[FRIAM] USAGM, VOA

Sat Jun 20 15:06:05 EDT 2020

I just posted on Facebook that I fear this is potentially the most
Goebbels-esq move in the Trump years.  If Trump can be defeated, it will
take a decade at least to restore some of our positive presence amongst
many around the world.
TJ

============================================
Tom Johnson - tom at jtjohnson.com
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
*NM Foundation for Open Government* <http://nmfog.org>
*Check out It's The People's Data
<https://www.facebook.com/pages/Its-The-Peoples-Data/1599854626919671>*

============================================

On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 12:20 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> I was caught off guard this morning when I saw these latest headlines:
>
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/18/voice-of-america-independence-fears-after-trump-ally-purges-senior-officials
>
> I went straight to USAGM's website to get oriented on the full scope of
> USAGM, of which I have only been vaguely aware.   I have heard plenty of
> anecdotes about Voice of America during WWII and Radio Free Europe
> during the Cold War as well as Armed Forces Network (especially during
> the Vietnam War).    I was shocked (but not surprised) that the website
> was already reflecting the "new management" and if I were not so lazy
> (incompetent), I might go search for a snapshot from yesterday/last-week
> of the website and see *just what all* was changed with the changing of
> the guard.
>
> I'm hoping Tom (and others) have some better understanding of the
> implications of this.
>
> As a child (6-12 years) my parents allowed me use of their classic
> (circa 1950) Zenith "Wave Magnet"  Transoceanic multiband short-wave
> radio in my bedroom.   We lived in an isolated location in the mountains
> of western NM where there was no "normal" radio (or TV) reception.   The
> ionosphere provides an interface for RF to reflect off of allowing
> "skip" of signals around the curvature of the earth, oftentimes
> *multiple* skips allowing *literally* reception from nearly halfway
> around the world.  In more of a technical fascination with this idea
> than with the sounds and in fact, voices and even messages coming out of
> the speaker in front of the warmly glowing tubes as I tweaked the tuning
> dial and waved the "magnet" (removeable antenna) around, I *did* listen
> to what was dribbling out of the speaker (turned way down to avoid
> disturbing the household).
>
> WWV (time) was the most reliable signal to find (on several bands?),
> partly because it was so easily recognized.  I doubt I knew what
> languages I was hearing, but there were any number of foreign language
> broadcasts fading in and out.   I was most fascinated by the BBC which
> (like WWV) seemed to show up on multiple bands, and possibly also
> because these sources may have been (and were sometimes identified) as
> coming from the south Pacific.  I don't think I ever actually heard the
> voice of Hanoi Hannah, or even knew of her.  I occasionally picked up a
> whiff of Radio Free Europe or one of it's affiliates elsewhere in the
> world, but never enough quantity to really follow much they were saying
> (and I *was* just a kid).   What I understood was that THIS was the US's
> voice to the world (or the other side of the Iron Curtain?).   The BBC
> world service was perhaps *most* fascinating because British English of
> course, but also because I seemed to understand that they were not
> "censored" by the same assumptions our own media would be.   I thought
> that because the BBC served so many colonial/commonwealth regions that
> their message would somehow be "cleaner" or provide better "parallax"
> than our own (implied to be?) singular voice.   Meanwhile i was getting
> my first/only taste of broadcast news "on the hour" whilst trying to
> listen to KOMA, KOA, or more interestingly one of the Pirate stations
> along the US/MX border.   I didn't know what 50,000 Watts meant, but It
> was pounded into my head by the announcers.
>
> I was careful what I said to or asked of my parents, because like many
> parents of that era, they could be fickle.   While they seemed to *want*
> me to play with their radio, I knew implicitely that they wouldn't like
> that I sometimes took the back off the radio, defeated the lockout
> switch and layed in bed watching the tubes glow like they were TV, and
> trying to "visualize" the radio signals impinging on the "wave Magnet"
> and flowing through the wires, being rectified (a term I learned later)
> and amplified by those glowing tubes before feeding the speaker.   I
> also knew that what I might be hearing coming out of the speaker might
> not be something they wanted me to hear.    I did ask them about he
> various foreign languages which made me acutely aware that the whole
> world (or the whole technologically advanced world) were not English
> speakers.  I also asked them about the BBC which lead them to explain a
> lot more about the Commonwealth and British Colonial power (past and
> present).
>
> When I asked them about Radio Free ?Europe, they were a little cagey...
> indicating that their message wasn't intended for the US ears... it was
> specifically crafted for the "poor fools living behind the Iron
> Curtain", they tried to indicate that because of the conditions of
> people living under the iron fist/boot of the Soviet Union were so
> sparse, so dire, and because they had no access to "open information",
> we had to be "careful" what and how we told them.  I think they likened
> it to helping a starving person recover, giving them only the smallest
> amounts of the blandest food (water and crackers) to start out, and
> build them up.    It seemed reasonable.  I also didn't ask them why the
> BBC seemed to talk about all kinds of things that I wasn't hearing in
> the 5 minutes of news from the AM Mega Stations I could sometimes get.
> I guessed it was because The UK commonwealth was so geographically
> spread, they were worried about a broader array of issues (which was
> likely true) but I Intuited that the BBC and the CBC were saying things
> about the US that the US would never say about ourselves.... nothing
> terribly harsh or critical... just things that probably didn't make us
> look that good.   Most of what I heard was really a jumble of ideas, of
> names and places I knew little of...  but I think I was sensitive to the
> "shape" or the "tone" of these different sources.  I couldn't watch
> their lips/jaws move though.
>
> The first thing I ran into on *today's* version of the USAGM website was
> that it was implied that their content was "illegal to consume in the
> US" up until 2013 with the Smith-Mundt modernization bill.  Best I can
> tell, what that bill really did was allow USAGM resources to make their
> materials available to domestic outlets.   But as with my parent's
> description, I do imagine that the content is significantly different
> (hopefully not directly contradictory) with that which is pointed
> inward.   Aside from the President's Press Secretary (and the equivalent
> for the other branch's offices?) that we don't have a strong (overt)
> message shaping out of our government?
>
> - Steve
>
>
>
>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/FRIAM-COMIC>
> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200620/3dcf0875/attachment.html>