The Case for an International Broadcasting CEO
Friday, July 20th 2012
Does the United States need an International Broadcasting Czar?
No.
But if you ask if we need someone to serve as a full-time Chief Executive Officer for the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), then I would say yes.
What’s the difference? A politically-appointed “czar” (which the current administration has used in several areas to supersede the traditional government hierarchy) has temporary but sweeping powers and influence. I think this would be not only unnecessary but also counter-productive. The heads of the U.S. international broadcasting entities – Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio & TV Marti, and the others – should be allowed to run their own agencies without being micro-managed by a higher boss. Any entity head who can’t be trusted to do that should be replaced with one who can.
A professional BBG CEO, on the other hand, could play a valuable role as a full-time representative for the part-time Board. He or she would serve as a single point of contact for the entity heads, and would have the power to make staffing and budgeting decisions without having to wait for a board meeting that could be weeks or even months away. Since the CEO would report directly to the Board, he would be responsible for knowing their policies as well as knowing what’s going on with the broadcasters. Even better, with a CEO in place, the Board could devote its attention during its periodic meetings to the big-picture decisions that Congress intended for it to oversee rather than get bogged down in the weeds of operational details that should be outside the purview of these part-time Board members. While every Board has included some members with professional experience in broadcasting and other media, the entity broadcasters would be even better served by a CEO at the top who was specifically chosen for his or her media and management skills.
Last January, the current Board recognized the need for such a position and voted unanimously to ask the president and Congress to pass legislation that would allow them to create it. Under the existing system, they have an executive director, who supervises the Board’s administrative support staff, and a presidentially-appointed, Senate-confirmed (i.e., political appointee) director of the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB), but that position would be replaced by the CEO. I think eliminating the IBB post makes sense for several reasons, but one of the most compelling ones is the fact that, as it was originally created in the Rube Goldbergian org chart cobbled together by Congress in the 1990s, it did not have the authority over the so-called “surrogate” broadcasters (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio Sawa and Alhurra TV) that the current Board has assigned to it.
The Board has also asked Congress to give it sole authority to appoint the CEO, which would take away whatever influence the Senate had on the IBB director appointment in the past. Supporters of this change say that it would insulate the CEO post from political influence, but I’m not so sure. Given the fact that every Board is going to have a built-in majority of one vote favoring the president’s party, whichever party that may be, I believe a better solution would be to give the CEO position a career Senior Executive Service (SES) status that would have to be competitively posted and selected. The Board deserves a CEO that is accountable, but there is also obvious value in having a CEO who could provide institutional continuity while bridging changing political administrations. If every Board could appoint its own CEO, we could end up with a new one in every administration, which would leave international broadcasting with too many new people learning the ropes in their new jobs at the same time.
The broadcasters that are overseen by the BBG are facing unprecedented challenges these days, and the best of them have been nimble and willing to shake things up to get their news and information out to audiences around the world. To continue to do this in today’s constantly-evolving media environment, they need 24/7 support from a single chief executive – not nine part-time appointees – who can make fast, informed, and objective decisions. A fulltime professional CEO can be that person.
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David S. Jackson
David Jackson is the executive editor of The Washington Times. A veteran journalist, he is also a former U.S. government official with extensive multimedia communications experience in domestic and international markets.
...click authors name for more infoAuthor: David S Jackson
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An IBB CEO
It is a safe bet that if the President were to ask one to set up an organization to oversee and manage U.S. government international broadcasting, the new structure would probably not resemble the current BBG. The current "collective CEO" arrangment makes little sense and leaves important broadcasting issues -- including language service review and budgets -- subject to the political or ideological whims of Board governors. This is not meant as a criticism of current or past governors; the fault lies with the way governance is structured -- it cannot operate differently when individual governors have responsibility for oversight of individual entitites or services. This inevitably leads to freelancing on the Hill in favor of one or another entity or language service come budget time, and sniping in the press and the blogs when decisions don't go the way a governor might like. It should come as no surprise that most broadcasters consider the Board to be the main obstacle to success, as has been demonstrated by several employee satisfaction surveys over the years. A Booz Allen management survey several years ago (it was never released, even in draft) came to the same conclusion. A far better arrangement is the one David is suggesting -- an effective, professional CEO to manage broadcasting, and a Board to whom the CEO can turn for help or guidance when necessary. This in turn would leave the board with its most critical function, that of serving as a firewall protecting the journalistic integrity of VOA and the entitites from outside political manipluation. As things currently stand, I think many international broadcasting employees would argue that the firewall they would really like to see in place is one which protects them from the Broadcasting Board of Governors.
CEO for the BBG?
David Jackson makes a strong case for creating a CEO position at the Broadcasting Board of Governors. I suggest two amplifications: a clear, direct reporting line between the BBG's operating network heads and the CEO, who in turn reports to the Board of Governors; and a five year term for the CEO, a term which can be renewed--or terminated--by a majority or even super-majority Board vote. That set term, outside the election cycle, strikes a balance between the necessity of political accountability--this is still our representative government, after all--and the inflexibility inherent in granting career SES status to the CEO, in essence a lifetime employment guarantee incompatible with the changing demands of international broadcasting. For the CEO to oversee effectively all the BBG networks, he or she also will need a level playing field. That is, the BBG networks should be make up either of all federal employees or all non-federal employees. The current situation, in which VOA and Radio/TV Marti staffers are federal employees working in federal agencies and all that implies, while the other networks are private entities, using taxpayer funds to hire, fire and move people as their needs demand and their union contracts allow, makes effective management of the resulting hodge-podge difficult if not impossible.
A quick word about the SES
Thanks to Bud and Dan for the constructive comments (informed, I should add, by their own ample experience in dealing with some of these issues). Let me add just one observation about the Senior Executive Service, a category in which I have served in both a career and a non-career capacity. Since new rules were put in place a few years ago that raised the ceiling – and lowered the floor – on SES salaries, and instituted measures aimed at increasing performance requirements and accountability, those jobs should no longer be havens for lifetime employment except for exceptional performers. They are now, at least on paper, much less secure than the General Schedule positions.
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