferences dealing with international communications. In the past year or so there have been such meetings of the Non-Aligned countries in Tunis, in Mexico City, in New Delhi and in Colombo;5 there was a series of regional UNESCO meetings and the UNESCO General Conference at Nairobi,6 the meeting in Geneva of the World Administrative Radio Conference (WARC)7 of the International Telecommunications Union, and the continuing discussions of sub-groups of the United Nations Outer Space Committee. This rapid conjunction of meetings has brought into urgent focus the need for the United States to examine this issue carefully and comprehensively and to formulate a policy and an agenda for addressing it in the months ahead.

The Soviet concept of “sovereign rights” has been supported at some of these international meetings by non-communist states for non-ideological reasons. Thus, at last January’s WARC meeting, Western European, African and Asian nations voted with the Soviet bloc to allocate fixed frequency and orbital slots for each ITU member nation outside the Western Hemisphere. The United States argued unsuccessfully that satellite technology was new and that any proposal for developing firm allocations now would freeze technology too soon. The net effect of this action everywhere except in the Western Hemisphere will be to deny the use of satellites for international television transmissions [Page 168] unless prior consent is given by the intended recipient and by all other countries that may be affected technically.

The reason for the positive vote by the Soviet orbit countries was, without doubt, ideological; some other nations, particularly in Western Europe, simply needed right now a rational plan for the efficient use of frequencies because of the technical problems they were facing. And still other nations—those in the Third World—used this forum, as they have been using every other one, to battle against what they have begun to call the “cultural imperialism” of the developed world.

Leaders and intellectuals in these Third World countries have indicated they recognize the pitfalls of government control of information media, and that the Soviet Union may be exploiting the legitimate complaints of the Third World for its own ideological ends. These leaders are, nevertheless, disturbed by and angry at the near monopoly the developed world has in supplying the books they read, the TV and movie films they watch, the news stories they read, and even the foreign universities they must attend for much of their higher learning. In such a situation, according to the ministers of information of the non-aligned countries meeting in New Delhi last year, “freedom of information really comes to mean the freedom of these few to propagate information in the manner of their choosing.”

This imbalance exists and because we are concerned that all peoples should have the opportunity to share in the potential benefits of modern mass communication, we have pledged our determination to help develop and increase two-way communication among peoples. This must be done in a way that preserves the independence and fruitful diversity of sources of all information. Let us not fool ourselves, however, into thinking that we can ever completely effectuate a balance. But we can understand, we can sympathize and we can take action.

The most effective way to reduce this imbalance in the two-way communication flow is not to choke off with control the communications capacity of some, but to increase the communications capacity of all. I said this last year at the UNESCO Conference in Nairobi, Kenya, where I had the honor to head the American delegation.8 I was speaking to a resolution which would have had the effect of sharply curtailing the international flow of news. Eventually enough nations came to realize that passage of this resolution might not be in their long-term interest and so, instead, they voted to call for strengthening the information and communications systems of the developing world. The United [Page 169] States and other nations pledged assistance to help the developing world in this endeavor. These pledges helped gain passage of the resolution. Now we must make good on these pledges—because the ideological offensive has only been blunted, not broken, and other nations may look more favorably on these ideas unless they see real progress toward redressing the imbalance. More important, however, than simply winning a point ideologically is the need to keep faith with our own basic morality and principles. We must act if we are serious about the importance of utilizing communications resources to their potential, if we believe that what we are doing for mankind is the measure of our endeavor in human rights and the legacy we will enhance for future generations.

Actually the process of bridging the communications gap has already begun and in some areas is advancing at a rapid rate. For example, more than half the Non-Aligned countries have Intelsat earth stations. Many of them are connected by telex. India lists 71 non-aligned with which it can communicate and Kenya lists 67.

At the Nairobi UNESCO meeting, I repeated the willingness of the United States to continue to share its knowledge and expertise regarding communication facilities available for experimental undertakings. For example, as a result of our supplying India with the use of the U.S. ATS–6 (Applications Technology Satellite) communications system, India was able to conduct a year-long program on agricultural techniques, family planning and hygiene, instruction, and occupational skills.

