Abstract
It is a service to a field to review and expand its institutional history and that is particularly true of the study of international broadcasting. Murendehle Juwayeyi has comprehensively assembled a history of policy decisions, demonstrating the significance of critical junctures to gaining an overall picture of actions and inquiries over more than a century. So convoluted and complex a past, so wound up in the ambiguities of state-sponsored journalism, and so intriguingly masked in notions of national security, intelligence, and the darker arts of propaganda, international broadcasting needs any cleansing light of constructive attention it can receive. This is particularly true now, when the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) is just recovering from an onslaught that trashed traditions and principles that gave USAGM its philosophical underpinning, its delicate hold on a theory of involvement in massive efforts to shape public opinion in key target areas around the world.
To supplement Prof. Juwayeyi’s work, I focus on one aspect of government-sponsored international broadcasting: the emphasis on describing much of the U.S. effort as providing “surrogates” in the absence of local news and information services that perform adequately. I propose examining whether, as part of foreign policy, there can or should be a discourse of negotiated de-escalation or mutual de-weaponization. I relate this question to theories of strategic communication and dynamic changes in “markets for loyalties.” Developing what I would call a strategic diagnostic would provide more guidance as to the future directions of the U.S. Agency for Global Media and its component entities.
This certainly is a time for introspection as to the future of international broadcasting. The USAGM has undergone a traumatic period of instability and attack. Statutory reorganization designed to make the Agency more efficient became a blueprint for its potential destruction. This was also a time of growing recognition of dramatic changes—in many contexts—in the structure for the production, distribution, and reception of information. Well-trod formats and approaches to international broadcasting persist, augmented by approaches to shifts in user practices and available technologies. Murendehle has shown that contestation has been a constant, but also that there are identifiable critical junctures.
With important but relatively minor exceptions, the United States generally has seen itself as privileged to influence foreign audiences while feeling immune from having its populace manipulated in turn. As the 21st century unspooled, that sense of immunity decreased. Virulent debate occurred in the wake of the 2016 election as to whether Russia had played an uncomfortably outsized role. More than that the Russian government’s RT channel, carried on many American cable systems, has gained many adherents and, according to many observers, was sowing seeds of distrust of American government and politics among U.S. households. The dynamics of international broadcasting—in terms of technology, geopolitics, and so much else—were changing or threatening to change in radical ways.
China, of course, was fashioning its own initiatives to gain influence, although not deploying international broadcasting in the same way. The hugely ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, with its own global agenda, created its own sphere of influence. More directly, Russia actively responded to American efforts targeting a Russian population: Not only did Russia provide substantial financing for surrogate efforts in the United States, it enacted rules that forced much of U.S. international broadcasting and website actors, like the Voice of America (VOA), in Russia to register and to display a notice that they were “foreign agents.” Fines for violation were impossibly high. Through it all, skepticism and challenges to the premises of international broadcasting, the belief has persisted that the United States should be involved in large-scale efforts to shape public opinion in particular target societies.
In this environment, history rhymes: The constituent parts of the USAGM are almost all children spawned of the Cold War, their views of strategy, and objective products of Cold War imaginings. Those seem to be with us still and again. As Cold War narratives revive, the harsh rhetoric of those times will become increasingly attractive to repeat and emphasize as the USAGM entities react. Tropes that have underwritten parts of international broadcasting in an expansive past are likely to be depended upon for future justification. The more active involvements of Russia and China are sufficient to encourage deep inquiry of all that constitutes the USAGM. The truncated, hostile, and aggressive efforts of the Trump administration might have led to this challenge to the USAGM, except that from the beginning White House agents virtually discredited themselves and never presented a vision or ways to reach a vision. They were too preoccupied with hostility to existing Agency personnel, destroying painstakingly developed structures, and erasing the “firewall” of independence; meanwhile, the Trump administration’s stance was empty of positive strategic response and constructive engineering.
American international broadcasting policy has embraced two philosophical approaches. As is often stated, the VOA, international broadcasting’s elder sibling, features and seeks to advance “American values.” There are conflicts and complaints about the VOA, but identifying and projecting such values are the less controversial and perhaps more venerated of U.S. international broadcasting techniques. In terms of an interest in potential reduction in conflict, I focus on the second grand theme of U.S. international broadcasting, namely, the creation of surrogate broadcasters—implanting a local or local-seeming service sponsored by a foreign government. Descriptions of this category often depend on distinguishing surrogate stations from the more general VOA counterpart. To take just one example, Arch Puddington, who was Senior Vice President for Research at Freedom House but also served as a bureau manager for Radio Free Europe (RFE)/Radio Liberty (RL), wrote in his 2000 book Broadcasting Freedom, Traditionally, governments have sponsored foreign radio services in order to promote their own geopolitical objectives or to convince a foreign audience of the superiority of their system. Hitler used radio to terrorize neighboring countries; the Soviet Union maintained a vast global broadcast network to promote communism; the American government established the Voice of America to convey the U.S. perspective on world events and familiarize a foreign audience with the American political system and American culture.
