TRANSCRIPT:
It didn’t just tell the story the way the American government wanted you to hear it. It told you the story as best it could, positive and negative.
If you believe as I do that America is different than other countries — that is that we stand not only for American interests but for American and universal values — VOA is the only way in which many people in the world, whether they’re in countries where I served like Pakistan or Iraq or Serbia, people who may not be sympathetic to what they hear about America, it’s the only way they can really learn in an objective way how America is different, how America serves the interests not only of a country but of certain values.
If VOA is not able to broadcast, that message is lost to many people who may have ambiguous feelings about the United States. It’s a way of getting people who don’t know what America is and why America is unique to know America better.
The first obvious danger is if the Americans go silent, others will step in. And it’s not that it’s a question that the Chinese or the Iranians or the Russians don’t have a right to express themselves about what they think, but they don’t do it in the same way we do. Their governmental broadcasting is one-sided. Their governmental broadcasting does not use the same values that the very experienced and talented VOA staff used as the way of communicating with the world.
So the first thing is people won’t get the message that they might have gotten about news in their own country and about news in America. But more important to me, they won’t get it in a way that was unique to VOA: objective and self-critical.
In a way, I always considered VOA not only as a broadcaster but as a listener because people would talk to me as ambassador and say, “I heard on VOA this. What do you think?” VOA, they felt, was listening to them and their concerns and not only that, but expressing ours.
Published
Munter served as U.S. ambassador to Pakistan from 2010–2012 and ambassador to Serbia from 2007–2009. His Foreign Service career included assignments focused on Iraq, NATO and European affairs.