STEPHE MILLER
77
I thought of a particular person who worked at the Radios or what I
thought about a certain controversy. Occasionally I was not sure what
I was supposed to be doing, but I got along with a ll three men and–
more important-l broadly agreed with Shakespeare's program to
reform the Radios. (Of course, a cynic could say that I had to agree if I
wanted to keep my job.)
Did the Radios need to be reformed? Many observers in Munich and
elsewhere thought that the Radios were doing a good job. In the 1950S
and 1960s the Radios had sometimes been guilty of strident anti–
communism and irresponsible broadcasting. RFE's Hungarian Service
apparently encouraged Hungarians to rise up in 1956, though what
exactly the service did is a matter of some debate. Yet after 1973, when
the Radios lost their CIA connection and became publicly funded, they
had become respected in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
Staffers in Munich worried that the new Reagan Administration team
would undermine the reputation for objectivity that the Radios had
slowly gained. They feared that Shakespeare would restore the Radios'
strident anti-communism of the early years and make them into cheer–
leaders for the Reagan Administration. The concern was that if such
changes were made, RFE
I
RL's audience would decline. But some
RFEIRL employees welcomed the Reagan team because they thought
that Radio officials were too eager to please reformist communist
regimes, and as a result rarely gave airtime to outspoken dissidents.
When I came on board in January 1983 I knew little about the
Radios, but soon realized that some reforms were necessary. To my
mind, the problem was not that Radio staffers were soft on commu–
nism-an absurd charge since many had suffered under communist
regimes, and some had even spent time in prison. Rather, the main prob–
lem was that the spectrum of news and opinion was too narrow. The
news focused heavily on Western Europe-especially on the doings of
left-liberal political parties and Eurocommunism. As Arch Puddington
says in
Broadcasting Freedom,
a study of RFE/RL, "Jim Brown Ithe
Director of RFEI encouraged his broadcasters to feature items about the
rift in the global Communist movement caused by the ferment in the
Italian and Spanish parties." The daily "budget"-the package of news
stories written by
RFE/RL
journalists and opinion pieces and general
interest stories that were culled from the Western press-contained few
articles about social and economic developments in the United States
and few columns by conservative and neoconservative writers.
Many high-level employees were what I would call "Euro-ists." They
thought developments in Western Europe were of far greater interest to
