A credible voice

Once again, the State Department has tried to muzzle the Voice of America. This latest flap involves an interview that a VOA correspondent got with the leader of the Taliban militia, Mullah Mohammed Omar. The correspondent included brief quotes from the mullah in a background reaction report after President Bush’s address to Congress about the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The report also included segments from the president’s speech and quotations from a spokesman for the Taliban’s opponents, the Northern Alliance.

Sounds like standard journalistic procedure, doesn’t it? But appropriate for the government-financed Voice of America? Officials at the State Department and National Security Council thought not. They heard about the interview and leaned on the VOA’s independent board of governors to kill the broadcast. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher fumed that “we didn’t think it was appropriate for the Voice of America to be broadcasting the voice of the Taliban into Afghanistan, and we didn’t think it was consistent with their charter.”

VOA held up the broadcast for four days, partly in hopes of adding quotations from an interview with the exiled Afghan king, which did not materialize. It finally aired the report in defiance of State Department objections. The broadcast included quotations from an American expert on Islam criticizing the Taliban’s support of terrorism and treatment of women as departures from mainstream Muslim interpretations around the world.

The State Department’s Mr. Boucher argued that the VOA charter says the station “should explain U.S. government policy and present responsible discussion about it. We don’t consider Mullah Omar to be responsible discussion.” Mr. Boucher was referring to editorials, which are identified as such and present U.S. government views. But the same charter directs the station to present the news in an “accurate, objective and comprehensive manner.”

That part of the charter is especially important now, as the Qatar-based satellite television station Al Jazeera, the most-watched station in the Muslim world, continues its decline from fairly credible journalism to utterly inflammatory anti-Israel and anti-American propaganda. It is Al Jazeera, after all, that spread the vicious and absurd rumor that Israel carried out the Sept. 11 attacks as a way to bring the United States into a war with Islam.

Whether the Voice of America should be a propaganda machine or a credible news agency is an old argument dating back to the early days of the Cold War. State Department officials tried to block interviews with Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in exile, Cuban President Fidel Castro, Palestine leader Yasser Arafat and Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid. When Saigon fell in 1975, officials imposed a l2-day VOA blackout on any news of the U.S. evacuation. Following that, a firewall was erected between the VOA and the State Department – the station became an independent agency with its own board of governors.

The Voice of America broadcasts in 53 languages worldwide and is for many people the only alternative to their governments’ propaganda. A survey last year found that an astounding 67 percent of men in Afghanistan listen to it every day. That percentage no doubt is much higher today, making an open and honest alternative to Al Jazeera all the more important.