Information Wars. Richard Stengel
while he’s talking, rather than just rattling off practiced phrases, as lots of people in Washington do. He had already been working for President Obama for five years, and I was the new kid. When you’re in government, you look at every new person as someone who can potentially advance or set back your agenda.
He wanted to talk about two topics: the BBG and counter-ISIS. BBG was the acronym for the Broadcasting Board of Governors—the truly dreadful name for what was also known as U.S. International Broadcasting, made up of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. These legacy media organizations were originally part of the United States Information Agency and then became quasi-independent by virtue of the 1999 legislation, which also created my job.
BBG had a $750 million budget and about 3,500 employees, which made it one of the largest news organizations in the world. But few Americans knew about it. This was in part because of Smith-Mundt, which mandated that it be directed abroad (Voice of America broadcast in more than 60 languages), and in part because it didn’t do much journalism that broke through in the U.S. It was also cursed with a contradictory mission: it was government-supported independent journalism. If that sounds strange, that’s because it is. Its employees saw themselves exclusively as journalists, but they were also tasked with creating content “consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States,” as its enabling legislation puts it. Hmm, how do you create objective independent journalism consistent with American foreign policy objectives? That’s a tough one. Ben said President Obama was interested in U.S. international broadcasting and wanted to see what more we could do with it. “It’s a lot of money,” he said. The President, Ben added, would like to sit down with me and Jeff Shell, the new chairman of the BBG, and talk about it. Ben said I should get my thoughts together and we’d schedule a meeting.
The other place where Ben thought he could help was counter-ISIS messaging. He supported CSCC, and had an idea on how to enlarge the platform. He said two Defense Department “influence” sites were being disbanded because of budget cuts. His idea was that DOD could essentially hand them over to State, and we would run them and pay for them.
Ben rummaged around his desk and found a glossy brochure about the sites, prepared by the Defense Department. The pamphlet described them as “cost effective, 24/7 influence with proven impact.” It felt a little like he was a realtor trying to sell me that dark apartment on the second floor. He explained that their content had to say that they were supported by the Defense Department. Or, if we took them, the State Department. But the only way you’d find this out was if you clicked on the “About Us” link. Here’s what the brochure said about that: “Less than 1% of readers click on the ‘about us’ link. Extremely limited loss of readership due to DoD attribution.” Ben said the sites cost almost nothing. How much was nothing? I asked. One cost about $4 million a year to run and the other $6 million.
Ben, I said, that was three times the budget that I had for all of CSCC.
That’s a problem, he said.
I wondered why I needed to buy something from DOD. The Defense Department had more people in military bands than the number of foreign service officers. For them this amount of money was just the nickels left on the table.
Welcome to International Broadcasting
As it happened, I had a BBG board meeting that first week. I admit that when I came into the job, I barely knew what the BBG was. Even in my years as editor of Time, I couldn’t remember ever seeing a Voice of America story or one from any of the other entities. Even the names—Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia—seemed like anachronisms, throwbacks to the Cold War. The meeting was at BBG’s headquarters in the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, a gloomy 1930s-era building filled with somber New Deal–era murals.
By statute, I was the Secretary’s official designee to the BBG board. But I was the first Under Secretary in anyone’s memory to actually attend a board meeting. Most of my predecessors had politely ignored it. When she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton told a House committee hearing that the BBG board was “practically defunct in terms of its capability to tell a message around the world.” The Chairman of that House Committee, Ed Royce of California, described the board as “dysfunctional.”7 By all accounts, this was a pretty accurate description. As one board member said to me, it was like the Albanian politburo but without the handguns. But under the chairmanship of Jeff Shell, the head of Comcast Universal, the board had undergone a turnaround. Jeff was a smart, no-nonsense, even-keeled chairman who just wanted to make things work.
At that first meeting, I did see some snippets of the journalism from some of the services. It was sober and straightforward, but seemed old-fashioned and not up to U.S. broadcast standards. The editing was a little rough, the graphics were poor, and the anchors didn’t seem all that comfortable with teleprompters. I also learned that the way the BBG “supported” U.S. foreign policy goals was to air “editorials” from the State Department. It was a neat solution for them. It hived off the material that supported U.S. foreign policy from news reporting, but it was also a way of saying to the viewer, Hey, don’t pay attention to this, it’s just American State Department propaganda, and we’ll get back to the news in a moment.
One issue in that meeting illustrated the curious relationship between State and the BBG. The executive producer for the Africa service did a short presentation asking for $300,000 of R’s public diplomacy funds to pay for a 15-minute daily newscast in Sango. I nodded as though I knew what Sango was. Sango, it turned out, was the lingua franca of the Central African Republic. I was told that the BBG currently broadcasts to the Central African Republic in English and French, but not Sango, the language most people speak. They told me that this was a priority for the National Security Council. I decided in the moment that I would say yes—that seemed like the diplomatic thing to do—but I said to the table that it was a onetime payment and that in six months I wanted to see some kind of metric showing whether it was working or not. The head of the Africa service looked a little nonplussed at this, I was later told no one had ever asked her for metrics before.
Before leaving, I told Jeff that Ben wanted to organize a meeting for us with the President about international broadcasting.
Choice of America
Ben was as good as his word. Within a couple of weeks after our sitdown, a meeting was on the calendar with President Obama on international broadcasting. Ben told me this was an ideas meeting where, once a month or so, the President called together a group in the Situation Room to brainstorm about one topic. This would be a whole hour devoted to international broadcasting.
Ben said that I should do an overview of international broadcasting, discuss State’s role, and mention any other quick observations I’d made since I arrived. Okay.
I got to the White House early and had a few minutes with one of Ben’s aides. Let’s call him Jaden. Jaden was a State staffer who had been tapped by the NSC to come over to Ben’s shop. He had served in Africa and South America. He was sharp and smart, had a goatee and a conspiratorial manner. He mentioned that he was going to be presenting about our response to Russian media. I knew from Ben and others that people at the NSC were concerned about Russia Today, the state-supported news channel that broadcast in the United States as RT. I wasn’t quite sure why. One story I heard was that Vice President Biden had turned on his television in a hotel room in Europe and thought he was watching CNN, and then … slowly … realized … it was RT. Jaden said his presentation was about the idea of the U.S. standing up its own version of RT.
Jaden showed me his PowerPoint presentation: it was titled “The Freedom News Network.” The idea was essentially to take the annual BBG budget and create an international U.S. government television network. While I wasn’t a gigantic fan of Voice of America or any of the other BBG entities, this plan was, well, crazy. The idea that the U.S. government would spend three-quarters of a billion dollars to create content 24/7, find and hire the people to do so, figure out shows and schedules, license content, and get carriage around the world on both satellite and terrestrial TV providers