Government Media

US broadcasters, fractious and fiercely independent, are a practitioner community skilled at the politics of survival, devoted to a “firewall” between news and policy, and committed to broadcasting in authoritarian environments. This chapter explores the braided practices of broadcasters who identify as two sides of the same coin: (1) the Voice of America (VOA), a government station that broadcasts news, information, entertainment, and US policies to global audiences, and (2) Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and other regional government-funded grantees that function as domestic services in countries denied free media. VOA’s practitioners defend a Charter that protects their journalistic integrity, struggle to keep pace with new technologies (from shortwave radio, to satellite TV, to digital streaming), and strive to maintain distance from the label public diplomacy. Practitioners in surrogate regional services work to protect their “non-official” grantee status and provide free media without becoming pawns of émigré groups. Co-located in the US Agency for Global Media, a name adopted in 2018, their twenty-first-century concerns include disinformation, adapting to multi-platform media services, increasing market share, and persistent disputes over norms, methods, and structures at the crossroads of journalism and government.