From my first stint leading Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — the iconic Cold War broadcaster turned 21st-century digital-media company — I recall FSB agents taunting our journalists across the Russian Federation.
Come work for RT, the Kremlin’s propaganda outlet, they’d say; we pay decent wages, offer proper benefits and take you seriously in ways the attention-span deprived Americans never will.
Today, my stomach is turning. As president and CEO of Middle East Broadcasting Networks, another US-funded news outlet, I’ve had to follow in recent days the crowing of America’s enemies in a region critical to the Trump administration’s foreign-policy agenda.
It’s bewildering. If left unchecked, we’re about to commit an unforced error of strategic proportion. As we speak, American-funded international media find themselves on the chopping block.
The Russians are drinking vodka straight from the bottle.
Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis are jumping with absolute joy.
“American soft power has failed!” proclaim terror groups in Lebanon.
Iranian-backed militia in Iraq, denouncing our journalists as “lapdogs of the Americans,” cheer their abandonment — and our fecklessness as a coherent, strategic leader in the region.
Nauseating stuff. None of this is making America great again.
The facts are straightforward.
Middle East Broadcasting Networks is television and loads of digital programming in Arabic. We reach more than 30 million people weekly across 22 countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
We operate in a fiercely competitive media market where platformed voices hostile to America and our ally Israel screech around the clock. Al Jazeera comes to mind.
MBN tells the American story — accurate, honest, compelling and credible. The cost? Barely the price of a couple Apache helicopters.
In a trip to the region before Christmas, I heard executives from our competitors explain how Alhurra, our regional brand, is the only way to get America’s story out. We also advance those timeless American values of democratization and development.
And we appreciate cost cutting and efficiency.
In my 11 months at MBN, we’ve closed bureaus, cut payroll by 25%, upped our tech and artificial-intelligence game and already saved our funder, the American taxpayer, $20 million.
We’re strivers. We lean into reform. We sign up 300% to oversight and accountability.
But slash and burn, really? Elon Musk’s chainsaws and Steve Bannon’s blowtorches grab headlines. US international media is “DOPE,” Musk chants on X — the “Department of Propaganda Everywhere.”
It’s amusing, of course. This is hardly America at its best, though.
In no way, shape or form is any of this strategic. Chinese Communists are licking their chops.
I recall being on RFE/RL business in Central Asia, China’s backyard, where I met young people convinced we were a CIA operation (the company did indeed start that way in the 1950s).
When I asked why they religiously followed our programs, they all laughed. It was because, they said, RFE/RL was honest and reliable — and they were fascinated and admiring of everything America.
It’s essential and urgent that we appreciative the weight of strategically minded soft power and good old-fashioned truth telling.
We know of the immense Cold War success. When Nobel Prize-winning novelist Herta Müller was asked whether she had listened to US broadcasts behind the Iron Curtain, she said, “But of course — only those who were idiots did not.”
Times and technologies change. And the appetite for serious US-funded journalism remains.
Know thy enemy is another way to grasp the incredible force of American soft power.
In Prague, home to RFE/RL headquarters and a favorite spot for many an American tourist, it’s still cloak and dagger three decades after the Cold War.
Russia is deadly. Imagine having to slip an editor out of the Czech Republic — a European Union and NATO country — to elude a team of assassins.
Picture homicide detectives and a forensic team in your newsroom after the suspicious death of a 32-year-old colleague.
Iranians are ever vigilant. The regime has its agents follow our people on reporting trips to Geneva and on weekend jaunts to Berlin.
That’s from two years ago during my second time at the RFE/RL helm.
Kari Lake, President’s Trump’s pick to head Voice of America, is leading the charge to dismantle these instruments of American soft power. After two weeks on the job, Lake declared the whole kit and caboodle “unsalvageable.”
Lake bears the title senior adviser at our parent agency, the United States Agency for Global Media. She declines to meet with me and the CEOs managing other US-funded networks. She refuses to visit MBN.
We’re waiting for Congress to step up. Lawmakers approved funding March 14 for US-sponsored international media through the end of the fiscal year.
We’re looking to courts. Lake’s March 15 termination of our grant agreements — killing off the Radio Free Asia network that focuses on China as well — is not only in conflict with congressional intent, it’s contrary to law.
A new project called Global News Service that counters Chinese disinformation and supports the freedom-loving people of Taiwan — it costs pennies, not even peanuts — faces extinction with all the rest.
How to get beyond such a baffling impasse?
We all want to do right by the hardworking American taxpayer.
None of us should want to unilaterally disarm and surrender to America’s enemies in the war of ideas and great contest of soft-power influence.
When our critics swear this is all anti-American fake news, don’t believe one word of it.
I know the truth from the inside. Yes, there’s silly and offensive lefty stuff. But that comes from a fraction of the Americans who produce English-language material for these US-funded networks.
This represents but a small slice of the massive material produced in more than 50 languages by freedom-loving journalists who hail from around the world and believe strongly in American ideals.
Note to the transaction-driven, bean-counting utilitarians among us: Do a different kind of arithmetic.
By closing down US international media, we’re about to throw hundreds of passionately pro-American journalists under the bus as they face prison, torture and worse back in dark, anti-American places like Russia, Belarus, Afghanistan, China and Iran.
So empathy is out. Do we really want to trash easy wins for American influence and US interests around the world?
Jeffrey Gedmin is president/CEO of Middle East Broadcasting Networks and a former president/CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