Puddington then contrasts the American surrogates, at the time primarily RFE and RL: The two “freedom radios,” however, had a much different purpose. They were, to begin with, pure Cold War institutions. Their goal was not simply to inform their listeners but also to bring about the peaceful demise of the Communist system and the liberation of what were known as satellite nations.
These were aggressive goals and, over time, they have been moderated. Goals of regime change are downplayed with an emphasis rather on underwriting an informed citizenship. Foreign government financing is often transparent. The implementation of the concept has included Radio Marti (Cuba), Radio Sawa (part of the larger Middle East Broadcasting Networks), Radio Free Asia, and Radio Farda (Iran; part of RFE/RL). The implementation of the concept is now evident in Radio Marti, Radio Sawa, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Farda. The idea of surrogacy nonetheless remains edgy and controversial. Indeed, originally, the United States masked its financial underwriting of RFE. Even now the USAGM points out that RFE/RL is “independent” and not a government entity. In the more modern articulation of this model, surrogates purport to provide the “objective” and informative local station that citizens theoretically deserve as a human right but lack for a variety of reasons (the government of the given society censors its local broadcaster, the society cannot afford a news service that provides information, etc.). The conceit is that the United States, given these conditions, is privileged to target a state’s citizens and furnish them the information sustenance that—in a proper world—would be an attribute of democratic participation. As with the “right to protect,” intervention is formulated as gift of a human right as opposed to a penetration of space in violation of rules against the unauthorized use of force. The modern surrogate is less saber rattling, less explicit talk of regime change, and more mobilization and idea of effective political opposition.
As between the two directions (articulation of American values and service as a mobilizing surrogate), the latter justification generally dominates and has more muscle. Past evidence suggests that passion is translatable into budget and intensity of effort tends to swing toward the surrogate, the concrete, and the goal-specific effort that has more of a strategic edge. The surrogates often enjoy the backing of diasporas within the American political system and are attractive to those who represent them. Surrogates gain as a consequence of Congressional zeal. Lobbies relating to Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and other loci often focus on surrogacy to produce impacts consistent with long-held political hopes.
The last years have seen an expansion of research, both at the Department of State and at USAGM, concerning the reach of the component parts, but little of this research addresses the costs and benefits of information de-escalation. On the contrary, most proposals, where potential conflict is highlighted, have to do with more effective intervention and more significant surrogacy. If information de-weaponization were proposed or attempted, it would raise questions not yet investigated or thought through. Given the current critical juncture, the hope would be—at least for a diagnostic moment—to examine the assumptions of surrogacy itself, target society by target society, in terms of a state’s objectives, in terms of costs and benefits, and in terms of understanding the roles of emerging public diplomacy. I propose that we think of international broadcasting more strategically. Does the existing narrative of U.S. sponsorship of local surrogates continue to be a useful guide? Have we evaluated decades of efforts to implement the related hopes of enriching local political participation? Is this a viable narrative and effective regarding an agreed-upon purpose? What can we learn from previous discussions of the goals and limitations of efforts by one country to affect the space of another state, to shape public opinion, media, and elections? Should a concerted effort be made to de-escalate weaponized information among many players, including the United States, China, and Russia but also Iran and others? De-escalation could be focused on technique, for example, by agreeing not to deploy on certain platforms or by reducing enforcement of mutual harassing labeling restrictions, such as registration of journalists and media as foreign agents. De-escalation could mean reducing budgets for particular initiatives. And de-escalation could deal with substance, determining what narratives to downplay and what relatively positive narratives to feature. Narrative de-escalation was a feature of the Oslo Accords; there is a bow in that direction in the quiescent Arab League Satellite Broadcasting Charter. From time to time, negotiated penetration in the information sphere was a feature of discussions between South and North Korea.
I have written about strategic diagnostics in defining what it means to be a large-scale communicator. In moments of doubt, change, and competing considerations, a comprehensive but relatively independent and thoroughgoing diagnostic is necessary. Strategic diagnostics filter what the overall effort is designed to accomplish. A diagnostic helps set forth the specific site utility of a surrogate approach. A diagnostic comes to grips with what I have called Markets for Loyalties. In my 1994 Yale Law Journal essay, I posited the existence of a myriad of such markets for loyalties, some large, some small, where “sellers” (often those marketing ideologies, religions, ways of living life) interact with “buyers,” ordinary citizens who are pursuing or considering ways of life. Buyers, in this model, use unusual currency to manifest their interest in what the sellers offer. Buyers pay taxes; serve in various militaries, including irregular ones, to show their loyalty; and refrain from migrating even if they have the ability. Sites have multiple overlapping markets—as in Ukraine or in Myanmar or the European Union. U.S. efforts to affect markets for loyalties are complicated and multifaceted.
