Remarks by D. Jeffrey Hirschberg, Governor, Broadcasting Board of Governors, marking the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

December 11, 2008 | Washington, DC.« Back to Press Releases

D. Jeffrey Hirschberg

Thank you Steve. It's a delight for me to be here on behalf of the Broadcasting Board of Governors today to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

My father raised me to be a rag salesman, although it didn't quite turn out that way.

The declaration was passed 48-0 with eight abstentions and two absences as a monumental achievement [in response] to the horrors of the Holocaust. The Declaration enshrines a wide range of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration is what we are here to celebrate today, and it is on your screen behind you and everybody can read it.

It's a Universal Declaration that is not universally observed, not universally respected and not universally adhered to. It is, in fact, aspirational, and the job of journalists is to foster that aspiration in one way or another.

Now for those of you who don't know, the Broadcasting Board of Governors is an umbrella organization for U.S. government-funded non-military international broadcasting. It's comprised of four Democrats, four Republicans and the Secretary of State. It broadcasts in 60 languages around the world to 175 million people every week.

Each of our broadcasters – Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Sawa. Alhurra Television, Radio and TV Marti and Radio Free Asia – are dedicated to the principle, encoded in U.S. law, that all people deserve the right to freedom of expression, to freedom of information and opinion.

On reporting on world events, our broadcasters in our organizations face the same challenges as the private media does, and you will hear from them today as to what our common challenges are.

Just to set the stage for a moment, repressive governments have always ignored Article 19. They employ a broad range of tactics to combat free media including murder, kidnapping, ransom, arrest and censorship, jamming and intimidation, and controlling distribution by limiting access to traditional distribution channels.

According to Freedom House, only 18% of the world's population today enjoy a free press, and that has been declining for the last six years. Journalists are often intimidated with violence or threats, and according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 34 journalists have been killed in the performance of their duties so far this year.

Sadly, all of the organizations under the BBG umbrella express the same problems as every other journalistic organization. We all have our horror stories and we all have our parade of horribles, and I'm just going to give you a few examples. And for those of you who want more there are some handouts you can take with you at the end of this panel.

In China, the government jams VOA and RFA broadcasts, prohibits local stations from airing their news shows, blocks their websites and periodically harasses listeners. In Azerbaijan, this month the government there will close down BBC, VOA and RFE/RL.

In Egypt today when we try to hire journalists for our broadcast entities, the government tells them that they will be expelled from the union, which would deprive these journalists of their pensions and future livelihoods as reporters in the country.

In Russia, after an incident with one of our reporters, Andrei Babitsky, who did a 70-minute taped interview in Chechnya with Shamel Basayev, the Russian government has closed down VOA and RFE/RL, taking us from 113 broadcast affiliates in radio and television down to five.

In [Uzbekistan] they have put our journalists on television with pictures of our journalists, their families, their children, have put their addresses and telephone numbers, and called them not very kind names.

In Iraq, as every other journalistic organization, we've had our share of kidnappings, we've had our share of murders, we've had our share of other problems.

All in this room agree that media freedom is a pillar in protecting freedom. Media coverage can sound the alarm on human rights violations and make them hard to ignore.

Just to give you one example, right now in Zimbabwe, VOA broadcasts in English, Shona and Ndebele provide updates to their citizens about their cholera epidemic and how to prevent disease. During the March presidential election, VOA, using a text-messaging program, circumvented government censors and provided SMS services to over 10,000 subscribers.

Darfur, we just recently began broadcasts to that country to share those issues.

As media moves to new technologies, and there are plenty of new technologies, the BBG is employing its personnel to meet those challenges. We are using more video streaming, we are doing audio streaming, podcasts, social networking and SMS. For the U.S. elections, VOA launched a new website, which was widely accepted and looked at around the world.

We are now offering headlines on microblogging site Twitter and the social networking site Facebook.

Unfortunately, with all these new technologies, repressive governments still find ways to block us. And our challenge today is to find a way to work with these new technologies to get the information to the people that need the information so they can make decisions in their own lives.

The Committee to Protect Journalists recently reported that online journalists are now jailed more than those in other media.

Foreign reporting, as we all know, has been trimmed in the face of budget cuts in the private world. You'll hear from some of our panelists how steep those cuts have been.

And while citizen journalists now fill gaps, at least in our view, they do not alter the need for professional journalists with appropriate filters.

In closing, our question here today is how to harness the power of new and old media to overcome challenges that may be intentionally created by those who want to control information, or some inadvertently because of the changing media environment.

As long as we can keep finding ways to bring accurate and reliable information to those who are in need of that information, we are indeed preserving the 60-year-old hope of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As President Kennedy told Voice of America employees in 1962, "Freedom of information is a fundamental human right, and the touchstone of all the freedoms to which the United [Nations] is consecrated."

I'd like to thank our sponsors today, and especially the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communications for putting this panel together. I look forward to participating in this program and look forward to the discussion that follows.

Thank you.

Learn more about the event here.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors is an independent federal agency, supervising all U.S. government-supported, non-military international broadcasting, whose mission is to promote freedom and democracy and to enhance understanding through multi-media communication of accurate, objective, and balanced news, information, and other programming about America and the world to audiences overseas. BBG broadcasting organizations include the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa), Radio Free Asia, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio and TV Martí). BBG broadcasts reach over 175 million people worldwide on a weekly basis.

For more information, call the Office of Public Affairs at (202) 203-4400, or e-mail publicaffairs@bbg.gov.