President Bush Orders a Review of US Government International Broadcasting Activities

Following World War II, State Department officials, skeptical of the diplomatic value of programs they considered “propaganda,” persuaded Congress to cut allocations severely for Voice of America (VOA) radio programs that had been established during World War II to communicate US war aims to populations abroad. In late 1947, however, a committee of senators traveling in Europe reported “a campaign of vilification and misrepresentation” conducted by the Soviet Union’s newly formed propaganda agency Cominform to discredit the Marshall Plan. Congress subsequently passed the Smith-Mundt Act—with the Senate voting unanimously in its favor—to establish a permanent peacetime program “to promote the better understanding of the United States among the peoples of the world and to strengthen cooperative international relations.” President Harry S. Truman signed the bill into law in January 1948, and funding for international cultural and information programs was greatly increased. Also in 1948, Radio in the American Sector in Berlin (RIAS), which had been established two years earlier as a broadcasting service of the US occupation authority in Germany, gained new importance during the Berlin blockade and began to direct broadcasts to East Germany. Radio Free Europe (RFE) was established in 1949 along the lines of RIAS to broadcast to Eastern European countries. Radio Liberty (RL) began in 1951 to broadcast to the Soviet Union. Both RFE and RL were privately owned, but secretly funded by Congress through the CIA, and as such, they engaged in psychological warfare campaigns that were deemed inappropriate for VOA. In 1953, the United States Information Agency (USIA) was created as an independent agency reporting directly to the president as the organization responsible for communicating US policy abroad and carrying out much of the government’s international information and cultural programs, and it took over from the State Department the VOA program. USIA’s official mission statement—“to persuade foreign peoples that it lies in their own interest to take actions which are also consistent with the national objectives of the United States”—guided many of its programs. In the following White House directive issued in March 1990 as the Cold War was winding down, President George H. W. Bush called for a policy review of US international broadcasting activities in light of the rapid changes occurring in Eastern Europe.