Combating Putin's misinformation machine

[Commentary] “We are not going to cooperate.” That one sentence letter from the director of Russia Today, Moscow’s state-run news agency, to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees US international broadcasting, kicked the Voice of America off the AM dial inside Russia.

VOA will now have to work around this block.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine is in overdrive, an effort reportedly costing Moscow over $100 million. Following Russia’s invasion of Crimea, Putin’s government seized more than a dozen television and radio stations and began to broadcast around-the-clock news and information that was misleading, at best, and hateful incitement at worst.

US broadcasters -- the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia -- are competing against Russia, China, Iran and others with a hand tied behind their back. That’s because the bureaucratic structure over top of these radios, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, is badly broken. In this 24/7 era, the BBG meets only once a month to make management decisions. Directives can languish if the Board does not have a quorum, which is often, rendering it “rudderless,” according to the Heritage Foundation. Indeed, then-Secretary Clinton told the Foreign Affairs Committee that the BBG is “practically defunct.”

[Rep Ed Royce is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee]