Former VOA head Robert R. Reilly in today’s Wash Post:

In the spring of 2003, across a field of rubble in Baghdad, a young Iraqi journalist accosted me and demanded: “Why did you stop broadcasting substance and substitute music?” The year before the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the government entity in charge of radio broadcasting, had shut down the Voice of America’s Arabic service, and it ended most of its Farsi service in 2003. Voice of America had been broadcasting features, discussions of issues and editorials reflecting U.S. policies. But now it filled 50 minutes of each hour on Arabic-language Radio Sawa and most of the time on Persian-language Radio Farda with Eminem, J. Lo and Britney Spears.