India is now planning to build its own satellite. Indonesia plans to use satellites to connect its 50 major islands and 20 Arab nations hope to establish a satellite network. Brazil has plans to link 1,000 of its widely scattered communities by space satellites. But despite these developments, many nations are just entering the twentieth century in communications terms. At Nairobi, I further stated that the United States and other nations with highly developed mass media should endeavor to make available, through bilateral and multilateral channels, both governmental and private assistance to other states in helping to develop their mass media. We suggested that UNESCO itself should join in these efforts.

In fact, the United States Government and private groups in this country have been engaged in journalism training programs for some years. Between 1970 and 1974, some 1,137 media specialists from Africa, the Near East, East Asia and Latin America have come to America for training under grants provided by the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The Department of Agriculture has sponsored an annual program to bring 40 specialized journalists to the United States for training which includes on-the-job experience on [Page 170] newspapers in the mid-west. At Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, the World Press Institute has trained over 200 foreign journalists and many Third World journalists have studied at Harvard University under the Nieman Fellowship program.9 My own Agency, USIA, which administers the State Department Educational and Cultural programs abroad, maintains a press center in New York and another here in Washington to assist foreign newspeople, many of them from the developing area.

I am pleased to be able to report to you that just a few weeks ago America’s leading newspaper executives began translating the U.S. pledge of assistance to developing nations into action. At the April meeting of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, Mr. Clayton Kilpatrick, editor of the Chicago Tribune and a valued member of the American delegation to the Nairobi UNESCO meeting, announced formation of a World Press Freedom Development Committee to bring news media people from developing countries into closer contact with newsmen in developed countries.10 Among special goals of the new group is creation of a manpower pool of experts in all phases of publishing and broadcasting who would be available to assist press and electronic media in Third World countries. The Committee also plans to assess the technical needs of developing media and to channel to them available equipment.

And just two weeks ago the UPI Broadcasting Advisory Board resolved at its annual meeting to participate in any professional effort to insure the free flow of news, including technical and editorial assistance.

The effectiveness of this kind of action might be inferred from the sharp attack on the Press Freedom Committee just a few weeks ago by the official Soviet TASS news agency. In response, Mr. George Beebe, associate publisher of the Miami Herald said: “The Soviet Government has shown once more that it is fearful of any challenge between a free press and a controlled press such as exists in Russia.”

The formation of the World Press Freedom Development Committee is the kind of positive action we favor—a happy augury, I hope, of the balanced and principled approach that will be taken to address these problems. There are many other possibilities for helping redress [Page 171] the imbalance. My colleague at Nairobi and here today, William Harley, and one of my predecessors as head of the United States Information Agency, Leonard Marks, have proposed a number of exciting activities and projects in this context which I am sure you will want to hear about and discuss.

Suffice it to say, there is need for the United States to continue to enunciate its basic policy in favor of the free flow of information to people the world over, to illustrate the dangers of government control of information and to take positive action to help those with legitimate grievances. We cannot relax.

I was asked this morning specifically to address two subjects in my presentation—the Third World News Agency and international radio. At Colombo, Sri Lanka, last year some 85 nations formally agreed to a three-year-old proposal to form a News Agencies Pool wherein they would share selected news items from each other’s national news agencies. The objective, in their words, was to “achieve the broad and free circulation among themselves of news, information reports, features and photographs about each other, and also provide objective and authentic information relating to Non-Aligned countries to the rest of the world.” It is too early to evaluate where the Pool is going but if I may, I would like to summarize for you a few conclusions drawn from a survey of this subject just completed by a USIA officer at the Senior Officers Seminar.

