Why is it OK to broadcast terrorist propaganda but not taxpayer-funded media reports?
Earlier this year, a community radio station in Minneapolis asked Voice of America (VOA) for permission to retransmit its news coverage on the increasingly volatile situation in Somalia. The VOA audio files it requested were freely available online without copyright or any licensing requirements. The radio station's intentions were simple enough: Producers hoped to offer an informative, Somali-language alternative to the terrorist propaganda that is streaming into Minneapolis, where the United States' largest Somali community resides. Over the last year or more, al-Shabab, an al Qaeda linked Somali militia, has successfully recruited two dozen or more Somali-Americans to return home and fight. The radio station was grasping for a remedy.
It all seemed straightforward enough until VOA turned down the request for the Somali-language programming. In the United States, airing a program produced by a U.S. public diplomacy radio or television station such as VOA is illegal. Oddly, though, airing similar programs produced by foreign governments -- or even terrorist groups -- is not. As a result, the same professional journalists, editors, and public diplomacy officers whom we trust to inform and engage the world are considered more threatening to Americans than terrorist propaganda -- like the stuff pouring into Minneapolis...
More at Foreign Policy.
Comments
George, I don't know the status of Al Jazeera's news bureaus but they are increasingly available across the US.
John, VOA was created in 1942 and the Smith-Mundt Act was originally introduced in the House as the Bloom Bill in December 1945 to continue peacetime information activities, a first. The firewall provision that has been altered in ways unintended by the 79th Congress that extensively debated the law (which after passing the House was blocked by a single Senator in 1946, in which case it would have been called the Bloom Act of 1946 instead) and passed by 80th Congress and singed into law in 1948. There were two other provisions in the Act that addressed the issues you raise, John. One required the maximum use of private resources and the other prevented the creation of monopoly, both key requirements of German pre-war propaganda and the Creel Commission (aka Committee for Public Information) under the Wilson Administration prior to and during World War I.
The legislation that you mention permitted the distribution by the Government of media.
I agree it would make sense for the freshman Senator from Minnesota introduce the legislation. It would make more sense to remove the firewall that was largely created in the 1970's when Senator Fulbright tried to kill the "Cold War relics" (Senator Fulbright's term for our international broadcasting in 1972), a sentiment Senator Zorinsky, already upset at USIA and State and investigating USIA for nepotism among other things, carried forward. Plus, the USIA of the 1980's was producing a different product than what was being created prior to USIA's creation in 1952 or in the two decades that followed.
-Matt Armstrong
Old law from another time that we are still stuck with. When VOA was created in the 1940s there was a real concern that the American people not be propagandized by the government as Josef Goebels did to the German people for Hitler with his Ministry of Propaganda. Obviously not applicable in the curren situation, Fortunately there is precedent for a remedy. After JFK was assasinated, Congress passed legislation waiving the requirement for the VOA film, Years of Lightning, Day of Drums. Hence the solution is to have Sen Al Franken D-MN introduce similar legislation waiving the rule for Somali language broadcasts...
I knew of the federal statute banning broadcasting of VOA news and programming inside the US. Surely the time has come in today's war on terrorism to change the law, as our enemies operate informationally with impunity within the US,including al Jazeera which to me remains the main "mouth piece" of the Taliban and al Qaida. Al Jazeera has been trying to set up news bureau offices across American, thus far not successfully, fyi.