As the United States government’s primary overt propaganda agency throughout the Cold War, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) (1953–1999) has had a subtle, yet
sustained influence on U.S. and international journalism
since the late 1940s.
The U.S. Information and Education Exchange Act
(Public Law 402), better known as the Smith-Mundt Act
of 1948, established the program mandate for American
information and cultural programs abroad. Under this
act, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the USIA on
August 3, 1953, as an independent government agency for
conduct of most officially sponsored publicity and information programs overseas. The new agency brought together
the USIA’s administrative staff, an overseas arm known as
the U.S. Information Service (USIS), and the government’s
single largest news and information project, the Voice of
America (VOA), to coordinate publicly acknowledged
“information activities” designed to promote U.S. national
security interests during the emerging Cold War.
The USIA did not control well-known propaganda and
information programs such as Radio Free Europe and
Radio Liberty, however. For most of their existence, those
projects were secretly operated by the Central Intelligence
Agency as ostensibly private, civilian organizations. The
U.S. Department of Defense also conducted both publicly
acknowledged and covert information operations independent of the USIA, particularly in war zones and areas under
military occupation.
In 1999, most of USIA was reorganized as a branch of
the U.S. Department of State for conduct of what are now
known as “public diplomacy” activities overseas. Those
operations are now led by the under secretary of state for
Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. A newly created U.S.
Broadcasting Board of Governors took control of most
government-funded broadcasting, including the Voice of
America radio network and its television and film distribution arm, Worldnet.
The USIA employed about 6,350 people at the time it
was absorbed into the State Department. Some 40 percent
of these were citizens of foreign countries engaged in U.S.-
sponsored information operations abroad.
The USIA and more recently the State Department have
resisted calling their work “propaganda,” preferring instead
to use that term to describe information operations that are
hostile to the United States. Some retired USIA executives
tend to be more frank, however. Alvin Snyder, director of
the USIA’s television and film service during the Ronald
Reagan administration, referred to the agency’s work during those years as “American propaganda [versus] Soviet
lies.” The former USIA director during the George H. W.
Bush administration, Bruce Gelb, may have captured the
USIA’s self image best when he described the USIA as
“never propagandists but rather dedicated ‘sales’ representatives for the greatest global product of them all: America,
our Constitution … [and] our unquenchable belief in the
benefits to all people of a market-based economy.”
The USIA played a substantial role in American and
international journalism throughout its life, as do its successor organizations in the State Department today. There
is no simple way to measure this impact, but examples
include the USIA’s service as the primary source of official information and quotations about U.S. international
actions, policies and aspirations for both American and
international journalists; training programs for as many
as five thousand international journalists per year, particularly those from global hot spots; exchange and travel programs for journalists and journalism educators; provision
of substantial logistic support, background information and
local contacts for selected American journalists traveling
abroad; placement in non- U.S. media of tens of thousands
of news and commentary articles, newsreels, video, audio,
and Internet feeds regarded as favorable to U.S. national
security interests; and significant engineering and financial support for building communication systems in poor
countries, especially in Southeast Asia and parts of Africa.
The USIA also established well-known Foreign Press Centers for international journalists in Washington D.C., New
York, and Los Angeles, which are now managed by the U.S.
Department of State.
Throughout its life, the USIA was the principal source
of information on overseas public opinion for the U.S. government, including for the intelligence community. It conducted or contracted for polls in some seventy-seven nations
and has trained native pollsters throughout the former
USSR, Central Asia, Bosnia, Haiti, Nepal, and the Palestinian Authority. The agency also established a large publishing plant in the Philippines that printed tens of millions
of magazines, pamphlets, posters, handbills, and books in
scores of languages.
The USIA’s Voice of America radio, Worldnet television
and film service, and affiliated radio, television, and Internet operations remain major news media today, claiming to reach more than one hundred million users per week. The
VOA’s network of journalists and stringers stretches from
“Hong Kong to Los Angeles, London to Capetown, Beijing to Rio de Janiero,” wrote Alan Heil, the VOA’s longtime deputy director, and includes remote hot spots such
as Chad, eastern Congo, the Horn of Africa and southern
Lebanon. Many VOA stringers work simultaneously for
private media organizations or for news services such as
the Associated Press. VOA shortwave and AM frequency
broadcasts reach almost the entire earth, although at this
writing they are being jammed in the Peoples Republic of
China. The VOA and Worldnet distribute radio, television
and news-oriented films to at least eleven hundred radio and
television stations worldwide.
Other broadcasting projects now affiliated with VOA
include Alhurra (Arabic satellite TV service), Radio Sawa
(twenty-four-hour Arabic news and entertainment radio in
the Middle East), Radio Farda (news and entertainment
in Persian aimed at Iran), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (news and other programming for Eastern Europe and
nations of the former USSR), Radio Free Asia (news in nine
East Asian languages), and Radio and Television Marti
(news and programming aimed at Cuba).