EYEWITNESS: GEOFFREY COWAN : Redefining America’s Post-Cold War Voice

Geoffrey Cowan, 52, the newly appointed director of the Voice of America, is an attorney and lecturer in communications at UCLA. He established the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission and is former director of California Common Cause.

I had some idea before I took this job of how remarkable the service was, because my father had been director of the Voice of America 50 years ago, during World War II, and because my sister wrote the definitive book about the VOA during the early years. Still, I wasn’t prepared for just how much goes on in this building and around the world through the Voice of America.

The VOA is largely unknown to people in America because of a law prohibiting it from distributing its programming inside the United States. But it is extremely well known in the rest of the world, where it’s heard every week by more than 100 million listeners in broadcasts delivered in 46 languages to every continent. The people who do the broadcasting come from every part of the world, so the Voice of America is like a miniature United Nations, filled with people who have a very broad perspective of their own countries and a sense of the world.

A lot of people wonder about the efficiency of government. But you come into an institution like this and it’s inspiring to see how hard these people work and how productive they are.

People in all of these services, in the Indonesian service or the Hindi service or the Afghan service or the Russian service turn out programming, because they know that there are people around the world who won’t get accurate and reliable news or news about America if they don’t get it from the VOA.

If you come here (to the VOA studios in Washington) at 4 in the morning, there are still hundreds of people delivering the news to the world, because we follow the sun as it goes around the globe. So at every moment, there is a morning show going on someplace in the world. Our programs introduce the world to American culture, to American artists, American ideas, as well as present information that has to be reliable. And while some people might assume that as a government-financed institution, our programming would be skewed, by law our news programming has to be accurate, objective, balanced and comprehensive.

We’re very concerned that our reporting be balanced and objective. We have to be. The Croatian and Serbian services, which are virtually right next to each other in this building, are broadcasting to the people in the region. It’s not like American news services, which are mainly heard or read by people who have no way of judging how accurate the coverage of another part of the world is. You know if it’s accurate if it’s in your own neighborhood.

And people listen. Our programming in Tibet, for example, is probably the major way that people in Tibet are getting news from the outside world. We’re in North Korea, China and many other countries where reliable information is at a premium. The rebels in Chiapas, Mexico, said the only news that they could trust as being accurate was from the BBC and the VOA.

We just ran an editorial--we have editorials that present some points of view of the American government--criticizing the government of Ethiopia for arresting some journalists. And the head of the journalists’ organization was released from jail a few days later.

I would like to redefine the VOA’s role, post-Cold War, and to make clear that it is as important an institution as ever. The agency started in a hot war, in World War II, and had many roles beyond presenting America’s viewpoint as contrasted with the viewpoint of the Soviet Union. Even then, that was only one perspective.

We’re living in an era of turbulence; the world is filled with national hatreds and ethnic hatreds and confusion about the world’s future. In such a period of history, it’s in some ways more important than ever to have a voice of sanity in the world, and that’s what the VOA tries to represent.

At its best, the VOA represents the diversity of the peoples of America, who of course reflect the diversity of the people in the world. It describes American institutions with all of their weaknesses, as well as their strengths. It’s probably the least expensive way that America has of helping to introduce models of freedom, democracy and the diversity of cultures in a world in which people from different religious and ethnic and national backgrounds are at war.