America's Trivial Arabic Voice

...The desire to build ratings is somewhat contradicted by MERN'S single-minded emphasis on American content...

...But the heart of Radio X would be its features: talks, panel discussions, documentaries...

...But Russia, the most important of those republics to the U.S., is clearly a freer, more peaceable country than it was as part of the USSR...

...But the main political freight directed to the Soviet Union was carried by the U.S.-sponsored Radio Liberty...

...Of course, just as Radio Liberty faced considerable hostility from Kremlin propagandists, RX would face the wrath of radical Islamic preachers...

...For that reason, the VOA also devoted considerable effort to Russian talks and other features on major topics of the day aimed at older listeners...

...Similarly, progressive policies within the Islamic world, because they do not carry the infidel stamp, would have a special legitimacy for every Muslim...

...The pattern set by Radio Liberty is especially relevant here...

...Prominent Americans and Europeans also spoke, not about Western superiority but about how they worked for change in their own societies...

...Why deny Arabs the useful service U. S. radio provided to Russians and other Soviet citizens during the Cold War...

...We were able to surmount these obstacles during the Cold War...

...Broadcasts to the Arabs would recall the halcyon days of early Islam, when the Muslims' openness to outside influence-from the ancient Greeks to the Chinese to the Indiansmade their civilization the most scientifically advanced and most affluent on the globe...

...It is as if no one here remembers how the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL) became a vital part of the process of political change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe by addressing issues of importance to their audiences...

...None of those present picked up on his comment...

...In the Middle East, the creation of MERN has turned U.S...

...Admittedly, change can be painful, as shown by the turmoil of the last decade in the former Soviet republics...

...Information Agency, and the Board for International Broadcasting...

...Yet in carrying all important world news it would give special emphasis to developments within the Arab region...

...Spokespersons have announced that it will air "jazz and entertainment" 24 hours a day to youth in Arab countries...

...It is also important to "engage ideas," he observed...

...The predominantly musical fare is being interspersed with brief news items and editorials about the United States...

...At the same time, its tone would have to be calm and its information accurate...

...But most of what Arab listeners will get, it seems, is songs by American and Arab rock stars...

...I shall never forget attempting to explain the concept of RL to an American Air Force colonel back in the 1950s...

...That's the only thing they'll understand...

...An older Arab listener interviewed by the New York Times was less enthusiastic: "I am fed up with hearing everything through the American filters-how the President reacts to this and that and how the American government is reacting...

...Staffed largely by émigrés from the Soviet republics, RL sought to provide its listeners with a "surrogate" radio service featuring the kinds of programs an independent local station in Moscow or Minsk or Tashkent might have carried if allowed to by Kremlin censors...

...An example is the Arab Human Development Report commissioned by the United Nations Development Program, issued in early July...

...For Radio X, a fruitful activity would be cross-reporting developments in different parts of the Islamic world...

...It is hard to measure RL's precise contribution to Soviet evolution...

...I remember with particular satisfaction an impromptu interview that I recorded in the 1960s with the author James Baldwin, who reminded Soviet listeners that "the people of a country are always, no matter how it seems, more important than any particular government...

...In the same vein, listeners would be reminded that Muslims, Jews and Christians coexisted in mutual respect for centuries when Spain was under Islamic rule...

...At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on "public diplomacy" held in June, it was revealed that when Arabs were asked by pollsters whether they would "listen to a radio brought by the United States," 60 per cent said "no...

...It would have to counter opposition tactics the way RL did, by making its broadcasts so compelling in terms of its audience's self-interest that people would listen anyway...

...It further charges that "deeply rooted shortcomings in Arab institutional structures" have caused particular deficits in three key areas: freedom, empowerment of women, and knowledge...

...Don't waste time trying to talk to the Russkies," he warned me...

...Whatever the case, they will not receive substantial knowledge of it from American government broadcasts...

...At the State Department, the Bush Administration's point person for overseas broadcasting is Undersecretary Charlotte Beers, who formerly ran top advertising agencies...

...On those rare occasions when VOA emcee Willis Conover visited the USSR he was besieged by fans after word of his presence got around...

...This accounts for the orientation toward youth: More than 60 per cent of the people in the target region are said to be under 30...

...At various times and places, there have been opposition campaigns for freedom of scientific inquiry and education unfettered by dogma, against slavery, for emancipation of women and equal rights for non-Muslims...