The political declaration which led to formation of the News Agencies Pool referred to the fact that the majority of the Non-Aligned countries are now “passive recipients of biased, inadequate and distorted information.” The survey looked at the news distribution patterns of the three leading international news agencies. They show that some three-quarters of all the developing countries, rather than being passive recipients, are in a position to screen news items before relaying them to end-users. And even in some of the remaining countries, where news services are sold directly to the media, there are press controls of one kind or another. The survey also shows that while there may be an imbalance in the news flow, the charge that international news agencies are biased in favor of their home governments and serve their political and economic aims is debatable. In regard to the Pool itself, the survey found it to be operating reasonably well, although just seven nations were contributing most of the Pool’s content. The survey noted that almost half the Pool’s output had high or medium potential for placement in Western media and that the Pool’s contents contained “surprisingly little overt bias as far as the United States is concerned. Even more surprising is that of the nine percent of the stories found to have a bias, four percent were in favor of the United States.”

In addressing the subject of international radio broadcasting, may I start with a few statistics: Well over one hundred million people [Page 172] around the world listen daily to broadcasts emanating from a foreign government radio station. Other statistics on international broadcasting are of similar breathtaking magnitude. Some 80 countries broadcast to the people of other countries daily and they transmit over 21,000 hours of broadcasting weekly. Some 17 nations each broadcast over 300 hours weekly.

The Soviet Union is the world’s most prolific international broadcaster. It transmits beyond its borders almost 2,000 hours of programs each week in 84 languages. The USSR is followed by the Peoples Republic of China, Egypt and then the Voice of America, which broadcasts 788 and a half hours of programming each week in 37 languages. (If one includes Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty this total is 1,809 hours weekly.) We are followed closely by the Federal Republic of Germany, the Republic of China, the BBC, North Korea and Albania. The six other Warsaw Pact nations are broadcasting almost 1,500 hours each week.

It can thus be seen that international broadcasting has become an important element in foreign policy implementation by many nations. The United States has long felt that it is of vital importance to our security and to the structure of peace to be able to continue communicating our policies, ideals and traditions of free information to the peoples of the world. The Voice of America, operating under a Congressionally approved mandate, broadcasts international news comprehensively and objectively, tells the story of American society and culture in all its diversity and explains U.S. foreign policy with a non-polemical approach. Particularly important is our broadcasting to the USSR and Eastern Europe where censorship and controlled media give the peoples of the area distorted or inadequate views of the United States, of crucial events within their own countries and in the world.

Whereas totalitarian leaders can in one way or another either stop at their borders, or selectively admit or control, other media of communication, international radio, unless it is jammed, goes directly into a listener’s home. There is heavy jamming in the USSR and in certain East European countries of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. Broadcasts by the Voice of America, however, seem at this time to be reluctantly accepted by these governments as an official activity of the American Government.

This does not prevent them from sharply attacking all three organizations. What has particularly irked the Soviet and East European leaders is coverage of news developments regarding human rights and dissident activities in their countries. They have construed this coverage—in which the United States has been joined by other Western radios—as an ideological attack on their system, interference in their internal affairs and an attempt to embarrass them at the upcoming [Page 173] meetings in Belgrade11 dealing with implementation of the Final Act of the 1975 Helsinki meeting. In considering these charges, I would like to quote that section of the Final Act covering radio. It says: “The participating States note the expansion in the dissemination of information broadcast by radio and express the hope for the continuation of this process, so as to meet the interest of mutual understanding among peoples and the aims set forth by this conference.” We believe that our broadcasts have been and are fully consistent with the spirit and the letter of this statement.

As you know, President Carter recently publicly enunciated his support for the VOA, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe by asking Congress to appropriate funds for increasing their transmitter capacity.12 At the time he made his request, the President said these stations have been for many years a vital part of the lives of the people of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. While no reliable figures are available—since no surveys in these communist countries can be taken—our estimate is that VOA listenership in this area is in the tens of millions daily. An interesting sidelight to this issue is the number of listeners in the United States to Radio Moscow broadcasts. An American social scientist estimated several years ago in the magazine Public Opinion Quarterly that despite an excellent signal throughout the evening hours, Radio Moscow has an audience of only two million listeners in the United States.

In terms of comparative worldwide listening, survey data in those areas where we have been able to take surveys, plus well-informed estimates, place total Soviet international radio listenership in the range of 15 to 24 million. Data and estimates put VOA’s weekly listenership at perhaps 70 million. RFE and RL listenership is estimated to be similarly impressive, perhaps as many as 50 million listeners weekly.

