Just as the armed forces are being shrunk and the stockpile of nuclear missiles is being pared, so should another American weapon of the Cold War be scaled back. It`s time for the federal government`s billion-dollar-plus propaganda arms, the U.S. Information Agency and the Board for International Broadcasting, to re-examine their operations and drop those that are no longer useful.
The USIA`s mission has been to win friends for the United States through communications and cultural exchanges. Its efforts include the Fulbright Scholarships; U.S. tours for foreign ”influentials”; operation of American libraries and cultural centers abroad; and television programming to overseas audiences.
Its best-known outlet is the Voice of America radio service, which broadcasts U.S. and international news in several dozen languages around the world.
The Board for International Broadcasting is a federally funded corporation that operates Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, which beam local news to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
The USIA and Radio Free Europe served important roles in the Cold War decades, delivering news, information and the hope of freedom across the Iron Curtain. Today the Iron Curtain is a scrap heap. Yet the two agencies, exhibiting an institutionalized instinct for self-preservation, are fighting efforts to rein in their budgets by attempting to redefine their purposes.
Some old purposes remain good. There is still value in helping people of other nations understand U.S. policy and culture. Radio Liberty should continue its broadcasts to the Soviet Union for as long as a truly free press eludes the practitioners of perestroika.
But a sensible scale-back plan was put forth last month by a federal advisory panel that recommends phasing out Radio Free Europe broadcasts to Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, which now have free media of their own.
Even more obvious, the panel called for the sign-off of TV Marti, a USIA station aimed at Cuba. Not only does it operate only during the non-prime hours of 3:30 to 6 a.m. (to avoid illegal interference with Cuban TV signals), but it has provoked the Castro regime to jam the signals of its more effective broadcast brother, Radio Marti.
These recommendations are good beginnings. But Congress could look further.
One product that merits re-examination is Worldnet, a satellite TV service with a $31 million budget. USIA officials, asked about the need for Worldnet when CNN spans the globe, say it is needed to help newly democratic peoples learn to handle such basic democratic practices as a free press. It is hard to understand how a state-run medium can teach people to wean themselves from state-run media better than the example of free media themselves.
