Is Democracy Merely Disney and Burgers?

Will America’s exports amount to no more than a duck, a mouse, a cheap burger and rock-video madonnas shaking their cheap merchandise in the eyes of the world? The question is poignant for California as it seeks to forge a special relationship with the other countries and cultures of the Pacific Rim. But to the extent that our worldwide profile sometimes does tend to resemble a monster mail order catalog as much as anything else, the question we must ask is: Are we underselling ourselves?

One voice that broadcasts a far more nuanced vision of America is a worldwide radio network that has an estimated 100 million listeners and is more popular than CNN and BBC combined. It can’t broadcast in the United States, accepts no commercial advertising, operates daily in 47 languages and is led by a high-voltage Angeleno whose father, interestingly enough, held the same position under President Roosevelt 50 years ago. It’s called the Voice of America. But now the VOA, still reeling from the budget cuts of the past two years, is vulnerable to new damage in the frenzy of capital budget-punishment.

Would diminishing VOA any further be wise?

America’s message of freedom remains our most valuable export. In extremely dangerous and volatile places like North Korea, the United States should be repeating simple messages, because very little from the outside world other than VOA’s vital broadcasts seeps into North Korea. In the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, where countless people have been slaughtered in brutal clashes with Indonesian government forces; in little lost Laos, with its dubious distinction as one of the five remaining communist countries; and in confused Cambodia, where human rights are so often under a cloud, VOA is virtually the only sustained message of hope. In Myanmar, so miserably oppressed by the military, 40% of the Burmese population are VOA listeners. As for Beijing-blanketed Tibet, even the Dalai Lama views VOA as the proverbial godsend. “Vital medicine,” he calls it.

Consider this dramatic letter dropped anonymously into a VOA post office box in Asia: “I formerly was a long-time officer in the public security apparatus. I regarded listening to Voice of America as counterrevolutionary behavior, behavior that was traitorous. . . . Now I realize that the VOA was an omen of disaster to the Chinese Communist hardliners. . . . VOA’s voice is a voice that the Chinese people yearn for but which is practically altogether denied them. . . . This is the first letter I have written you. It may be the last.”

In fact, staffers at the East Asia and Pacific division of the Voice of America never heard from him again. But they never stop hearing from the people of China for whom VOA--on the air in China 12 hours a day--is the chief lifeline to the outside world. After the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square were snuffed out in 1989, some 5,000 Chinese graduate students around the world applied for jobs at VOA. Inside China, according to one study at Beijing University, perhaps 60% of all university students listen to VOA at least once a week. “Not even MTV has that penetration in America,” laughs VOA Director Geoffrey Cowan, a former head of the L.A. Ethics Commission and a widely known author, university lecturer and screenwriter.

VOA, on the whole, is not some hackneyed Defense Department public-information mouthpiece. It’s a professional network that respects the listener’s intellect, run by a sophisticated staff that probably has as much diversity as the U.N. Secretariat and holds more degrees than any radio station you’ve ever encountered. Not long ago, I toured VOA’s Washington headquarters and observed the daily whirlwind of radio programs beamed to Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. I quickly realized that for many of our immigrants who live here productively and contribute richly to our culture and economy, VOA was probably their first introduction to America--indeed to the spoken English language (some programs even have simple English language instruction). So, too, for those born in today’s economically surging but politically troubled East Asia, where America’s $103-million-a-year government network broadcasts daily in 11 languages, and for emerging Latin America, where millions glue their ears to shortwave and FM satellite transmissions of news, information, cultural and music feature programs in Spanish, Portuguese and even Creole.

The VOA projects the side of the American character that favors openness and debate. That message is especially vital for Asia, where California’s destiny will be increasingly found and where governments often are deeply distrustful of the very political openness that is the prerequisite to healthy democracy.

Let’s put it this way. If Congress downsizes this vital agency any further, it will have saved a few dollars but abandoned many souls. Wouldn’t it prove hugely ironic if after all those decades of oft-ineffective electronic jamming by so many repressive regimes around the world, it is patriotic Americans, many of them conservative Republicans, who wind up effectively muffling America’s clearest worldwide voice?

Tom Plate’s Op-Ed column runs Tuesdays. His e-mail address is <tplate@ucla.edu>.