...Studies like the UN's Arab Human Development Report would be grist for RX'smill...

...It was the first President Bush who, fearing the consequences of change, chose to let Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime survive the Gulf War...

...Is this because of a fear that democratization might upset the status quo and harm the interests of American oil companies in the Arabian Peninsula...

...At least one influential member of Congress has sensed the problem...

...One VOA director used to say of his operation and RL that they were "the two blades of the scissors-neither blade can cut without the other...

...The Administration, with Democratic support from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr...

...Arab women, for instance, may be inspired by the example of their sisters in Islamic countries like Turkey, where Muslim women are free to hold jobs at all levels, or to own and drive their own cars...

...The more today's Muslim masses know of these positive elements, the greater their chances of prevailing...

...At the same Senate committee hearing where Pattiz testified, the ranking Republican, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, expressed disquiet over the Broadcasting Board's emphasis on sheer numbers...

...It brought to its microphones well-known Russian émigré writers like Vassily Aksyonov, Anatoly Kuznetsov and Viktor Nekrasov...

...Unlike Al Jazeera and other Arab media, RX would not stress Arab victims of Israeli violence over Israeli victims of Arab violence...

...The work of some 30 Arab intellectuals, it is outspokenly critical of conditions in their region...

...Pattiz is chairman of Westwood One, the largest American radio network, which distributes programs and syndicates individual performers like G. Gordon Liddy...

...broadcasting is concerned, however, nothing could be farther from the truth...

...In an exception, MERN departed from its breezy entertainment format to air President Bush's 18-minute June 24 speech on the Middle East...

...Choosing its name would be a serious matter, but for the moment we'll call it Radio X(RX...

...broadcasting into a scissors missing a blade...

...Let's suppose that through some miraculous change of heart in the White House and Foggy Bottom a new radio could be created to take up the slack left by MERN...

...In the Arab countries, young people tend to be unemployed and undereducated...

...One from a student in Baghdad said that, while cramming for an exam, "I found in magic and charming way that your radio programs show my most old and new favorite songs...

...Correspondingly, long-term change in Arab societies offers the only hope of their establishing stable relations with the non-Muslim world (including Israel...

...And while RL gave priority to topics close to the hearts of its listeners, like political change, it carefully avoided appeals to political action...

...For obvious reasons, the studios and shortwave transmitters had to be located outside the country...

...In its heyday RL had a daily audience of some 6 million-smaller than the VOA's, but more concentrated among older, better educated listeners, not to mention dissidents...

...To the extent possible, these would present well-known Arab figures...

...Nuke 'em...

...Retreating from the Marketplace of Ideas America's Trivial Arabic Voice By James Critchlow Washington Given President George W. Bush's emphasis on the "war against terrorism,' one might think Washington is taking every possible step to strengthen moderate forces in the Muslim world opposed to Islamic fanatics...

...The emphasis on youth and audience size rather than quality of listenership may reflect in part the commercial background of the Washington players involved...

...This seems particularly unwise, since it is the older people in Islamic societies who enjoy special influence and respect...

...True, the Kremlin put a violent end to the Prague Spring, but not before it had given Soviet citizens considerable food for thought...

...Washington's retreat from the marketplace of ideas comes at a time when the Arab world is showing signs of wanting to enter the 21st century...

...RL ran a regular series of broadcasts on prerevolutionary Russian thinkers like Aleksandr S. Pushkin, Aleksandr I. Herzen and Vladimir G. Korolenko, who had spoken out against tyranny...

...Surely it is worth a major effort to repeat that performance with Islamic audiences in general and the Arabs in particular...

...Indeed, the new format leaves in the lurch more mature Arabs with a serious interest in reforming their countries...

...Abundant anecdotal evidence, though, shows that by recirculating internal criticisms of Kremlin policy that surfaced in the West in the form of samizdat, RL became an organic part of the process that led to perestroika...

...At RL we featured reform attempts within the "Socialist camp": private farming in Poland, private retail trade in Hungary, the easing of censorship during the Prague Spring of 1968...

...Ever since, enlightened Muslims have sought to bring about reform...

...How would RX go about doing its job...

...Would any of that have dissuaded the 9/11 hijackers from completing their awful mission...

...There are parallels between today's challenge of broadcasting to the Arabs and those we faced in 1952 when I was one of those who went to Munich to set up Radio Liberty: Both cases involve a faith (Marxism then, Islam now) whose original teachings were perverted to serve aggressive ends, and a potential audience exposed to years of domestic propaganda aimed at engendering hostility toward outsiders, especially Americans...

