The US Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 (Public Law 402), popularly referred to as the Smith-Mundt Act, established the programming mandate that still serves as the foundation for U.S. overseas information and cultural programs. It institutionalized the Voice of America and expanded the Fulbright exchange programs.
It was first introduced out of committee in December 1945 as the Bloom Bill. In July 1946, the Bloom Bill passed the House only to be blocked in the Senate by Senator Taft. Taft never gave a reason for his action but general politics and isolationism may have contributed as he was against nearly anything the Truman Administration was for and opposed sending US forces overseas for training after the war. The Bloom Bill was the basis of the bill Congressman Karl Mundt (R-SD) introduced on March 21, 1947, as H.R. 3342. An isolationist before Pearl Harbor, Mundt sought to formalize the State Department's information activities to ensure both funding and quality thresholds. Cosponsoring in the Senate was Alexander Smith (R-NJ).
In August 1946, between the Bloom Bill and the introduction of the Smith-Mundt Act, was an amendment to the Surplus Property Act of 1944 that expanded funding and mandates for previously authorized exchange programs promoted by Senator William Fulbright (D-AR). The amendment expanded the exchanges to include books and cultural tours.
Congress, in recommending passage of the bill, declared that "truth can be a powerful weapon." Congress further declared six principles were required for the legislation to be successful in action: tell the truth; explain the motives of the United States; bolster morale and extend hope; give a true and convincing picture of American life, methods, and ideals; combat misrepresentation and distortion; and aggressively interpret and support American foreign policy.
Smith-Mundt was passed by Congress and signed into law by Harry S. Truman on January 27, 1948, in part because of the reactions by a Congressional delegation that toured Europe after then-Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced the Marshall Plan.
In the Act, Congress put in three major 'protections'. The first was to protect the American media by requiring the State Department to maximize its use of private resources. The second was to ensure the State Department would not have a monopoly on broadcasting. The third, the prohibition on domestic dissemination by the State Department, was put in place because Congress feared the State Department - full of "loafers, incompetents" and "men of strong Soviet leaning" - could undermine the US Government.
Today, the Smithh-Mundt Act's most well-known component is Section 501. In its original form, Section 501 directed the Secretary of State to disseminate information abroad. Modified in 1972 after Senator Fulbright declared that America's information broadcasters, the "Radios", "should be given an opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics." Trying to dis-establish America's international broadcasting, Fulbright asked the US Attorney General to block a domestic broadcast by a US Senator to his constituents of a movie produced by the United States Information Agency. The Attorney General, Richard Kleindienst, did not while noting the "apparent purpose" of the section prohibiting domestic dissemination applied to the State Department only and that Congress did intend that "USIA materials available to the American public through the press and members of Congress." Fulbright would fight the Nixon Administration to first get rid of the Radios and then attempt to abolish USIA. The Administration responded by moving the Radios out of USIA into a precursor to today's BBG and ultimately successfully battling Fulbright to that the once-powerful Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would not even go to the floor for his pet projects, "why bother?" he would ask.
Senator Fulbright realized the Cold War had shifted. It was no longer a struggle for the minds and wills of people, as President's Truman and Eisenhower had described it. It was now, by the early 1970's, firmly a bipolar, superpower versus superpower contest measured not in mindshare but in missiles, bombers, tanks, and submarines. The Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 1972 amended the Smith-Mundt Act to include a ban on disseminating within the United States any "information about the United States, its people, and its policies" prepared for dissemination abroad.
The "loop hole" was further tightened in 1985 when Senator Zorinsky, inspecting USIA for nepotism and fighting the establishment of Radio MARTI, was unhappy with what he thought was a tactical use of "public diplomacy" - namely the USIA - to support immediate policies goals of the Reagan Administration. On the floor of the Senate, Zorinsky declared that the "American taxpayer certainly does not need or want his tax dollars used to support the US government propaganda directed at him or her." This quote, often cited, was offered in a context that is often not cited. A breath or two before the aforementioned quote, Zorinsky said, referring to the 1972 amendment, "By law, the USIA cannot engage in domestic propaganda. This distinguishes us, a free society, from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principle government activity." The Zorinsky Amendment added a new prohibition: "no funds authorized to be appropriated to the United States Information Agency shall be used to influence public opinion in the United States, and no program material prepared by the United States Information Agency shall be distributed within the United States." This amendment also added that domestic access to USIA products be for "for examination only." For several years, Zorinsky Amendment was interpreted as a Congressional intention to exempt USIA products from the Freedom of Information Act.
An act of Congress, through legislation or verbal agreement, is traditionally used permit a program for domestic release in less than 12 years. USIA's John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums (1965) was the first film that Congress approved for domestic release. 1.
The Smitht-Mundt Act does not define or use the word propaganda.
As the Smith-Mundt ban on domestic dissimination has been tightened over the years by subsequent legislation, Section 501 has been challenged on several grounds.
Many argue that the introduction of the internet and related advances in communication technologies have rendered the prohibition on domestic propaganda anachronistic. U.S. cultural and information programs meant for foreign audiences are now readily accessible via the web.
In 1994 when the USIA launched its Internet service, providing access to the text of news dispatches, and audio feeds from VOA radio programs, Senator Jesse Helms objected on the grounds that it violated the Smith Mundt Act. In response, the USIA moved these services from a domestic to a foreign server. Employees of overseas and cultural programs were also forbidden from giving out the URL address of their websites to US citizens. However, these websites remain easily accessible via google and other internet search engines.
Others have challenged Smith Mundt on the grounds that it violates the Freedom of Information Act. In February 1996, Essential Information, Inc., a non-profit citizen activist group founded in 1982 by Ralph Nader asked the USIA for six months records. The USIA refused citing the Smith Mundt Act as the reason for noncompliance. Essential Information Inc. then filed suit. In November 1996 the federal District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled that the Smith-Mundt Act is one of the statutes requiring confidentiality addressed in the FOI Act's Exemption 3.
Smith-Mundt has taken on a new role in recent years with the expansion of "public affairs" activities throughout government. Each new program now includes a PA component, whose primary task is coordinating with Capitol Hill and conducting media relations domestically. Career PD officials in the field are expected to support these operations with regular feeds in the form of "success stories" for publication in the U.S. The U.S. Agency for International Development has developed its own international PA system, which largely bypasses State's "PD" network that formally comes under Smith-Mundt. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), housed in State, expressly demands that PAOs feed its domestic pipeline such stories, whose original ostensible purpose was to serve as overseas press releases -- the Smith-Mundt figleaf. The current head of its PA operation served as a political appointee press officer in Baghdad, where her primary task was handling U.S. media and Congressional liaison offices; she views this as the primary responsibility of all PAOs everywhere. Similar pressures now flow from other State offices. Rather than promote PD in the field, using informed local expertise, PAOs now are viewed as campaign cogs to buttress policies back home. Smith-Mundt is the only legal obstacle to this growing practice, and a weak one at that since non-State offices have a free hand.
Smith Mundt and the Fulbright Hays Act (1961) are considered to be the corner stones of United States public diplomacy legislation.
