Voice of America – A History

This review first appeared in International Affairs

The Voice of America (VOA), which broadcasts more than 1,000 hours of programmes in 45 languages to an estimated audience of some 115 million worldwide, is the world’s second largest international broadcaster, yet within the USA itself it is “America’s best-kept secret”.
Alan L. Heil, Jr., who spent 36 years at the Voice, beginning as a newswriter trainee to retire as deputy director after holding several positions including Middle East correspondent and chief of News and Current Affairs, was uniquely placed to write this comprehensive and captivating insight into a “great, sometimes heroic, but fragile and endangered national institution”, stretching from the launch of the service, in February 1942, to its 60th anniversary.
Ever since going on air for the first time, telling its German listeners: “Here speaks a voice from America (...) The news may be good. The news may be bad. We shall tell you the truth”, the Voice has been constantly striving to uphold its editorial independence in the face of persistent political pressures and to secure appropriate funding.
Heil’s detailed account of the Voice’s advances and setbacks, always set in the broader US and international contexts, shows the importance attached by successive US administrations to international broadcasting in their public diplomacy strategy.
Yet, Heil’s record of the often considerable pressures from all official quarters involved in foreign policy – from the White House down to US diplomats abroad – to influence editorial content, shows how US public diplomacy itself has suffered (and continues to suffer) from this constant interference into VOA’s operations.
Heil peppers his account with transcripts of radio broadcasts and personal anecdotes from dozens of VOA staff and listeners, which give this sizeable book its distinctive – and often moving or amusing – human dimension.
In his “tales of great VOA escapes” Heil describes the extraordinary backgrounds of some of the Voice’s foreign staff who have made a major contribution to its reputation over the years.
Many of Heil’s descriptions of the work at VOA apply to similar services in other countries and depict the very specific features that make international broadcasting such a distinctive craft: in particular, a meticulous respect for the specificities and sensitivities of foreign audiences and the care taken in transposing concepts and ideas in other languages and for people of different cultural backgrounds.
Over the years VOA has developed a number of unique programmes which have contributed to its popularity and to the spread of American values abroad.
Notable among those are music and VOA Special English programmes. The latter, using a vocabulary of about 1,500 words only, are read at a much slower speed than VOA’s standard English programmes. Broadcast since 1959, they have proved very popular.
Music, “the universal language”, has contributed to VOA’s reputation abroad. Heil recalls, in particular, the role played by Willis Conover in bringing jazz to millions of listeners throughout the world, most notably in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, for over 40 years.
The book highlights VOA’s unique nature in the US broadcasting environment: it is a genuine public service broadcaster, publicly-funded and carrying out public service duties.
Heil shows how, through its incessant quest for balanced and credible news reporting, its aspiration to be a “voice for the voiceless”, its efforts to assist people worldwide through a number of humanitarian actions – special family reunification helplines for refugees in Central Africa; public health campaigns in India; human rights awareness programmes in Central America, etc. – VOA has become a highly-respected and valuable broadcaster worldwide.
In spite of all this, the Voice is nearly unknown in the USA, thanks to provisions of the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act which banned the dissemination of VOA products within the country.
Paradoxically also, the greatest threats to the Voice come from the US administrations – whose changing agenda and interference in the running of the Voice are very unsettling – and the existence of “too many voices of America”, as a renowned VOA media analyst once noted.
New US-funded stations are indeed appearing (and disappearing) on a regular basis, leading at times to the closure of long-established VOA services, such as that of its respected Arabic service, replaced in April 2002 by Radio Sawa, a fast-paced mix of pop and Arabic music interspersed with short news aimed at young listeners in the Arab world.
A closure which Heil – a former Middle East correspondent and director of VOA program centers in Beirut and Cairo – obviously regrets.
Heil is also looking at the challenges the Voice – and other international broadcasters – will face in the future.
The breadth and scope of this book makes it essential reading for all those involved – or with an interest – in public diplomacy, international affairs, and the media.

About the reviewer

Morand Fachot is a media analyst and international broadcasting consultant. He worked as a journalist and media analyst with the BBC World Service (Monitoring Service), and media officer for the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). His publications include an FT Business Management Report on “European public broadcasting in the digital age” as well as articles and papers on international broadcasting; media, conflict and the military; hate media; and broadcast technology for BBC News Online, The Channel (Association for International Broadcasting, U.K.), International Affairs (U.K.), Transnational Broadcasting Studies Journal (Adham Center, The American University in Cairo, Egypt), Policy Options (Canadian Institute for Research on Public Policy), Commentaire (France), Diffusion Online (EBU).