Voice of America: Agent of Democracy or Imperialism?
T
he brutes,” my daddy cursed under his breath, right hand thumping the steering wheel. “They surrounded Grandma’s house that night and threatened to burn it; I could hear them firing into the ground. I huddled with your aunts and uncles in the kitchen praying that it would not be my time to go with Grandpa yet.” He exhaled loudly, wiping the glistening sweat from his right cheek with the back of his hand. The conglomeration of motorbikes in front of us still did not move an inch.
Thirty-seven years had passed since the night when Daddy woke to the sound of soldiers ambushing his house on the outskirts of Saigon, yet the memory remained vivid. It was 1980, five years after Liberation Day, eight years after my grandfather got shot while spreading propaganda for the government of Southern Vietnam. Uncle Dinh had somehow procured a battered radio from the black market and was tuning in to Voice of America (VOA) in Vietnamese. According to Daddy, our heedless uncle attracted the attention of nearby patrollers who heard the sound of the broadcast and accused the family of “betraying the country” by “listening to anti-state propaganda.” They would have, at best, arrested them then and there, if my grandma had not recognizing a few of the hunger-ravaged soldiers as people she had sold pork and rice to illegally. After a few more threatening shots, they left the family alone. Still, it was a close call.
Fast forward three decades, and we are now in an age past Renovation and past the collapse of the USSR; yet, many things remain the same. VOA is no longer on the government’s official blacklist, though Radio Free Asia (RFA) and the BBC are still intermittently blocked by the state’s “bamboo firewall.” I will never forget the joy I felt that first day in September last year when I clicked onto the links to BBC and Human Rights Watch articles for the first time without eliciting the appearance of an intimidating full-screen rectangular box “Error 451—The websites you are trying to access contain delinquent and immoral content.”
Given the significance of VOA back home, I was at first very much stunned to learn that most Americans did not know much, if at all, about this news source. Thanks to its carefully cultivated image of reliability and objectivity, VOA has always been a steady supplier for the market niche of disillusioned citizens “seeking the truth” not only in Vietnam but in a hundred other countries across the globe where it is available in the native language. A large number of these states have political systems that are highly undemocratic; as a result, trust for conventional media has always been low.
Especially in places like Saigon–hubs of relative cosmopolitanism despite near-antagonistic subversion efforts from the capital–mainstream newspapers are commonly regarded, not inaccurately, as the state’s mouthpiece. All of the major dailies–Tuoi Tre, Thanh Nien, Dan Tri–have connections to the Communist party or organs like the United Youth League. Strictly censored, both writers and editors for these newspapers do not want to put a toe out of line. For instance, after Bill Clinton’s visit to the country, Tuoi Tre journalists ran a survey and found that the American president was a more popular and respected leader amongst the younger generations than the Reverend Uncle Ho Chi Minh himself. All copies of the Tuoi Tre issue containing these results were immediately destroyed. The three editors involved received a host of punishments and sanctions for their transgression before being moved to less prominent newspapers.
In contrast to this, VOA and other international news outlets, at times, seemed like noble saints valiantly fighting for freedom of the press and media transparency. Indeed, that was my view of them during much of my childhood, hearing stories from Daddy similar to the one told above. VOA did not shy away from reporting on the environmental disaster of Formosa; they published a full analysis online about the ridiculous use of Build-Operate-Transfer projects as a guise for corruption and bribes. They were blunt when it came to covering political activism, even dissident activities.
Almost a tad too blunt. Maybe thanks to the Harkness discussions at Phillips Exeter where we all learn to question our preconceptions, there came a point when I began to distrust this powerhouse of ideological reporting. Freedom, empowerment, democracy: Was this really what VOA was all about? A short fifteen minutes of research on the computer provided even more reasons for me to start having questions. The most troubling of them was that until 2015, VOA was barred from broadcasting to American citizens.
This was due to the amended Smith-Mundt Act of the 1970s, which ruled that because of its ties with the US government, a feature untypical for media organizations in the US, VOA could not direct its messages towards American citizens to prevent the chance that they would be exposed to “state propaganda.”
Two things about this news left me in shock. First, though I had vaguely been conscious of the obvious ties between VOA and the American government, it had never struck me before that this organization’s official description was, in fact, “the US federal government’s official institution for non-military, external broadcasting.” To my further astonishment, VOA obtains all of its operational budget from American taxpayers, and is overseen by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), an executive-branch agency nominally out of the president’s direct control, though few presidents have been able to resist the urge of exerting their influence when certain events called for toning down. Roughly a fourth of VOA’s reporters are not actual journalists but career members of the foreign service.
Furthermore, the legislative recognition of VOA alongside a host of other BBG products–namely RFA, Radio Liberty and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks–to be under the purview of the Smith-Mundt Act meant, inherently, that this was no benign source for unbiased news. “[These broadcasting corporations] should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics,” said Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, the most vocal advocate of the 1970s amendment to limit their distribution. Though his words may seem extreme, it is hard to disregard the fact that VOA’s current presence in the former Soviet bloc and its allies–Russia, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and my very own country, Vietnam–is much more prominent than in African and most South American states. Throughout the Cold War, Communist governments spent a lot of money jamming VOA’s transmission because of its tendency to deliver information that would spark upheavals, as acknowledged by former government officials and political dissents after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.
VOA’s mission, outlined in its founding charter, seems rather impossible when examined under critical lenses. Its first principle: VOA will serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news. Its second principle: VOA will represent America. Such dual responsibilities of serving a government that sees it as an official mouthpiece and an international audience keen for unbiased truth only makes sense if one is to accept that America itself is “the world’s biggest champion of truth and freedom,” and American imperialism is “the greatest force for good in the world during the past century.”
An easier task to do if one has never set foot in this country.