BBG Watch Commentary

Markos Kounalakis
Markos Kounalakis

One of the most thoughtful analyses of U.S. government/taxpayer-funded international media outreach was written by Markos Kounalakis, a research fellow at Central European University and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and published by The Sacramento Bee newspaper.

“China and Russia are fighting a heated war with the United States. It is an intense battle of words and ideas fought between state-sponsored broadcasters, on the airwaves and online,” Kounalakis observes. He next quotes a 2011 statement by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the U.S. is “engaged in an information war.”

“She concluded her analysis to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations by saying that in the fight against emerging international broadcasters, ‘we are losing that war’.”

MARKOS KOUNALAKIS: “The general consensus is that the steady drumbeat of credible Western broadcast news critical of the communist regimes during the Cold War helped bring about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But the impact of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Marti, Radio Free Asia and others is now being challenged by growing competition in the struggle to dominate global news narratives.”

READ MORE: The Conversation: America’s international broadcasters are losing the air wars, By Markos Kounalakis, The Sacramento Bee, June 22, 2014.