Smith-Mundt Act
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The US Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (Public Law 402), popularly referred to as the Smith-Mundt Act, specifies the terms in which the United States government can engage in public diplomacy.
The act was first introduced as the Bloom Bill in December 1945 in the 79th Congress and subsequently passed by the 80th Congress and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman on January 27, 1948.
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[edit] Provisions
The legislation funds global propaganda outreach using all the latest communication technologies. As a Cold War measure, it was intended to counter propaganda from the Soviet Union and Communist organizations primarily in Europe.
Since 1972, the act prohibits domestic access to information intended for foreign audiences. Prior to this, the State Department and then the USIA beginning in 1952, were prohibited from disseminating information intended for foreign audiences with the express intent that Congress, the American media, or academia would be the distributors of such information.[1]
It established the programming mandate that still serves as the foundation for U.S. overseas information and cultural programs at the Department of State.
The act expanded the Fulbright Program to include countries other than those Lend-Lease countries originally specified in the original 1946 Fulbright law. It also facilitated the establishment of bi-national centers around the world to coordinate international exchanges between the countries.[2]
Amendments to the Act in 1972 and 1985 and reflected the Cold War’s departure from the “struggle for minds and wills” (a phrase Presidents Truman and Eisenhower both used) to a balance of power based on “traditional diplomacy” and counting missiles, bombers, and tanks. As a result, Senator J. William Fulbright argued America’s international broadcasting should take its “rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics.”[3] A decade later, Senator Edward Zorinsky (D-NE) successfully blocked taxpayer access to USIA materials, even through Freedom of Information Act requests, as he compared the USIA to an organ of Soviet propaganda.[4]
[edit] Excerpt
Section 501(a) of the Act (care of the Voice of America website) provides that
information produced by VOA for audiences outside the United States shall not be disseminated within the United States … but, on request, shall be available in the English language at VOA, at all reasonable times following its release as information abroad, for examination only by representatives of United States press associations, newspapers, magazines, radio systems, and stations, and by research students and scholars, and, on request, shall be made available for examination only to Members of Congress.
[edit] Entities Covered by the Act
The following are administered by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, an agency of the US government.
- Voice of America, a radio and TV network broadcasting worldwide, outside of the US
- Alhurra, satellite TV broadcasting to the Middle East
- Radio Farda, a radio station targeted at Iran
- Radio Free Asia, a radio network broadcasting in Asia
- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a radio network based in Europe and the Middle East
- Radio Martí and TV Martí, a radio and TV network broadcasting in Cuba
- Radio Sawa, a radio station broadcasting in the Middle East
[edit] Recent Interpretations
A 1998 U.S. Court of Appeals ruling indicated that this act exempts Voice of America from releasing transcripts in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
While the act prohibits the Executive Branch from distributing propaganda at home, it also means that the US taxpayer is not permitted to know how the VOA (and its successor agencies) operate or what their programming content was. The act both protected the American public from government-sponsored information and broadcasting and turned information programs into a Cold War classified weapon.
[edit] References
- Voice of America News's online press kit, retrieved March 22, 2005
- rcfp.org media update on the Court of Appeals ruling, Feb 23, 1998
- Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad, (University Press of Kansas, 2005) p. 37.
