White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

VOA Pure Because it Wasn’t Beholden, Despite Its U.S. Funding

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It was a quiet voice in the night in Southern Rhodesia, a radio broadcast. But it let in the world: a world beyond the horizons of my family, and even the demanding British public school-inspired academy I attended. 

The broadcast was the BBC Transcription Service. I had to keep the radio on low because it was carried after midnight by the local radio network, which itself was based on the BBC model.

There was only one channel and no television in  Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s, so the BBC Transcription Service was very important, especially to me in my teens.

To this day, I recall a scientific program on the frontal lobes of the brain and a dramatization of John Galsworthy’s novel “The Man of Property.”

I didn’t need to listen to those broadcasts to get information left out by an oppressive government’s censorship. There was none then; it was long before Ian Smith’s premiership. I didn’t have to be afraid of the police at the door because I was listening to the radio.

Behind the Iron Curtain, or in any other oppressed country, say Salazar’s Portugal, listening to the unbridled BBC and its spiritual sister, the Voice of America, required courage as you risked arrest. 

But listen they did. First to the BBC in Nazi Germany and its occupied countries, and to VOA, later during World War II and in the countries under Soviet influence or control, and in Mao’s China.

Now this great voice, the Voice of America (so appropriately named in reality and metaphor) has been silenced after 83 years by the Trump administration for no discernible reason. What Stalin and Mao couldn’t silence — with jamming, long prison sentences and ubiquitous policing — President Trump has done with a pen stroke.

What VOA and its services — including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio Marti and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks — did was to offer high-quality journalism and entertainment uncontaminated by propaganda. 

Paradoxically, VOA was free of government messaging because it was financed by the government. An act of law guaranteed that, and its highly professional staff of 900, broadcasting in more than 40 languages, were on guard against propaganda. 

Yes, the government paid for it to be free. Consequently, it was practicing a pure broadcasting that might have reached the apex of achievable objectivity.

Commercial broadcasting is not free in that way and is often biased for commercial reasons. Think Fox and MSNBC or the pinnacle from which CNN has fallen.

The BBC, like VOA, is government-funded with a special tax called the “licensing fee.” But because the bulk of its output is domestic, it is constantly berated by politicians, frequently in the House of Commons. 

The BBC World Service is financed separately through the UK Foreign Office, but is wholly owned and operated by the BBC, thus keeping the government at arm’s length; another paradox in which pure journalism is taxpayer financed.

I have personal knowledge of both the BBC and VOA. I worked for the BBC television news in London and did occasional radio broadcasts for its overseas service in the early 1960s.

At VOA in Washington, I was sometimes interviewed by Branko Mikasinovich for the Serbian and Russian services. I found the experience as professional and questions as objective as any I have experienced from any news outlet anywhere. (It was also fun.)

For two decades, my weekly news and public affairs television program, “White House Chronicle,” was carried by VOA globally in English — and at one time was translated into Chinese. It was dropped during the first Trump administration, but VOA started distributing it again in the Biden years. Mostly it deals with the nexus of science and society, such as AI’s anticipated impact on jobs.

I have simply given the program to VOA as a public service and no money has ever changed hands.

Apart from the hard news, VOA gave the world a window into democratic America: our struggles and triumphs, our values, our of freedom, our luxury of choice, and those aspects of American life that make us the nation we are —  at best aspiring to be Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”

The Trump administration hasn’t only denied 70 percent of the world that lives under authoritarian rule the opportunity to hear the truth, but they have also robbed America of the second of its two great soft power tools; the first was USAID, the helping agency.

We aren’t only telling the world that we don’t care about it, but we are also retreating from it into inconsequence.

