The Son Now Shines in Father’s ‘Propaganda Room’ : Broadcasting: UCLA professor follows in parent’s footsteps as director of Voice of America to bring U.S. news to a changed world.

When Geoffrey Cowan was a child, the library in his home in Connecticut was called the “propaganda room” because it was stocked with great works about the forces that shape public opinion. What the books said, his father Louis G. Cowan explained to him, was that there is only one way to influence people: tell the truth.

Louis Cowan was able to put that creed into practice. From 1943 to 1945 he was the second director of the Voice of America, the United States’ most famous government-run news arm, which provides radio broadcasts in native languages and English to countries around the world.

Fifty years later it is the younger Cowan’s turn. A UCLA professor, author and playwright, Cowan, 51, in effect took over the propaganda room earlier this month when he became the 19th director of the Voice of America.

He is beginning the job at a time of great change for the U.S. radio voice, which was created to combat the totalitarian thought-control machinery of Nazi Germany and later the communist regimes of the Cold War.

In an interview recently in his office, Cowan outlined his three main tasks as the head of one of the world’s largest news organizations. One is to take advantage of new technologies; the second is to find new ways of distributing the news and information that Voice of America already produces for its 1,000 hours a week of broadcasts, and the third is to define the station’s role in the post-Cold War era.

Cowan--who is on leave from UCLA--also will have to help cut about $20 million from Voice’s annual budget to $244 million.

Voice broadcasts news about the United States and the outside world to 46 countries in English and 45 countries in other languages. But because it is government run, Voice is barred from broadcasting in the United States.

The other two U.S. government news organizations, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, were created to deliver news to people behind the Iron Curtain about events in their own countries. Radio Liberty broadcasts to Russia and the former Soviet republics, Radio Free Europe to the rest of Eastern Europe.

Cowan argued that events since the end of the Soviet Union in 1990 demonstrate that the “VOA is at least as important as it was during the Cold War.”

First, he said, a number of countries still have repressive regimes that control the news, including Haiti, China, Myanmar (formerly Burma), Tibet and the former Yugoslavia.

Beyond that, “we are living in a period of what one historian calls ‘turbulence,’ an unsettled period of ethnic hatred, fierce nationalism and confusion about values.” In some countries, including Russia and even Germany, “the possibilities of democracy and fascism” coexist, competing for power.

In such a world, Cowan argued, Voice of America has the potential to be one of the country’s most eloquent demonstrations of democratic values, providing accurate, balanced and comprehensive information as well as news about American concerns and policy positions.

Despite Cowan’s philosophy about accuracy and honesty, however, most Voice news reports tend to be different from those of commercial news organizations, if only because they tend to emphasize American policy rather than to point out conflict or to look for potential problems.

Cowan has a background well-suited to the challenges of new technology. He noted that Voice of America has just moved onto Internet, the free computer database system, that will make its scripts available in all languages to anyone with a computer.

Cowan may represent a return to tradition, compared with some of his recent predecessors, who were more intrigued by television than he is. Cowan thinks there is something about the character of radio that makes it better for communicating ideas.

“Although PBS television is a great service,” he said by way of analogy, “if you wanted to influence minds in America, National Public Radio would probably be more effective.”

In his career as an attorney and professor, Cowan has focused on communications. A graduate of Harvard and of Yale Law School, Cowan was a public-interest lawyer whose work led to several landmark Federal Communications Commission decisions and to a teaching job at UCLA, where he helped found the school’s Communication’s Law Program and more recently became director of the Center for Communications Policy.

He is the author of two books, including “See No Evil” about television censorship, and more recently “The People v. Clarence Darrow: The Bribery Trial of America’s Greatest Lawyer.”

He is a playwright, the author of “Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers,” and also a television producer, whose “Mark Twain and Me,” a two-hour movie starring Jason Robards, won an Emmy Award in 1992. Cowan chaired the commission that wrote Los Angeles’ ethics and campaign finance law.