(2 of 2)
Also unchanged is the Voice's basic approach to news, which is to tell it straight. "You can't talk down to people," says Chancellor, a former White House correspondent for NBC. "They won't listen. And you can't lie to people. You'll get caught." Despite sporadic grumblings from congressional flag-wavers, the Voice scrupulously tells both the good and the bad about the U.S., presents both sides of all major issues.
Polyp Problem. Translating the news into 37 languages presents perennial difficulties (President Johnson's throat polyp came out in Vietnamese as "a boil in the side of the throat"), but the Voice, particularly in Communist countries, often scoops the local radio and press. In 1964, its Russian broadcasts beat the state radio by 1½ hours with news of the fall of Nikita Khrushchev; this year it carried the most complete accounts of the trials of Writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. Red China, North Korea and North Viet Nam still try to jam VOA transmissions, but all the Communist countries of Europe except Bulgaria have quit jamming.
In Europe, VOA remains second in credibility to the BBC, whose wartime broadcasts won it a lasting reputation for reliability. But it has greater respect in many parts of Africa, where, says a Nigerian newspaper editor, "it appears the BBC regrets that Britain ever abdicated power." In the credibility race, both friendly rivals far outdistance Radio Moscow and Radio Peking.
Multiplied Wattage. In total hours beamed over short wave, VOA, with 854 hours a week, is behind Russia (1,403 hours) and China (1,015 hours), and is only slightly ahead of the United Arab Republic (827 hours). However, by freely offering local stations tapes of its own programs and live broadcasts of special events, such as U.S. space shots, VOA vastly multiplies its wattage.
The competition is at least as stiff as any commercial broadcaster faces. Even so, Red China's Foreign Minister Chen Yi has described himself as a listener of Voice newscasts. Captured Viet Cong posters warn direly that "listening to the Voice of America is like letting a thief in your house who will steal your soul." Graduating Moscow high school students danced until dawn to VOA music in Red Square last spring. In the forests of Togo, one Christian Agbeze spends three hours a day—one hour down a mountain and two hours up—walking to the nearest village with a radio so that he can catch Voice broadcasts. Never one to let a listener down, VOA is sending him his own transistor.