BBG’s Michael Meehan: charges of censorship against me are unfair

Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) member Michael P. Meehan said at the BBG open meeting on September 15 that he had nothing to do with censoring of Voice of America news broadcasts to Ethiopia after his talks with the Ethiopian regime officials. Referring apparently to the two other BBG members who went with him on the trip, he said that “we were disturbed by some activity” (presumably, VOA news reporting) that followed the BBG negotiations with the repressive regime in Ethiopia, but he implied that any actions that were taken, including the subsequent removal of the Voice of America Horn of Africa service chief, were taken by the VOA management. He described these actions as “appropriate.”

Link to YouTube video.

Meehan said that he refrained from saying anything until the actions (presumably, the removal of reports that he considered misleading and the dismissal of the service chief) were taken by the VOA management. He also said that he is fully committed to press freedom and that charges against him were unfair.

“We’re here to protect the journalistic mission of this place. If not, I could just resign,” Meehan said.

The BBG Chairman Walter Isaacson agreed with Meehan, offered his full support and stressed that the agency is working hard against censorship around the world. The BBG issued a statement about threats to journalists in various countries, including Iran, but it did not mention China, Russia, or Ethiopia. The BBG terminated VOA radio and TV broadcasts to Russia in 2008 and plans to end VOA broadcasts in Mandarin and Cantonese. The latest BBG plan has generated strong bipartisan opposition in Congress (the full House Committee on Foreign Affairs voted to block it) and was criticized by Chinese human rights activists and U.S.-based human rights organizations.

Ethiopian Americans and media freedom advocates staged the largest ever anti-censorship demonstration in VOA’s history. They were protesting in front of the BBG and VOA headquarters in Washington, DC after news stories about the BBG delegation’s visit to Ethiopia filed by the Horn of Africa service reporters were removed from the VOA website, the service chief was dismissed, and VOA reporters were prevented from covering two Ethiopian American political events, being told instead to focus more on human interest stories.

According to reports in Ethiopian American media, the VOA Horn of Africa service chief was removed after the Ethiopian regime complained to the BBG that he revealed the content of sensitive negotiations between Ethiopian officials and three BBG members: Michael Meehan, Susan McCue, and Dana Perino. The BBG delegation was pushing for placement of VOA radio reports about health on local regime-controlled networks in line with the current BBG marketing strategy which aims to expand audience reach by offering soft programming that could pass government censors in countries like Ethiopia, China, and Russia.

Several years earlier, the Ethiopian regime threatened VOA journalists working in Washington with the death penalty and charged them with treason. These charges were later dropped after protests by the State Department and media freedom organizations.

Michael Meehan, a Democratic Party operative, was nominated to serve on the bipartisan BBG by President Obama and was confirmed by the Senate. In 2010, he was accused of shoving a reporter on who was trying to ask questions of a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate with whom Meehan was walking near the Capital in Washington, D.C. Meehan apologized afterwards and said that he did not know that the person asking questions was a journalist.

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