Читать книгу Information Wars - Richard Stengel - Страница 30

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.