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Voice of America, buffeted by budget cuts, has a new leader

For generations of listeners, the Voice of America (VOA) and its crackling international shortwave broadcasts are memories of huddling around radios, listening to accounts of the Allied landing on Normandy or the toppling of the Berlin Wall.

Today, the network's headlines are delivered on mobile phone news alerts, satellite television programs or Internet Webcasts. But the Voice of America, the 64-year-old international broadcasting service of the US government, is still searching for relevance in an increasingly fierce market as rivals from commercial networks and public broadcasters compete for listeners.

"I'm afraid that I'm not listening to Voice of America," a participant from Chennai, India, acknowledged two weeks ago at the network's global open forum on international broadcasting.

"The shortwave is not so good so I've switched over to NPR on satellite," he said.

In October, the service -- which reaches about 115 million people weekly in 44 languages -- received fresh leadership with the appointment of Danforth Austin as director, succeeding David Jackson, a former Time magazine foreign correspondent.

Austin, 60, is, among other things, a former chief executive of Ottaway Newspapers, a community newspaper subsidiary of Dow Jones. He was named to the post by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a politically appointed group led by Kenneth Tomlinson, a former chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, who was forced out last year amid accusations that he exerted political pressure on programming.

In an interview, Austin said he hoped to bring organizational skills to bear on an institution that had been buffeted in the last year by budget-cut proposals and plans to reduce English-language programming in favor of Arabic-language services.

"There is a proliferation of media, and it's not just government-funded services," he said. "How could the United States not want a broadcast service in the midst of all that, which keeps and maintains the kind of journalistic values that really reflects who we are as a country?"

Austin, who has worked outside the US on short-term reporting assignments but essentially served in corporate posts, said the notion of taking over the Voice of America was "not on my radar screen."

"I was contemplating taking some time off, reading," he said. "I've done some work for charity kinds of things and then through an acquaintance who knows one of the governors on the board, they asked me if I had any interest in the Voice of America."

His plans for the network at this early stage are largely vague and general, beyond trying to make sure that it is responsive to its audiences.

"For some people," he said, "shortwave radio is and will remain very important. For others, it's through television and the Internet."

"We look at markets. We decide what to provide, based on what those audiences want and how they use information," he said.

Critics, though, say the Voice of America is slow-moving and hampered by a strategy of issuing government editorial newscasts, whether it is US President George W. Bush's views on Iran's "intransigence" or comments by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on nuclear weapons in North Korea.

Jonathan Marks, a radio consultant and former executive at an international broadcaster, Radio Netherlands, is among the critics.

"Don't you think that Jon Stewart on YouTube has more impact on the way people see America than anything VOA could muster on radio or TV?" he asked.

Marks remarked that the VOA News Now program had been nicknamed "VOA Now and Then" because of reduced programming.

"Both times that [former Iraqi president] Saddam Hussein has been world news with his capture and death sentence," he said, "VOA English has been off the air. To be fair, its radio in Arabic and Farsi was running."

With control of Congress shifting to the Democrats, many network employees and supporters hope that reductions in the US$166 million annual budget will be reversed to avoid further cuts in English-language programs. It continues to offer slower-paced "special English" programs to reach those for whom English is not the native language.

Ted Lipien, who retired in April as a marketing director for Europe and Asia, created a Web site, www.FreeMediaOnline.org, and foundation to support independent journalism. He is lobbying to maintain Voice of America programs in Russia, which are scheduled for elimination.

"They have focused on the Middle East and taken money away from programming for other regions. Once your audience goes down, it creates a vicious circle," he said.

To a certain extent, the network is facing realities of the end of the Cold War. Simon Spanswick, chief of the Association of International Broadcasters, said the Voice of America took the approach that "it's not worth trying to compete in saturated markets with highly competitive broadcasters."

"There's no point in competing if there's established media," he said, "so they're aiming for the difficult parts of the world."
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