The Loud Silence from Islam

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A dark shadow passed over Paris, the City of Light, on Wednesday, January 7.. Well-organized, well-trained killers murdered 13 people in the name of Allah. As Shakespeare said 500 years earlier, about the heinous murder of King Duncan by Macbeth, “O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee.”
Indeed, recent horrors in the name of Allah have been so gruesome it is impossible to conceive the mutilated reason, the perverted concept of God’s will, and the unvarnished rage that has subverted the once admired religion.
The killers are ruthless and depraved, but those who inspire them are evil and those who tolerate them are guilty.
In 2005, when a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed and riots were stirred up against the publishers, a meeting was arranged at a community room in the basement of The Washington Times. It was not organized by the newspaper but, as I recall, by an interfaith group. There were several fringe “let’s be nice” speakers before the main event.
The main event was the Danish ambassador and, to a lesser extent, myself. The ambassador spoke about life in Denmark and what the Danish government would do to understand and listen to the concerns of the Muslim community. My role was to defend and explain the Western concept of freedom of speech and the place satire. The overflow audience, which by dress and appearance was dominated by emigrants from Pakistan, was implacable.
I have spoken to some hostile audiences in my time, but this one was special: No compromise, no quarter. Nor interest in cultures other than their own. Ugly and insatiable rage came out in their questions.
They did not want to know about the values of the country that had given their brethren sanctuary, education, healthcare and a decent life. My audience only wanted to know why the blasphemers in Denmark and Norway (the cartoons were reprinted there) were not being punished. For good measure, they wanted to know why the American media was so committed to heresy against Islam. No thought that they had moved voluntarily to the United States and were enjoying three of its great freedoms: freedom to assemble, freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
They wanted absolute subjection of all Western values to the dictates of Islam. They had been fired up and they were angry, self-righteous and obdurate.
In 2009, I was invited to a conference of world religions in Astana, Kazakhstan. There were maybe 100 religions present, but at a featured session the conference degenerated into an Islamic diatribe against sexuality and the treatment of women (mostly in advertising) in the West. No dialogue. No discussion. Absolute certainty.
I mention this because of the reaction to the barbarity in Paris, and to a string of other barbarous murders across the world, from Muslims has been so muted.
“Je Suis Charlie” said millions of people in dozens of countries in sympathy with the murdered journalists and with their fight for press freedom. From Muslim leaders in the West, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the United States, there were statements of condemnation but no sense of outrage. From the bulk of the followers of Islam there was nothing. There never is. Not when innocent children are shot in their schools, or when aid workers are beheaded, or when or when satirical journalists are executed. The Muslim multitudes have acquiesced to evil.
When will those who believe deeply in Islam take to the streets to denounce the excesses of the few? After the horror in Paris, British Muslims took to the BBC to mildly criticize the murders, but more to vigorously demand a better deal for Muslims in Britain.
The medieval certainty of the leadership of Islam is endorsed by the silence of its congregants. The silence of the millions gives a kind of absolution to the extremists, intoxicated with fervor and hate. It will all go on until the good Muslims stand up and are heard. The guilt of silence hangs over Islam. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 
 
 

PBS Hasn’t Kept Up

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Things are tough in the world of public television.

State budgets for local stations are being slashed or eliminated, as in Rhode Island where Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee has proposed to fund Channel 36 through Dec. 31 and then eliminate state funding.

Five states have eliminated funding and others have cut contributions.

In Washington the federal contribution, through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is under constant attack from Republicans who believe that PBS is biased and that it shouldn't receive any public money whatsoever.

Mitt Romney says no to federal money.

But a larger problem for PBS and its stations is one of mission.

When the service was created in 1970, the mission was apparent: Create quality programming that couldn't be found elsewhere. As PBS was cobbled together from a collection of educational stations, children's programming was always an important element and remains so; also books, cooking, political talk, business, interviews, documentaries, music and drama.

Over time, the television landscape has changed out of recognition.

Competing broadcasters, to say nothing of the Internet, have eroded the once solid franchises that were the backbone of PBS broadcasting.

Books have been largely ceded to C-SPAN and the ever-creative Brian Lamb. Cooking, far from the glory days when the only place you could find out how to make a roux was from Julia Child, is now the theme of two cable cooking channels that are creating new stars.

Political talk, which in its modern incarnation was born on PBS with "The McLaughlin Group" and "Firing Line," is now a staple of commercial television. Likewise, cable has pushed ahead of PBS in developing business (Remember "Wall Street Week"?), interview, history and arts channels. Other PBS innovations like "Motor Week" and "This Old House" are also under attack on cable.

Running down the list of what PBS does that no one else is doing brings one to the last franchise that PBS still dominates, and that might be called the "British bonanza." PBS has been mining effectively the output of both the BBC and the commercial British television channels with great effect since the days of "Upstairs Downstairs" (commercial in Britain).

Today, in its struggle for audience, another British import, "Downton Abbey," is the brightest star in PBS's dimming firmament.

If PBS is to again command the community loyalty it once enjoyed, if it is to answer its political foes, if it is to be a decisive force in television and perhaps on the Web, it needs to stop whining about money – now part of its demeanor – and to ask itself, "Is it new?" Is it bringing in and developing young talent? Is it doing something, anything, that will be imitated around the world? Is it creating programs that will bring in dollars in syndication and entice sponsors to be associated with the excitement?

