When Karl Rove announced his departure, it rekindled memories I had with my former boss Ken Tomlinson’s relationship with Rove.  I asked Tomlinson to write about Rove’s interest in international broadcasting.  This is the result.

By Ken Tomlinson

Of all the subjects that Karl Rove really understands it will surprise many that international broadcasting is on the list.

“Is it surrogate broadcasting?”  That’s the question Rove always asks when assessing international broadcasting — and in the end that question should provide the standard for what we do.

The concept of surrogate broadcasting is deceptively simple.  Through solid research and reporting, surrogate broadcasting provides totalitarian and authoritarian societies information they would enjoy if their countries had a free press.

It’s not propaganda, dear to the hearts of so many émigré activists.  It’s not a call to arms to resist tyranny associated with Radio Free Europe’s broadcasts that may have played a role in sparking the ‘56 Hungarian Revolution.

Nor is it public diplomacy promoting the policies of the United States government, though this is an absolutely valid responsibility of a vital State Department component.  We don’t need to spend the resources required for surrogate broadcasting for societies that already enjoy a free press.

Surrogate broadcasting gives the people of Iran, for example, what they would enjoy if they could have the Iranian equivalent of the best of Fox News and MSNBC and CNN with the Weekly Standard and the New Republic thrown in.  Vital to its effectiveness is that the broadcasts must retain the ring of freedom associated with the kind of journalism that conveys information so that the people can make their own decisions.

Critics might find it difficult to associate a political master like Rove with such a idealistic concept of truth, but his roots are pure.   Rove’s knowledge is drawn from his service on the old U.S. Board for International Broadcasting where in the 1980s Steve Forbes and Lane Kirkland worked like brothers for a revitalized Radio Free Europe — an exercise that leaders like Poland’s Lech Walesa and Czechoslovakia’s Vaclav Havel believe was critical to winning the Cold War.   (I too served on this board.)

Forbes, the quintessential advocate of unfettered capitalism, and Kirkland, whose AFL-CIO stood for working men and women, were absolutely joined at the hip when it came to what Cold War broadcasting should be doing.

The key was not advocacy of U.S. policies.   It was providing the forbidden fruit of truth to information-deprived societies.  We couldn’t resemble the dogma of Soviet state radio.   The forbidden fruit was free and open debate and reporting events in such a way that truth, not advocacy, was the bottom line.

It may be hard for Washington to conceive of Rove, the political master, being dedicated to truth above determinism.   But just as Truman and Vandenburg found unity at the water’s edge, Forbes and Kirkland forged a partnership that freed RFE/RL of the traditional partisan conflicts that so often had interfered with the quality of its work in the past —- and would haunt its successors at the Broadcasting Board of Governors in the future.

But Rove understood that the RFE/RL of the 1980s worked because it reflected the standards of surrogate broadcasting.   Maybe one day this concept of international broadcasting might work again.

There is a personal footnote to all of this, When Rove informed me that I would be the new chairman of the BBG, he advised that I should best leave the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.   The BBG work, he understood, was too important to be intertwined with the natural political conflicts of domestic public broadcasting.

I felt I could not turn my back on those responsible for President Clinton appointing me to the CPB board.   I ignored Rove’s advice.

That would turn out to be the worst mistake of my life.

Tomlinson, the former editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest, recently left the chairmanship of the Broadcasting Board of Governors.