There were "problems and mistakes" with Voice of America coverage in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the chief of the US government-funded radio network admitted.
"I will candidly acknowledge that in the pursuit of this historic story, there have been some problems and mistakes as we ramped up our coverage," Marc Nathanson, chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors told the House International Relations Committee Wednesday.
VOA has been under heavy fire since September, when, over objections from the State Department, the station broadcast excerpts from an interview with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, who sought to explain the Taliban's refusal to turn over Islamic militant Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the terror attacks in New York and Washington.
"VOA has a charter which defines very clearly their obligations, their responsibilities and their purpose and we think that broadcasting interviews with the head of the Taliban is not consistent with that," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said at the time.
In Congress, the flap has led to proposals to revive Radio Free Afghanistan, which broadcast during the 1979-1989 Soviet invasion of the country.
Nathanson said he wished the Omar remarks and another VOA report, quoting a man associated with an Egyptian radical Islamic group, "had been handled differently."
"The process by which this report was received, edited and aired was not seamless," he said, in reference to the Omar interview.
"In the end, we learned lessons about sure-footedness and the need for constant internal communication," he added.
Nathanson also admitted mistakes were made last month in the handling of a report quoting an Egyptian exile living in London without explaining his association with the Islamic Group, an organization that has claimed responsibility for many terrorist attacks in Egypt.
"That was a serious omission," the board chairman said. "The reporter who filed the story has been reassigned. The editors who handled the story have been admonished."
Committee chairman Henry Hyde expressed concern that US air strikes against terrorist targets in Afghanistan were being "widely depicted in the Muslim world as a war against Islam" and were sparking riots threatening friendly governments.
"How is it that the country that invented Hollywood and Madison Avenue has such trouble promoting a positive image of itself overseas?" the Illinois Republican asked -- WASHINGTON (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