In the 1960s the BBC, which had become a national treasure during World War II, had lost its way. Commercial television was eroding its audience and pirate broadcasters were attacking its radio franchise. The BBC got off the couch and joined the creative fray, especially the satirical revolution. Bam! It was back.

Of course, the BBC with its private tax, called a licensing fee, had a lot of money to spend. But it wasn't money that saved the BBC from ignoble decline – it was unleashing creative forces in post-Empire Britain.

Particularly, the BBC encouraged young writers and producers. It worked.

PBS should think of itself as an incubator, not as a roost for the old, the tired and the timid. Had PBS, or rather one of its bigger stations, been offered "The Daily Show" or its stable mate "The Colbert Report," it's hard to imagine that they would've been welcomed.

Yes, PBS, those retread English comedies and Lawrence Welk won't cut it going forward. –For the Hearst-New York Times syndicate

A Wake-Up Call for Public Broadcasting

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The U.S. House of Representatives, in an act of retribution that is vicious, punitive and crass, voted to eliminate the modest funding provided to public broadcasting through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

The $430 million in federal funding for public broadcasting is somewhat less than the $500 million purportedly spent by the Pentagon on military bands. Like Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, the House has ruled that everything must go.

The cut would be another thread pulled out of the tapestry of our national culture. Without public broadcasting, MSNBC and Fox will set the tone for a generation or more; Twitter will set our thought processes. Already dispassionate news is in retreat.

Fortunately, Republican leaders rewrote the House bill because they knew it would never sail in the Senate, where Democrats hold a majority. The cleansed version didn’t whack CPB funding but instead met the goals of deficit hawks by cutting other spending.

Let me state that I produce and host “White House Chronicle,” a Washington talk show that airs on a number of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stations. I offer my television show free of charge to all stations. I pay for the program's closed-captioning, and pay PBS to put it on its satellite.

The action of the House will, if anything, benefit independent producers such as myself, Dennis Wholey and Rick Steves. Our product, for which we find the funding, possibly could be more acceptable to the stations than expensive programming like “Frontline,” “Nova” and the Ken Burns' series.

But I must say that PBS programming, already burdened with reruns and resuscitated British comedies, will be the worse for it. Its promise, never fulfilled, will be dashed.

CPB is the creation of Congress for helping fund the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. NPR, a ratings behemoth, will survive better. It has a loyal following and has proven that there is a market for down-the-middle news programming.

PBS, unlike NPR, has no central programming function, but instead is a loose confederation of television stations that have different owners. Yet PBS does control the “voice” of PBS television. It does this through programs it supports and sends to the stations on what is called the “hard feed.” You know these as the aforementioned “Frontline” and “Nova,” but they also include “The NewsHour,” “Washington Week with Gwen Ifill,” “Charlie Rose,” “Consider This,” and the heirs to “Masterpiece Theater.”

These programs, unlike mine, are fed to the individual stations in a bundle for which the stations pay. They are produced by well-heeled stations like Boston's WGBH-TV, New York's WNET-TV and Washington's WETA-TV.

Some of these PBS programs have been around a long time — and they show it. Television is a cruel medium and it demands innovation, experimentation and retirement. In commercial television, life is short and death is brutal. Even the Sunday-morning programs go through dramatic iterations. Less so PBS programs.

But the more egregious failure of public broadcasting is there isn’t enough fun in it: There are no high-jinks. If “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” had been offered free of charge to PBS, it probably wouldn't have made it to the coveted world of the hard feed, where tedium and quality are dreadfully mixed in the manager’s minds. I'd like to think my program's originating station, WHUT, and WETA, which carries my program on Sunday mornings, would've picked up something so revolutionary. But PBS itself? No.

In the 1950s, the most staid broadcast entity on earth was the BBC. I worked there as a news film scriptwriter. We could show pictures of blood, but not tell people what it was. Hard to believe, huh? But elsewhere in the corporation, things were moving: Brilliant young people were pouring out of Oxford and Cambridge and setting the Thames on fire with programs like “That Was the Week That Was” with David Frost and “Not Only … But Also” with the comedy team of Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. It was explosive, dramatic, exciting, uninhibited television. The best place to be in the evening was in front of your television set.

Maybe the brush with Congress will be good for the managers of PBS, and they'll lift up their skirts a bit, as the BBC ­– that old matron — did in the 1960s.

Public broadcasting can save itself, but not with “The Lawrence Welk Show” or that tired, old British show, “Are You Being Served?” – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate