Of the various ironies besetting U.S. foreign policy at the moment, one is both particularly acute and little recognized: even as the realization grows that the international image of the United States is in steep decline, the country's best instrument of public diplomacy, the Voice of America (VOA) broadcast service, is being systematically diminished. ...

When the BBG was created in the mid-1990s, in preparation for the VOA's removal from the USIA, one of its goals was to build a so-called firewall between the U.S. government's radio services and its foreign policy agencies, ostensibly to protect those outlets from the sort of political interference that had intermittently plagued the VOA. But some members of the BBG were major political contributors who had hoped to become ambassadors and took the assignment to the board as a consolation prize. Others had their own political agendas. Together they led a chaotic effort to restructure U.S. international broadcasting -- sometimes with poor results. ...

The BBG's most controversial move to date was its decision in 2002 to phase out the VOA's Arabic service. The service had long been criticized for being dominated by speakers of classical or Egyptian Arabic and for failing to provide specially tailored broadcasts in local dialects that would appeal to different subregions in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf. Norman Pattiz -- a Democratic appointee to the board who made his fortune as chief executive of Westwood One, the largest U.S. commercial radio operation -- persuaded his colleagues to let him run a subcommittee on the Middle East. Pattiz insisted that U.S. broadcasts to the region should target the masses on the "Arab street," rather than the elites in government ministries and universities who had been the VOA's main Arabic listeners for decades.

With funds originally intended for the VOA, Pattiz launched Radio Sawa (sawa is Arabic for "coming together"), a 24-hour-a-day channel that features popular Western and Arabic music with just a few minutes of news every hour and is broadcast primarily to Arab countries with pro-Western governments. In 2004, the BBG spent another $62 million of its federal appropriations to create an Arabic-language television network called al Hurra ("the free one") as an alternative to the popular al Jazeera satellite network based in Qatar. Al Hurra, which principally targets audiences in Iraq and Kuwait, focuses heavily on events related to the transformation of Iraq under U.S. occupation.

Similarly, to broadcast in Iran the BBG has established Radio Farda, which uses the commercial-style approach of Radio Sawa to compete with the Farsi service of the VOA. The latter is not expected to survive.

These initiatives, none of which is carried out under the VOA name or staffed with government employees, have been the subject of fierce debate. Although Pattiz claims great success for al Hurra, a survey by Shibley Telhami, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has found that it has a minimal audience and enjoys little credibility. Edward Djerejian, a retired diplomat who led a well-publicized study of U.S. public diplomacy needs in 2003, argues that the $62 million spent on al Hurra would have been better used purchasing "quality American content" for indigenous Arab satellite networks. ...

Meanwhile, employees in the VOA's battered newsroom have tried to fend off directives from VOA director David Jackson and other political appointees, who have suggested that the network report more favorably on the actions of the Bush administration in Iraq and the Middle East and more deliberately try to enhance the United States' reputation around the world. Editors have repeatedly been asked to develop "positive stories" emphasizing U.S. successes in Iraq, rather than report car bombings and terrorist attacks, and they were instructed to remove from the VOA Web site photographs of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, even though they were already widely available elsewhere. On several occasions since 2002, VOA management has objected to stories quoting Democratic politicians or newspaper editorials critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy. ...