In terms of VOA’s impact there are many illustrations I might cite: Visitors to major USIA exhibits in the Soviet Union frequently report learning about them only through VOA promotional broadcasts, which often led them to travel thousands of miles to the exhibit site. Letters sent to Willis Conover who has been Master of Ceremonies for VOA’s “Jazz USA” program for many years indicate he is as well known in the USSR as any other single American. When VOA broadcast the [Page 174] complete Charter 77 text,13 listeners in Czechoslovakia wrote to say that they had learned what the Charter contained only from hearing it on VOA.

The normal conduct of international affairs, President Carter told the Organization of American States last April,14 requires communication with all countries of the world.

Whether it is to these people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, or the leaders of nations around the globe and their peoples, the VOA is a most effective element in America’s public diplomacy, a channel through which we can not only tell our story but also can speak freely about human rights and American values directly to the people of the world. It is a vital instrument in the conduct of American foreign policy.

  1. Source: National Archives, RG 306, USIA Historical Collection, Office of the Director, Biographic Files Relating to USIA Directors and Other Senior Officials, 1953–2000, Entry A–1 1069, Box 24, John E. Reinhardt, Speeches, 1977–1978. No classification marking.
  2. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 but did not seek official permission to travel to Stockholm to receive the prize, fearing he would not be able to return to the Soviet Union. (Bernard Gwertzman, “Solzhenitsyn Shuns Nobel Trip,” The New York Times, November 28, 1970, p. 1) Exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974, Solzhenitsyn later accepted his Nobel Prize during the December 10, 1974, Nobel ceremony. (Richard Eder, “Solzhenitsyn Collects Nobel He Won in ’70,” The New York Times, December 11, 1974, p. 3)
  3. See footnote 7, Document 26.
  4. See footnote 6, Document 8.
  5. References are to the Non-Aligned Symposium on Information, which took place in Tunis, March 26–30, 1976; a seminar sponsored by the Latin American Institute for Transnational Studies and the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation on The Role of Information in the New International Order, which took place in Mexico City, May 24–28, 1976; the Conference of Ministerial-level Government Representatives and Heads of News Agencies of the Non-Aligned Countries, which took place in New Delhi, July 8–13, 1976; and the Non-Aligned Movement summit, which took place in Colombo, August 16–19, 1976.
  6. October 26–November 30, 1976.
  7. Reference is to the World Administrative Radio Conference for the Planning of the Broadcasting Satellite Service (WARC SAT 77), which took place in Geneva, January 10–February 13.
  8. For Reinhardt’s November 1, 1976, statement before the General Conference, see Department of State Bulletin, November 29, 1976, pp. 661–667. See also, “U.S. Appeals to UNESCO to End Political Skirmishing,” The New York Times, November 2, 1976, p. 3.
  9. In the late 1930s, President of Harvard University James Bryant Conant used a $1 million bequest from Agnes Wahl Nieman to establish the Nieman Fellowship, a sabbatical program for journalists.
  10. During his April 25 address at the ANPA annual convention in San Francisco, Kirkpatrick stated: “The techniques tested at Nairobi should be employed in the coming struggle for free communication. We need a missionary effort. We need a sympathetic understanding of national aspirations. We need to be tough when we have to.” (“Editors’ group acts on world press curbs,” Chicago Tribune, April 26, 1977, p. 2)
  11. See footnote 4, Document 25.
  12. See footnote 3, Document 14.
  13. Reference is to a January 1977 document signed by about 300 Czechoslovakians, petitioning the Government of Czechoslovakia to guarantee the rights accorded to them by the Czechoslovak Constitution; international covenants on civil and political and economic, social, and cultural rights; and the Helsinki Final Act. On January 26, the Department of State’s Director of the Office of Press Relations Frederick Z. Brown read a statement to news correspondents, which stated, in part, “All signatories of the Helsinki Final Act are pledged to promote, respect, and observe human rights and fundamental freedoms for all. We must strongly deplore the violation of such rights and freedoms wherever they occur.” (Department of State Bulletin, February 21, 1977, p. 154)
  14. See footnote 2, Document 38.