EDITORIAL: VOA and NCRTB: Silly standoff (04/13/97)

EDITORIAL

VOA and NCRTB: Silly standoff

In the next few months, Ukraine may lose a solid source of information about U.S. attitudes and policies regarding Ukraine, and the U.S. will lose access to more than a million radio listeners. For budget reasons, Voice of America's Ukrainian Branch will drop its simulcast into Ukraine and return to short-wave only transmission.

Close to 2 million listeners tune in VOA Ukrainian Branch programming on a regular basis. They pick up the broadcast on their AM radios, or through their cable radios, as well as on short-wave. In the radio industry, the first two methods are known as simulcast, and are much more popular, provide higher sound quality and are more accessible to listeners than short-wave.

VOA Ukrainian Branch broadcasts twice a day, an hour early in the morning and an hour late in the evening, six days a week. In order for this broadcast schedule to be continued for another year, the National Council for Radio and Television Broadcasting (NCRTB) of Ukraine is asking VOA to pay approximately $250,000 in broadcast fees to pay for the cost of transmission.

The Ukrainian media industry is heating up rapidly. For years, a post-Soviet dinosaur, Ukraine's radio and television programming is now improving, and investors are acquiring broadcast licenses and buying up airtime so that they can in turn sell it to advertisers for a handsome profit. Amid accusations of government corruption and political manipulation, one thing is clear: for whatever reasons, television viewers and radio listeners in Ukraine have become an audience that advertisers and politicians want to reach. And in keeping with the principles of free market economics, once the demand goes up, so does the price.

VOA may feel that the broadcast fees the National Council for Radio and Television Broadcasting of Ukraine wants to charge may be high (though several of our sources in Ukraine tell us the fee is not out of line), but the other issue is that the NCRTB may be cutting off its nose to spite its face.

The VOA's Ukrainian Branch provides programming about America and a unique perspective on U.S.-Ukraine relations that are not readily available from other foreign news broadcasts, even from its sister-service, VOA's Russian Branch, which also broadcasts into certain parts of Ukraine. News about U.S. views and the activities of Ukrainian leaders in the U.S. are the key reasons that most people in Ukraine listen to VOA.

It is also unclear why the VOA would want to lose more than a million regular listeners for a couple of hundred thousand dollars - this may be a case of being penny-wise, pound-foolish. According to studies done by the Open Media Research Institute, 60 percent of VOA listeners in Ukraine listen only to simulcasts - a demographically critical 60 percent. The 40 percent who probably would continue to listen to short-wave are the "choir" - you don't need to preach to them. The 60 percent contains the younger generation (who don't listen to short-wave and probably don't know how to use it), the post-Cold War listener who disliked the previous stigma of surreptitiously listening to Western broadcasts on short-wave, and the new, and aspiring elite, who want to feel, and be, informed.

In principle, the policy that VOA chose to pursue - to sign up independent radio station to broadcast VOA programming in Ukraine - is fine. However, in reality there is "no meat on the bones" of this strategy.

There are only 50 independent stations throughout Ukraine, six of which have signed with VOA. Even if VOA signed up all 50 independents (also for the cost of about $250, 000, according to our calculations), the broadcasts still would not get the number of listeners, the broad geographical diversity or the quality of transmission, as they would with simulcast. Furthermore, the independents are not required to broadcast any specified amount of time. They could get the satellite dish to receive VOA broadcasts, and then broadcast only one 10 minute news report a day, or one cultural program a week. This amount also does not reflect the personnel costs necessary to craft relations and sign contracts with 50 separate media entities.

At a time that the State Department has identified good relations with Ukraine as essential to U.S. foreign policy, we can only hope that both the NCRTB and the VOA will reconsider their positions.

| Home Page |