Report: A New Voice of America for the Age of Twitter

When Walter Isaacson championed Voice of America’s decision to shut down its shortwave radio broadcasts to China — and shift those funds to the Internet, cellphones and other forms of digital media — he viewed it as the sensible updating of a propaganda playbook dating from the cold war, according to a story by Mark Landler at nytimes.com....

While the need for the United States to get its message across to an often hostile world is greater than ever, Mr. Isaacson said, digital technology risks turning these services into relics of a bygone era, when dissidents in closed societies huddled over their transistor radios for scraps of information from the West.

To be sure, the broadcasters have made significant strides. Voice of America is inviting listeners to file reports about the uprisings in Bahrain on Facebook, while Radio Free Asia is aggressively developing technology to circumvent firewalls that the Chinese government puts up to block its transmissions.

Yet in a brutal budget climate, the money for foreign broadcasting is shrinking. And the competition is relentless. In Egypt alone, 12 new commercial television channels have sprouted up since the January revolt.

“It’s not the neatly defined world of the cold war,” said Robert McMahon, a former news director of Radio Free Europe, which reinvented itself after the fall of the Berlin Wall by beaming into countries like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. “It’s a crowded, chaotic media marketplace.”

Mr. Isaacson’s solution sounds like the blueprint for a state-owned CNN: create a state-of-the-art global newsroom that would gather all the programming generated by the five networks and send it out via television, the Web, social-media services, mobile phones — even shortwave, where it still makes sense.

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