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POSTCARD USA: O what a sweetheart deal! —Khalid Hasan

The current VOA philosophy is simple: if you are below 15 or over 39, get lost. We are not interested in you. Some jokers have sold its governors the utterly ridiculous idea — insofar as the Islamic world goes — that the way to a potential suicide bomber’s heart is through pop music, interspersed with snappy sound bites packaged as news and information

Be it newspapers, makers of soap or broadcasting organisations, it takes a long time for them to establish a distinct image, put a stamp of their own on what they do, but it takes little to knock it all down. Self-destruction is an inexplicable phenomenon. “What is doing well, is best left alone,” may be a sound adage but it is quite amazing how often the contrary gets done, no less by organisations than by individuals. The latest instance of such self-demolition is the venerable Voice of America.

Under the utterly mistaken notion that its worldwide listening audience is more interested in pop, bee bop and hip hop than in good, old-fashioned news, current affairs, discussions and magazine programmes, it has begun to dismantle itself. The current VOA philosophy is simple: if you are below 15 and over 39, get lost. We are not interested in you. Some jokers have sold its governors the utterly ridiculous idea — insofar as the Islamic world goes — that the way to a potential suicide bomber’s heart is through pop music, interspersed with snappy sound bites packaged as news and information.

It took VOA more than 60 years to win universal recognition and admiration for its call signal and it has taken it just months to assume several new and ridiculous identities. Its Persian service is now called Radio Farda, its Arabic service Radio Sawa and its Pakistan service, Radio Aap ki Dunya, if you please. A more irrelevant name could not have been invented. I suggest that the genius who thought it up should be put on a donkey back to front and paraded through the streets of Washington and Islamabad.

VOA is controlled by the federally appointed Broadcasting Board of Governors which has been creating these new media groups at the rate of one every few months. The 500 permanent VOA staffers, as fine a group of professional broadcasters as you can gather under one roof, have been up in arms at the destruction of something they have spent their lifetimes building. A petition submitted to Congress last week said the new autonomous units focused too much on music and entertainment at the expense of hard news and spoken word programmes. They said the Board was “dismantling the nation’s radio beacon piece by piece”.

But let me turn to Pakistan and what the scene is, on air and on ground. Radio Aap ki Dunya is aimed at age group 15 to 39. God alone knows on what research the decision to launch this pop-goes-the-weasel service is based, but who told these worthies that people in this age group remain awake from 7 pm to 7 am, the hours Dunya is on the air. It is Pakistani pop and Indian pop and itsy bitsy news in between. How many times can even the admirers of her looks and voice listen to Hadiqa Kiyani for instance? And how will Miss Kiyani’s music help the “war on terrorism” and fight radical Islam? Will it get the Americans Osama bin Laden?

On July 9 at a special ceremony here, the Board signed a deal with Clarity Communications (Pakistan), known to one and all as a proxy much favoured by the indestructible federal Information Secretary. Clarity will broadcast Dunya programmes during the day on FM101 on leased time segments. FM101 is owned by Radio Pakistan. The honest and logical thing would have been to sign the deal direct with Radio Pakistan. That the Information Ministry did not favour. It was discreetly suggested to the VOA Board that business could only be done with Clarity. The strangest part of this entire charade is that neither the Board nor Clarity is willing to disclose what the financial basis of the deal is. The buzz in Washington is that Clarity is going to be paid two million dollars. For what? For broadcasting its and bits of Dunya from FM101’s eight city stations, none of which has a range of more than 12-15 miles. Eighty-five percent of Pakistan’s population that lives in rural areas will not be able to listen to these programmes. Even in large cities like Lahore and Karachi, there will be areas where the FM101 signal will not reach.

If ever there was a “sweetheart deal” this is it. Radio Aap ki Dunya will not only be supplying the programmes but also paying FM101 for broadcasting them in limited time slots during daylight hours.

Why does nobody ever make such a proposition to me? And I live in Washington.

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent. His e-mail is khasan2@cox.net

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