...The Broadcasting Board of Governors -appointed by the President-that now oversees all foreign programming says its priority for MERN is "the largest possible audience...

...There may be bumps along the way, but where Muslim opposition figures exist whose values are akin to our own, we should be building up our proven radio strategies, not tearing them down...

...Pattiz believes this objection can be overcome by the Board's serving as a "firewall" between MERN and the government to assure "credibility...

...In a lastditch effort to save the USSR from disintegration, the same President Bush made a 1991 speech in Ukraine (known to history as his "chicken Kiev speech") in which he warned separatists against the consequences of "suicidal nationalism...

...To prove its point, the Board has proudly circulated selected e-mail messages from listeners...

...And this would be contrasted with the damage to Muslim living standards and intellectual progress caused later on by the ascendancy of reactionary clerics, who pulled down the world's greatest astronomical observatories while preaching hatred of the non-Muslim world...

...Pride of place would go to voices of dissent from within the Arab and Islamic worlds, such as that of Egyptian Nobelist Naguib Mahfouz, who condemned the Iranian fatwa ordering the assassination of his literary colleague Salman Rushdie...

...He is currently an Associate of the Davis Center at Harvard...

...The list included such figures as Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Thomas, British Labor Party leader Hugh Gaitskell, Pierre Hervé (shortly after he resigned as editor of the French Communist newspaper L'Humanité to protest Kremlin policies), union leaders, and creative artists representing a wide range of nationalities...

...By and large, though, his young listeners were politically passive...

...RX would air balanced newscasts at least once an hour...

...The struggle of Afghan women for further emancipation following the crushing of the Taliban would be a continuing story...

...This new voice could be based on the concepts and methods of RL, carefully tuned to the needs and interests of Arabs...

...There is no Radio Liberty counterpart trying to help Arabs come to grips with their blight of authoritarianism and stagnation, ills that breed fundamentalism and violence and, arguably, the dark moods that have inspired the 9/11 hijackers and Palestinian suicide bombers...

...James Critchlow, a past contributor to The New Leader, served with Radio Liberty, the U.S...

...These demonstrated that such reforms were a legitimate aspiration for our listeners in the USSR...

...Where U.S...

...Apparently seriousminded Arabs will not be able to look to U. S. -sponsored radio for information and discussion of matters close to them...

...History proved him wrong...

...The few who can get commercial broadcasts like CNN have to settle for a once-over-lightly treatment, at best...

...First of all, it would concentrate on achieving a long-term impact on the attitudes and values of its audience...

...Nevertheless, its programs provoked intensive countermeasures by the Soviet authorities, from heavy jamming to harassment of the staffs to at least one assassination and a bombing of the studios...

...They would be done from the perspective of Arab listeners, without any editorializing...

...Early in the Cold War RL had to cope with the embarrassment that its funding was channeled through the CIA, a fact always stressed by Communist media, although audiences did not seem to care so long as the programs were inviting...

...In the U.S., commercial broadcasting puts a premium on young audiences because they are profiled as having disposable income to spend on consumer gimmicks...

...of Delaware, has replaced the Voice of America's Arabic service with a new entity called Middle East Radio Network (MERN), identified to listeners as Radio Sawa ("Together...

...Is it because Arabs are impervious to ideas from outside their own world, as Soviet citizens were once thought to be by many...

...It is probably true that just as VOA Russian jazz programs once attracted Russian youth, MERN broadcasts may actually win some friends for the U.S...

...History and tradition would be vital Radio X subjects too...

...Regrettably, the Bush Administration's structure of MERN, or Radio Sawa, indicates an unwillingness to reach out to moderate and reform elements in the Arab world...

...Encouraging the emergence of representative government is the best avenue to eventually eliminating the corrupt, despotic rulers who attempt to buy time for themselves by covertly supporting fundamentalist causes and terrorism...

...How much, if anything, Arab populations will learn about the provocative UN document from their own often controlled media is difficult to say...

...Norman J. Pattiz, the Board member with principal responsibility for MERN, has declared triumphantly that it is a "new station for the new generation...

...The text decries "high illiteracy rates, the deterioration of education, the slowdown of scientific research and technological development, poor production bases and competitive capacity, rampant poverty and mounting unemployment rates...