Smith-Mundt: Time for a Change

By David S Jackson

People have been complaining about the Smith-Mundt Act for years, but like that old joke about the weather, they never did anything about it.

That may be about to change.

The Smith-Mundt Act (originally known as The United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948) provided the underlying authorization for just about everything that we call public diplomacy today, from educational and cultural exchange programs to international broadcasting. Signed into law by President Truman in January, 1948, the legislation was driven by a growing realization at the beginning of the Cold War that the U.S. government needed to do a better job of explaining, defending, and advocating its policies in the face of relentless Communist propaganda overseas.

Smith-Mundt helped support that. But over the years, a “firewall” in the Act, which prohibited the State Department from disseminating domestically any content that was intended for overseas audiences, has come to be interpreted as applying government-wide, which has led to problems. Some of them were described at a 2009 symposium on Smith-Mundt convened by public diplomacy consultant Matt Armstrong. Defense Department representatives said the military needed clearer guidance on whether the Act applied to their communications in overseas information operations and other areas. Some former diplomats said they either ignored the Act or didn’t feel restricted by it, but I pointed out that an unintended consequence of the prohibition on domestic dissemination by Voice of America (VOA) and other U.S. international broadcasters was that it led critics to falsely charge that the reason American audiences were forbidden from hearing the broadcasts was because they were “propaganda”. I also described how, when I was the VOA director, I was prevented by Smith-Mundt from assisting small U.S. broadcasters when they asked for some of our programs to replay for local immigrant communities in their own languages.

In fact, the original restrictions on domestic dissemination stemmed from Cold War-era suspicions of the State Department. But the most glaring problem today is that the Internet has made the ban on domestic dissemination a moot point. When Smith-Mundt was passed, you needed a good shortwave radio to find a VOA broadcast. Today, everything that VOA or any other U.S. international broadcaster transmits can be easily found on the Internet, thus making the most controversial element of Smith-Mundt technologically obsolete.

Now there seems to be a growing consensus for taking another look at Smith-Mundt and fixing what needs to be fixed. U.S. Rep. William (Mac) Thornberry (R-TX) had 23 co-sponsors, from both sides of the aisle, when he proposed a “Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2010” last year, and the Obama Administration has indicated its support of an amendment. The U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which oversees VOA and the other U.S. international broadcasters, has endorsed a repeal of the ban on domestic dissemination, and a senior staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says the conditions may finally be ripe for a change.

Even if the ban is lifted, I don’t expect the BBG broadcasters to start targeting American audiences. Their primary mission has always been to focus on international audiences, and that shouldn’t change. But amending Smith-Mundt could make it a lot easier for them to provide an occasional news or information program to a local American broadcaster or anyone else who requests it. They have nothing to hide and everything to gain from sharing with Americans what they do every day for millions of listeners and viewers around the world. 

(Source : Public Diplomacy Council)