User:Chetsford/RFERL

RFE/RL

Is the United States Federal Government's RFE/RL:

• Option 1: Generally reliable
• Option 2: Additional considerations
• Option 3: Generally unreliable
• Option 4: Deprecate

Note: This is a follow-up RfC to a previous one that weighed the reliability of RFE/RL's sibling agency, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. Chetsford (talk) 18:19, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Survey

• 4 While it's possible to find individual instances of WP:USEBYOTHERS, implicit in that is the idea that refusal of use by others (when stated) acts as a rejoinder. Moreover, common sense would dictate that robust content analysis on an outlet's unreliability or propensity to publish falsehoods should be given more weight in source evaluation than a drive-by "according to X" mention in a different RS. In this case:

a. RFE/RL has a documented history of broadcasting lies, rumors, and conspiracy theories

• From 1950 to 1971, RFE/RL disseminated overt lies to its audience about something as basic as the identity of its editor. That year, an expose revealed that editorial decisions at RFE/RL were being secretly made by the CIA, something RFE/RL falsely denied over a period of decades [1].
• Penn professor Kristen Ghodsee writes in The Baffler that - well after the CIA had divested itself of RFE/RL - executives continued managing the outlet to advance "a new genre of psychological and political warfare", that the outlet trafficked in antisemitic conspiracy theories, and reported "unsubstantiated rumors as fact". [2]

b. RFE/RL has a documented history of intimidating -- up to and including firing -- its own staff to ensure reportage aligns with U.S. global military-security ambitions

• In 2023, Blankspot reported that multiple RFE/RL "journalists" who reported critically on Azerbaijan were fired during a period the U.S. was cozying up to the Azerbaijani government. [3]
• Also that year, Arzu Geybullayeva, in her blog, explained that her conversations with RFE/RL journalists found that they faced "systematic harassment" from management if they veered from the U.S. foreign policy line. [4]
• In 2018, the entire staff of the RFE/RL station in the Republic of Georgia protested the firing of their director and asserted "growing intimidation, unfair treatment and attacks from RFE/RL management" over the topics and tone of their reporting.[5]
• The GAO has documented that USAGM's own staff, generally -- including staff from RFE/RL, specifically -- have stated that management has meddled with editorial independence by taking "actions that did not align with USAGM’s firewall principles". [6]

c. RFE/RL is both objectively and subjectively non-WP:INDEPENDENT

• According to Jennifer Grygiel, a media studies scholar at Syracuse University, under U.S. federal law, "RFE/RL is required to support the U.S. government abroad". [7]
• The objective fact of its structural non-independence has been subjectively confirmed by studies; an article in the scholarly journal UC Irvine Law Review in 2020 reported that RFE/RL operated by "not always address[ing] facts unfavorable to U.S. policy".[8]

d. RFE/RL has been described as "propaganda" by RS

• In 2018, the New York Times implicitly described RFE/RL as propaganda, writing that it "used Facebook to target ads at United States citizens, in potential violation of longstanding laws meant to protect Americans from domestic propaganda" [9].
• Magda Stroínska, scholar of linguistics at McMaster University, describes RFE/RL as "propaganda" in her 2023 book My Life in Propaganda: A Memoir About Language and Totalitarian Regimes (no online copy available).

e. RFE/RL has no legal incentive to be accurate in its reporting on BLPs Under federal law, RFE/RL has the unique position of being absolutely "immune from civil liability". Even fully deprecated outlets like Gateway Pundit and Occupy Democrats have a pecuniary interest to get claims about living people roughly correct. RFE/RL, however, does not as it can never be sued.