What aspects of a diagnostic would inform the possibility of de-escalation? The relationship between Ukraine and Russia is an active example of the working of such markets in an international context. Both states use broadcasting across borders to shape loyalties. Violence can be encouraged or not through the media. Russia uses technologies to supplement its use of force to maintain or expand its sway. At times, these parties subtly agree (or forcefully disagree) as to steps that they can take, perhaps even as to the claims they make, the arguments they put forward, and even the way they characterize key aspects of history. In seeking to alter what might be called “audience shares” in the relevant markets, Ukraine looks for allies, such as the United States, the European Union, and others to provide backup and reinforcement. Ukraine seeks to regulate what programming from Russia directed at Russians in Ukraine can be carried on Ukrainian private stations. Russia is hostile to RFE/RL broadcasts into Russia and uses sweeping legislation and other techniques to render operations near impossible. These examples are not strictly about international broadcasting efforts but they universalize the concept and provide a rounded perspective on what is at issue.
A sophisticated diagnostic would expand beyond the classical perspective of public diplomacy. The essentialist view of international broadcasting is to focus on two elements: the sending government and the receiving audience. Two innovative scholars of international broadcasting, Will Youmans and Shawn Powers, provide a more complicated model. In their 2012 International Journal of Communication article, “Remote Negotiations: International Broadcasting as Bargaining in the Information Age,” they recharacterize international broadcasting. While this chiefly involves an effort by a “sending government” to influence opinion in a “receiving audience,” Youmans and Powers recognize some significant potential dealings between the “sending government” and the “receiving government.” That is where certain bargaining as part of de-escalation may take place. It is this relationship to a “receiving government” that is of interest here because it sheds light on the strategic areas of concern when an international broadcaster features surrogacy as its principal mode of reaching into a target society. A diagnostic would sketch out the interplays between sending and receiving governments to determine the potential for negotiation.
Even stating the scope of a diagnostic demonstrates how broadcasters are related to other factors in a persuasion marketplace. Realistically, information de-escalation is not just about, or even principally about, international broadcasting. To Russia, China, and others, Western movies, music, T-shirts, fads, and social mores—American culture generally—are more threatening to their cultures than is international broadcasting. Thomas Kent, a former RFE/RL President who frequently writes about international broadcasting, emphasizes this point. There is little likelihood that the United States could or would rein in its overall cultural power, although the receiving societies may wish this. European national efforts to limit the marketing of U.S. films and music by setting quotas or formulae serves as an example. In a world of social media, it is difficult for sending or receiving states to make restrictive content commitments or honor them.
The diagnostic can augment the search for formal and informal norms that might constrain bilateral or multilateral discussions, leading to de-escalation. For example, for background, one might look at the incomplete history of a little studied document, the International Convention Concerning the Use of Broadcasting in the Cause of Peace, an interesting artifact of the League of Nations. Entered into force on April 2, 1938, it was pioneering as a treaty that purported, if it were finalized, to bind states to “restrict expression which constituted a threat to international peace and security.” Article 1 of the Convention obligated the state parties to prohibit and stop any broadcast transmission originating within their territories that are “of such a character as to incite the population of any territory to acts incompatible with the internal order or the security of a territory.” This article was intended to prohibit and stop propaganda from being broadcast that would incite listeners to revolution. Moreover, Article 2 of the Convention, a forerunner of Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), prohibits broadcasts that would constitute “incitement to war against another high contracting party.” Intriguingly, Articles 3 and 4 prohibit the broadcasting of false news. The Convention languished as its prospects moved to the United Nations. The United States failed to become a Party, among other reasons citing the First Amendment. Attempts were made to reactivate the Convention in the 1950s, but by the 1960s, these efforts had come to naught.
De-escalation is difficult and unlikely. But for a case to be made, the societies involved clearly need to know more. Among the international broadcasters, including the surrogates, there are likely meaningful differences in existing negotiations with the government of the receiving society. Do different correspondents or national representatives have different red lines? In the era of social media and the internet, does surrogate broadcasting usefully expand into surrogate local media? If so, how does that work? Can the United States constitutionally seek to limit the availability or even the content of RT and other Russian or Chinese efforts? All this leads to the question whether there can or should be soft discussions on some sorts of arms control of weaponized information. Is surrogate broadcasting a possible candidate for such efforts? Perhaps “arms control” is too strong a term. But the term may apply in a time of polarization, Cold War renewal, disinformation, election intervention, and even cyberhacking. My goal here is to suggest a broad inquiry in how surrogacy and other aspects of international broadcasting should be contemplated and evaluated from a broad foreign policy perspective. Professor Juwayeyi has set a tone for such an inquiry by tracing its intricate history and lineage. De-escalation in information wars is not likely, but the stakes are such that attention should be paid.