Media : Listening to the World Change on Shortwave : The radio remains one of the globe’s leading sources of information. But democratization is forcing broadcasters to re-examine their role<i> .</i>

Last New Year’s Eve, Voice of America researcher Kim Andrew Elliott decided to reflect on the year of momentous change by listening to broadcasts from around the world over shortwave radio.

Elliott heard many signs of the new order--from anti-Soviet protests by Radio Vilnius in Lithuania to promises by the suddenly pro- perestroika announcers on Radio Moscow that if the Soviet government were to crack down again, “we would not throw our personal integrity to the wind” by reverting to the hard-line past.

But perhaps most dramatic were the emotional messages on the English-language service of Radio Bucharest in Romania, which until the week before had been the propaganda service of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

“From free Bucharest--from free Romania,” said the voices--in some cases the very same ones that had droned with Ceausescu’s own rhetoric the week before.

Forgive us, they said--forgive us our lies. Before last week, “we were not allowed to transmit . . . the voice of the real Romania, the Romania we all cherished in our hearts and souls.”

Although virtually unknown to most Americans, crackly old shortwave radio remains a primary medium for news and information for much of the world. The British Broadcasting Corp. conservatively estimates that 125 million people around the globe listen to its World Service at least once a week.

Yet in the last two years, the global system of international radio broadcasting--which developed fully during the Cold War largely as a government propaganda medium--has been thrust into turmoil by the move toward democratization.

“The question is, do you switch off your transmitters or do you redefine your role?” said Lawrence Magne, editor-in-chief of Passport to World Band Radio, a guide to international shortwave.

The answer, it seems, is both.

Some of these services--including America’s Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty--are fighting for their very survival. Two weeks ago, East Germany’s Radio Berlin International lost its bid to consolidate with West Germany’s Deutsche Welle radio service--partly because of fears that its staff was ideologically too unreliable. The East German service is expected simply to vanish from the air in October.

Radio Moscow, once dedicated to proselytizing for the cause of world revolution, is trying to make the difficult shift to delivering news and entertainment--and is even exploring the possibility of selling commercial time to American corporations.

And, in the face of tighter budgets worldwide, almost every international radio service is scrutinizing its operations, cutting back on foreign-language services that have small audiences or a diminishing need. Many are taking transmitters once aimed East and West and turning them toward the Middle East.

The pressure is even affecting the BBC, considered the most listened-to and the most objective of the services. “The Beeb,” as it is known colloquially, recently announced that it was closing its Japanese and Malay services, cutting an hour and 45 minutes from its nearly 786 hours of broadcasting each week.

“Both sides, East and West, have to come down from the mountain top,” said Jonathan Marks, producer of a weekly news magazine on the Dutch Radio Netherlands about international media. “Rather than shouting at each other through a megaphone and saying, ‘If I don’t like what the other guy says, I will jam the hell out of it,’ they are now increasingly being forced to survive on the quality of their programming.”

The U.S. government has three basic broadcast services: Radio Free Europe functions as a surrogate to what were formerly the tightly controlled media of the countries of Eastern Europe, broadcasting in their native languages to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and the three Baltic republics of the Soviet Union.

Radio Liberty performs the same surrogate function for the rest of the Soviet Union, broadcasting in Russian and 13 other major languages spoken in the country’s constituent republics.

The Voice of America broadcasts the view from the United States, including news about America, editorials promoting U.S. policy and explanations of how America sees the world.

All three efforts were rooted in the Cold War. Indeed, until the mid-1970s, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe were operated by the CIA. The Voice of America is run by the U.S. Information Agency, which also runs the Fulbright scholarship exchange programs and other cultural services.

The debate over whether, and in what form, they should continue began in earnest last May, when an obscure panel that reviews the work of the USIA--called the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy--argued in its annual report that the government should begin planning to phase out Radio Free Europe.

Within hours, as commission Chairman Edwin Feulner put it later, “All hell came toppling down on top of us.”

The report was seen as an attempt by USIA to acquire the assets of the so-called surrogate services, but its argument nevertheless was a telling one: If Eastern European countries such as Poland and Hungary are developing their own free media, what need is there for the United States government to operate a “surrogate” for them?

Even officials such as Robert Coonrod, deputy director of Voice of America, admit that as the Eastern European countries have developed more reliable media of their own, listenership for U.S. government broadcasts has shrunk.

But most officials still caution that it is a mistake to think that international radio broadcasting is now obsolete. “There is always an American practice to rush the boys home as soon as the war is over,” said Paul Henze, a RAND Corp. consultant in Washington, who supervised the government’s broadcasting efforts as a member of the National Security Council during the Carter Administration. “It is evident that at times in the past this has been rather unwise. One of the reasons we are seeing the revolution we are seeing is because we have conducted pretty good communication.”

