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LONDON — The American government’s decision to cut the funds of its international broadcast service Voice of America and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which funds Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and local subsidiaries, has been greeted with dismay. VoA and USAGM claim a weekly combined global audience of 427 million on all their platforms, including radio. RFE/RL alone counts around 50 million listeners in 23 countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Iran and Afghanistan.
However, radio audiences are notoriously hard to measure, and global audience figures often include live broadcasting and digital services users. Radio audiences for public broadcasters will be lower since listeners have a wider choice of platforms than 40 or even 20 years ago.
A blow to public broadcasting
It’s difficult to decry the death of shortwave and mediumwave transmitters if they are being shut down to cut energy bills or facilitate commercial land transactions, such as in Austria.
According to observers on both sides of the Atlantic, the recent American decision to pull funds from its public-facing voice abroad and international broadcasters providing independent news and information to audiences in countries where press freedom is restricted or under threathas dealt a big blow to international public broadcasting, while offering an unexpected gift to countries like Russia, Belarus, Iran or China.
We will leave it to analysts to decipher whether this sudden decision was based on perceptions of financially bloated services. Or if they were seen as irrelevant after 75 years since they were set up to fight Nazism and later communism. We cannot judge if the cuts resulted from financial decisions, personal antipathy or ideological conflict.
However, it is hard to believe that, while Washington focuses so much on American interests, the U.S. will completely abandon its efforts to promote democracy and transparency worldwide. Maybe USAGM and USAID were seen by the current administration as spewing “radical propaganda.”
Russia waiting in the wings
However, the “wine” — less of it, for sure — needs to be poured into new bottles. And fast, as any space, or rather, frequency, vacated by Western media will be snapped up by the broadcasters of undemocratic states. If public international broadcasting using shortwaves is declining, why do countries like Russia want it?
This was the experience of Australia’s ABC in the Pacific and of the BBC a couple of years back. When the BBC’s Arabic radio service withdrew from Lebanon, the state-owned Russian Sputnik Radio took over its radio frequency.
Russian and Chinese media spend about 10 billion dollars a year on international services and acquisitions, compared with the approximately 500 million dollar budget of the BBC World Service. This is why Deutsche Welle’s Broadcasting Council recently spoke out in favor of the international broadcaster’s expansion and modernization. So, expansion and modernization, yet public broadcasters are also considering “structural financing,” probable management speak for cuts.
The BBC World Service is also ready to start pushing back the costs entirely to the government. Currently, two-thirds of its funds come from TV license fees, i.e., the British taxpayers. “As press freedom drastically reduces, disinformation thrives, and state-backed media advances aggressively, its role is increasingly important. We need a sustainable, long-term funding solution that enables the World Service to meet these global challenges and invest in services for the future,” says Jonathan Munro, the global director of BBC News. Meanwhile, BBC World Service is cutting 130 jobs to save about nine million dollars.
If public international broadcasting using shortwaves is declining, why do countries like Russia want it?
Change needed to progress
The changes in public broadcasting are seismic while the world is unstable. Threats from undemocratic governments and increasing defense costs might dwarf the need for unbiased and intelligent information.
Paradoxically, this may be the best time for public broadcasters to reassess their operations and reevaluate whether digital terrestrial broadcasting can overcome its perceived analog weaknesses: poor audio quality, high infrastructure and energy costs, possible electrical interference and a dwindling number of receivers and audiences.
Now is the time to reexamine the extra benefits of DRM digital shortwave: excellent FM-quality audio over long distances (thousands of kilometers compared with 70km for FM), capacity to use less spectrum for audio and data (up to three audio services and one data channel in DRM compared to one analog program per frequency in FM) and reduced energy consumption — between 40 and 80%.
Radio without frontiers
DRM shortwave also offers radio without frontiers, which can freely carry more than news, music, or sports; it also provides education to those without internet and emergency warnings for everyone nationally and internationally. A couple of transmitters can cover huge countries like India, China, Indonesia and those in Africa. Long-distance propagation (even across continents) with much lower energy costs and less interference, as well as improved stereo audio and data to accompany it — what is not to like about digital DRM broadcasting? Countries are noticing. “For Africa, DRM is the answer,” said Mark Williams of the DRM South African Group. “We have large areas to cover where there are small population groups in those areas, and DRM is cheaper.”
To those who mention radio being replaced by mobile devices or television, I would give the example of events in Chile earlier this year when a massive power outage caused by a transmission line failure plunged most of Chile into darkness, disrupting telecommunications and internet services. With the absence of real-time information, there was a renewed focus on the need for battery-powered radios to access news in emergencies, such as the declaration of a curfew. Only the battery-operated radios worked. Shortwave would have been ideal for a country the length of Chile. There was also no shortage of criticism of the telephone companies and the widespread use of smartphones without integrated FM radio.
Digital DRM shortwave can now be the building block for a new business and coverage model. Digital radio can reach the populations that need it, some far away from Washington. We must determine how this radio platform meshes with IP services, AI solutions and the new digital world. I have not even mentioned receivers. If governments send the right, strong signals for a forward-looking digital media approach — domestically and internationally — and there are broadcasts on air, receiver manufacturers will respond positively. They will confidently offer their products, incorporating the latest chipset and receiver solutions, which listeners will be attracted to buy. The ball is now firmly in the courts of governments as to whether they want their voice to reach out to the world or stand back and let others do the talking.
The author is chairman of the DRM Consortium.
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