What's the Big Idea?

By Alan L. Heil Jr. of VOA

August is a time for reflection.   International broadcasting, among many U.S. funded national security institutions, is immersed in questions this summer about its mission, its reach and its cost effectiveness.  Our pioneer publicly-funded overseas network, the Voice of America, is just a few months shy of its 70th anniversary.   What is its role and impact in the ever widening galaxy of U.S. government funded overseas broadcast entities?

The U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors has wisely recognized the need to take a hard look at how the five broadcasting organizations it oversees might be restructured.   In addition to VOA, these are:  Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks in Arabic (Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa) and Radio-TV Marti to Cuba.

 Of the five, VOA commands the largest following:  123 million listeners, viewers and on line or social media users out of the 165 million reached by all of U.S. international broadcasting.  Its brand and full-service mission of providing accurate, objective and comprehensive news and American ideas are well established and recognized globally as a window on the world.

None of the overseas networks, however, can afford to stand still.  Not in this rapidly changing digital age, where there are more than two billion people on line.  By 2014, some predict, there may be more cell phones than humans on this planet.   In this 24/7 universal electronic town meeting without boundaries, there’s a seemingly limitless array of voices, tweets, re-tweets unimaginable at the turn of the century.   Content becomes king.  In the cutthroat competition for attention, one media professional once said it so well:    “Be distinct or be extinct!”

And that brings us to this time for August musings.  We should not get caught up in looking at process and platforms so much that we forget that we are in the ideas business.  Rather, we should concentrate, laser-like, on what is said by both consumers as well as producers.  This summer, IBM marks its centennial as a remarkably successful corporation.  As The Economist noted in its June 9 edition:  “IBM’s secret is that it is built around an idea that transcends any particular product or technology… Building a company around an idea, rather than a specific technology, makes it easier to adapt when industry ‘platform shifts’ occur.”

So, in U.S. international broadcasting, what’s the big idea?   It’s to serve the national interest by providing “an American optic” on civil society and events of the day.   That was how an Ivory Coast broadcasting executive described VOA in a conversation we had in Abidjan in 1978 but the notion is unassailably sound even today.   For international broadcast professionals, there are overarching principles in any era about what to say and how to say it:  1) listen to what’s on the consumers’ mind --- “the mind is our medium,” as NPR would put it; 2) build programming by responding to what you hear; 3) consider yourself, to borrow a characteristic ascribed to IBM, “as part of an ecosystem (producers and consumers) whose members are working together to solve common problems.”  No preaching.  Just listen.  This, as Nick Cull of the USC Annenberg School for Communication often has said, is a critical component of successful U.S. public diplomacy.  In inaugurating his book, The Future of Power, Harvard’s Joseph Nye recently explained, power increasingly may be derived not only by military might but by those that have the most compelling story to tell.

International broadcasting can and should build communities through humanitarian programming such as VOA has done, in full measure, in covering and analyzing the current famine in the Horn of Africa.  But it also must be credible, hard-edged but accurate in assessing events of the day --- the recent high-speed rail accident in China, for example, an event censors in the PRC attempted to soft pedal and block on-line received full treatment on VOA Chinese TV and radio transmissions.   The Washington Post headlined a recent editorial: “The Train Truth.” The Post decried PRC censorship in a world where the cutting edge of balanced facts ought to prevail.

You can find that very principle in two key articles of the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.  Article 19 says:  “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information through any media and regardless of frontiers.”   Article 30 adds:   “Nothing  in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”   That’s the really big idea that drives solid, public service multi-platform international broadcasting at its best.

(Source : Public Diplomacy Council-PDC)