Even such leaders as Czechoslovakia’s President Vaclav Havel and Poland’s Solidarity leader Lech Walesa have pleaded that the U.S. broadcasting operations are crucial to helping their fledgling democracies build their own free media.

A classified National Security Council study of U.S. international broadcasting commissioned by President Bush reaffirms that the broadcast services should continue. But a senior Administration official who agreed to discuss the report conceded that eventually the need for surrogate broadcasting to Eastern Europe--and even to the Soviet Union--will be unnecessary if they become true democracies.

The NSC review also suggests that the Administration consider creating a new organization to eliminate duplication between the VOA and other broadcast agencies, the official said. Proponents argue that the redundancies are apt to increase as the missions of these organizations gradually merge.

One approach, which has support within VOA, is for the United States to create a quasi-independent agency--modeled after England’s BBC--to remove international broadcasting from direct government control. The BBC is by far the most popular of the Western broadcast services--with 100 listeners for every 63 of the Voice of America--largely, according to conventional wisdom, because it has a reputation for more editorial integrity.

Administration officials say they expect the President to form an independent task force to develop more formal recommendations. “The chances of VOA being removed from USIA are very good--or at least that we would have a separate budget,” argues Richard Carlson, director of the Voice of America.

Meanwhile in Eastern Europe, democracy is emerging at different speeds in different countries, which means that the development of independent media that might replace some of the current international broadcast operations is also uneven.

Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia are the three East European countries where surrogate broadcasting will most likely become unnecessary the soonest. In Romania, Bulgaria and parts of the Soviet Union, it could be far longer. In fact, many Soviet-watchers have argued that the United States should broaden its broadcasting efforts to those Soviet republics that have blossoming liberation movements.

“I think the atmosphere (in Washington) today is very different than six months ago,” said Forbes magazine chairman Malcolm (Steve) Forbes Jr., chairman of the Board for International Broadcasting, which oversees Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. “People realize it (democracy) is not a done deal.”

Indeed, China resumed jamming the VOA after last year’s Tian An Men Square violence. “China paid a price and learned a lesson on how to stick to the socialist road and oppose bourgeois liberalization,” as one Beijing official put it in a radio broadcast. Cuba also jams the U.S.-sponsored TV Marti and some Radio Marti broadcasts.

Still, the vast majority of international broadcasts have changed drastically.

“Radio Moscow has changed beyond belief,” said Dutch broadcaster Marks. It even offers a program featuring the teachings of the Gospel--and is doing a highly regarded job of reporting on protests in Lithuania, Armenia and Azerbaijan.

One Soviet program called “Weekend” includes rap jingles and a wild mix of rock music. On New Year’s Eve, the program was broadcast from host Vasili Strelnokov’s Moscow apartment, which he dubbed--in a gesture that would make any American deejay proud--”the Party Center of the Nation’s Capital.”

Even if the former Eastern Bloc comes around, that still leaves much of the underdeveloped world as a potential target for Western international broadcast efforts. Indeed, more than half of the BBC’s regular audience--some 70 million persons--is located in Africa and South Asia. Another 10 million are in the Middle East--nearly three times the total number of listeners in Europe and the Soviet Union. The broadcast agencies are expected to move increasingly toward serving these countries.

Another factor in the changes facing international broadcasting is that virtually all the major industrialized countries are facing serious budget constraints. “The deep pockets of the Cold War are a thing of the past,” Magne said.

One approach that some Western broadcasting services are trying is to give some of their material to the domestic radio stations in developing democracies. The United States, West Germany’s Deutsche Welle and Radio Canada International are well in the lead.

Technology is another issue. Most of the American broadcasting effort is shortwave, a medium designed to penetrate closed societies. But as the East European countries open up, they inevitably will turn more to AM and FM radio, which the BBC, for example, uses (rather than shortwave) in the Middle East. Listeners in Czechoslovakia can already tune into RFE on their regular car radios. And shortwave, which has inferior sound quality, is expected quietly to disappear in some countries.

Even more of a threat to the future of shortwave in the new Europe is television. Most of the government-run international broadcasting systems have little or no television presence. The United States has its WorldNet operation, sent mostly to U.S. embassies.

Voice of America has about 127 million adult listeners worldwide, according to a VOA spokesperson in Washington. An adult listener is described as someone who listens at least once a week. The British Broadcasting Corp. estimates the total audience for its World Service Broadcast in 38 languages is 125 million. It estimates audiences for a few of the other services as follows (in millions):Radio France International: 5 Radio Moscow: 13 Deutche Welle: 18 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: 36