Vietnam TV Broadcasts Anger Emigres

In a throwback to Cold War-era strategies, Vietnam’s Communist government today begins a daily satellite TV broadcast to North America aimed at expatriate Vietnamese.

While skeptics question the broadcast’s impact, timing of the kickoff--three days before the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon--has inflamed passions among Vietnamese emigres who view Vietnam’s “Liberation Day,” April 30, as the blackest day in what they call Black April.

“I would never watch it even if they gave me a free satellite dish,” said Hoi Thi Le, 73, of Santa Ana, a critic of the Vietnamese government. “Why would I watch? They will show beautiful girls, nice beaches and happy people jogging. But they won’t show the poverty, the 13-year-old dropout who sells her body to make a living, the child beggars, the . . . AIDS epidemic, the unsanitary living conditions.”

Programming will focus on current events, human interest stories and profiles. It will include live coverage this weekend of Vietnamese celebrations of the anniversary of the end of the war, said a spokeswoman for VTV 4 in Hanoi, the government-owned station that will supply programs for satellite broadcast.

The shows will be available daily to viewers in North America via satellite dish from 6 to 10 p.m. Pacific time.

While videos from Vietnam are easy to find in Orange County’s Little Saigon, the idea of the Vietnamese government beaming broadcasts into American homes has sparked outrage. Many see it as an act of provocation.

“They know that to the Vietnamese community abroad April 30 represents the date when we lost everything,” said Kinh Luan Tran, a Los Angeles attorney and community activist. “We have every reason to be upset that the same regime would now choose to have a permanent propaganda tool . . . right in the middle of our living rooms.”

A particular worry among activists is that a new generation will be seduced by government images of life under communism.

“We don’t want the younger generation to be tricked by them,” said Du Mien, president of the Vietnamese Journalists Assn. “This propaganda is just the beginning.”

The broadcasts, however, may appeal to some viewers outside the reach of American-produced Vietnamese-language shows in San Jose, Houston and Little Saigon.

Hai Ta of Biloxi, Miss., for example, said she has trouble finding Vietnamese-language media along the Gulf Coast and would welcome the broadcast.

“I don’t have money to buy a satellite dish, but if I had one, I’d tune in,” said Ta, 46. “I would watch it because I want to see my homeland and how it has changed.”

Officials at the Vietnamese Consulate in San Francisco deflected the criticism. “We are confident that the program . . . can partly meet the information and emotional needs of Vietnamese people residing in the U.S.A.,” said consulate spokesman Dzung Dang.

Despite the emigres’ fears, one expert said he would be surprised if the broadcasts find many viewers.

“I wouldn’t want to invest in it,” said Alvin A. Snyder, a former director of worldwide television operations for the U.S. Information Agency. “The signal might leave the country, but very few people are going to look at it.”

Snyder said that other governments, including the former Soviet Union, have broadcast propaganda and general programming internationally with limited success. The Chinese government broadcasts a wide range of programming over several satellites, including some in English. It is unclear how much of an audience those programs have in the United States.

Radio and TV signals also flow the other way. The U.S. Information Agency’s Worldnet--established by Snyder in the mid-1980s--sends satellite broadcasts of English-language programs to east Asia. The agency’s Voice of America radio programs were directed at the former Eastern Bloc for decades, and 2 1/2 hours of Vietnamese-language programming is beamed daily to Southeast Asia.

Politics aside, the Vietnamese programming faces stiff competition for viewers amid the explosive growth in available TV programming.

“To get any kind of meaningful audience in terms of size you must provide a program service that has broad appeal and that’s not simply ground out from a government propaganda machine,” said Snyder, who now works in private video production in Washington, D.C.

There also are technical considerations. To receive the broadcasts, viewers must have a KU-band satellite dish measuring at least 3 feet in diameter, equipment costing more than $500.

Vietnamese Americans, at least those in Southern California, appear so far not to be big buyers of the bulky devices. Gay Hamilton, owner of Hamilton Satellite Systems Inc. of Garden Grove, estimated that there are about 500,000 satellite dishes in Southern California, including 80,000 in Orange County, but said few of his customers are Vietnamese.

An attempt last year to deliver commercial Vietnamese programming via DirecTV, in which consumers use a small satellite dish to receive a stream of channels, has reached only 1,200 households nationwide, said Trang Nguyen, a former vice president of the Vietnamese Broadcasting Network.

“I don’t think it’ll be successful because . . . you only have one [Vietnamese] channel,” she said. “How many people would put out a couple hundred dollars to get one channel?”

Still, Vietnamese American community leaders “are afraid because this medium can be very influential in terms of politics and economics,” she said.

Vietnamese activists in Little Saigon have set up a committee to channel opposition to the broadcasts, including a letter-writing campaign to the Federal Communications Commission in Washington. Officials there did not return telephone calls seeking comment Wednesday, but with the broadcasts coming in via established satellite wavelengths, it is unclear whether the FCC would be in a position to act.

A spokesman for the U.S. State Department said he was unfamiliar with the planned broadcasts, but added that they fell within accepted U.S. policy. “We believe people should be able to have access to information,” the spokesman said.

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Vietnamese programming will be broadcast 6 to 10 p.m. daily on Telstar-5, KU-band, at 97 degrees west, transponder 8. Downlink at 11.874 Ghz with a digital receiver.