Submitted by John Stauber on
"From a ground-floor office in a nondescript building in
Washington, the US government's newest radio station is sending a message to the Arab world. ... This is the sound of three-month old Radio Sawa: 85 percent pop music, 15 percent government-generated news, slickly packaged with market research in hand. To counteract the anti-American diatribes on the Middle East's airwaves, a senior American radio executive has persuaded Congress to use the simple syntax of the young and lovelorn to sell the US to the youth of the Arab world. ... Norman J. Pattiz, chief executive of Westwood One, the largest radio company in the US, and chairman of the Mideast subcommittee of the US government's Broadcasting Board of Governors, has been the moving force behind Radio Sawa. ... He sees Radio Sawa as 'the future of the Voice of America,' the prototype for future government radio - and perhaps, eventually, television - broadcasts. The Voice of America's previous Arabic-language programming, which had been broadcast on shortwave, has been canceled; almost all the Arabic-language news staff has been dispatched to work at Radio Sawa."
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