International Bloopers

Within the last few months both Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty have been guilty of beaming at least two really outrageous programs to listeners in Poland and the Soviet Union. They appear to have been isolated instances, but they suggest the need for closer supervision by their governing board.

The State Department found it necessary to make a formal apology for a recent broadcast by Radio Free Europe that compared Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski with Adolf Hitler. Despite its crushing of Solidarity and other transgressions against democratic freedoms, the Communist government of Poland is hardly in the same league with the monstrous Nazi regime that murdered millions of helpless people--many of them in death camps in Poland.

Several months ago, in a separate incident, Radio Liberty broadcast a passage from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book, “August 1914,” dealing with the 1911 assassination of a czarist prime minister by a Jewish anarchist. The broadcast picked up several phrases that have traditionally been used by Russian anti-Semites--and even quoted a passage from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Radio Free Europe is an American-run radio station that broadcasts into Eastern Europe in six languages. Unlike the Voice of America and the British Broadcasting Corp., its function is not so much to tell Poles, Hungarians and other East Europeans what is going on in the outside world as to tell them things that are happening in their own countries--things that Communist governments hide from them. Radio Liberty performs a similar function for Soviet audiences. Soviet Bloc countries, of course, beam their own programs to the West.

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty are quasi-independent stations; they are not official voices of the U.S. government. But their money comes from the U.S. Treasury, and their board of directors is appointed by the President with congressional approval. Washington cannot avoid responsibility for program content.

The Polish government justifiably reacted in anger to the Jan. 7 broadcast that compared Jaruzelski to Hitler. The fact that Soviet Bloc propagandists have been known to suggest similarities between Hitler and Western political leaders is irrelevant. There is no excuse for Radio Free Europe to stoop to the same level. The quick, formal expression of regret by the State Department was appropriate.

The Jaruzelski regime unfortunately couldn’t let well enough alone. A Polish government spokesman said this week that the apology was insufficient, that Radio Free Europe routinely broadcasts “lies” into Poland and that U.S.-Polish relations can’t improve until the station stops its “subversive activities.”

In fact Radio Free Europe, after some missteps in the mid-1950s, has usually done a good job. What really bothers the Communist authorities is not that the station broadcasts lies--it doesn’t, intentionally--but that large numbers of people in Poland and other East European countries find it a more reliable source of information than their own government-controlled media.

However, the two objectionable broadcasts cited above suggest that closer supervision is needed over Russian and other Soviet Bloc refugees who work for Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe--some in influential positions--but whose personal views do not necessarily coincide with U.S. policies.

Board members must work harder to ensure that Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty broadcasts are consistent, day in and day out, with American values and purposes.