Old Propaganda and New.

Matt Welch's rambling discourse "Old Propaganda and New" (March) contains a great deal of misinformation from unreliable sources. Unfortunately, Welch did not contact the Broadcasting Board of Governors for the facts.

Far from living in the past, as Welch suggests, the Broadcasting Board, with the support of the Bush administration and Congress, has utilized the latest audience research techniques and 21st-century technology to produce a radio and television service for the Middle East that operates in a competitive broadcast market. The result has surpassed our most optimistic predictions.

The Voice of America Arabic short-wave service Welch would like to bring back operated seven hours a day to an estimated audience of 1.8 million. The 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week broadcasts of Radio Sawa include 325 newscasts weekly, and its music/news format is widely acknowledged to be one of the region's most popular. That's why The Washington Times called Radio Sawa "one of the great success stories in the administration's war on terrorism." The world-renowned research company ACNielsen, in a 2005 survey, showed that Radio Sawa and Alhurra television now reach a total unduplicated audience of 35 million.

Even Welch's personal insults are baseless. Radio Sawa is not "staffed by Lebanese who famously mangle their Arabic," but by professional journalists from various Arabic-speaking countries-including Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, and Sudan as well as Lebanon

who have the courage to work for an American news organization in a hostile environment.

Larry Hart

Communications Coordinator

Broadcasting Board of Governors

Washington, D.C.

Quite apart from everything else in Matt Welch's article with which one might take issue, it is simply a lie that Commentary was ever subsidized by or took a penny from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. From its founding in 1945 until 1990, and throughout the years in which the Congress created and supported Encounter and a string of other magazines around the world, Commentary was fully subsidized by the American Jewish Committee. (Since 1990, it has raised its own operating funds while continuing to be housed by AJC.) Welch is not the first to propagate this lie, but I'm surprised he fell for it and repeated it without checking.

Neal Kozodoy

Editor, Commentary

New York, NY

Matt Welch replies: If our Mideast broadcast propaganda has "surpassed our most optimistic predictions," the problem is much worse than I thought. In addition to the Lebanese bias (an issue, as Larry Hart well knows, that was brought to Congress' attention by Al-Hurra's own staffers and admitted by Al-Hurra's own executives), "the numbers released by the station," the Center for Public Diplomacy's Alvin Snyder noted in December, "paint a much more optimistic picture of its viewership than do those calculated by outside sources." (The dispute over those rosy "unduplicated" figures is also well-known to Hart.) It's a desperate bit of cherry-picking indeed that lunges for glowing blurbs from The Washington Times, whose own editor at large, Arnaud de Borchgrave, has repeatedly slammed the broadcast mouthpiece under headlines like "Few Hurrahs for Al-Hurra."

Neal Kozodoy is right to criticize me for stating that the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), created and funded by the CIA, "subsidized" Commentary; I should not have written that. It would have been more accurate to note that Irving Kristol became head of CCF in 1952, the year he stepped down from the editorship of Commentary; that several of Commentary's contributors (Melvin Lasky, Sidney Hook, and Daniel Bell, for starters) received money that originated from the CIA during the 1950s and 1960s (with varying degrees of awareness on the writers' parts); and that its editor from 1960 to 1995, Norman Podhoretz, chaired an advisory committee to the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the government's official overseas propaganda arm during the Cold War, from 1981 to 1987. During Podhoretz' tenure Ronald Reagan greatly expanded the USIA's covert activities, under the leadership of the former senior CIA official Walt Raymond. The same period saw the launch of the USIA-affiliated National Endowment for Democracy, an international organization modeled directly on the CCF.