Talk:Smith-Mundt Act
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[edit] Is VOA and Radio Free Asia permitted to spam?
I get a strange kind of spams almost daily about Chinese dissident news, using proxies and English study, which I absolutely had never asked for, and most U.S. citizens can not even recognize. Many spams are encourageing feedback to email address on voanews.com, voa.gov and rfa.org to "improve their service". The spams does not have a pattern of their subjects or addresses.--Skyfiler 17:44, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
- Could someone write about the motivation of this law? Why were its supporters interested in preventing the broadcast of such information in the US? Because the views of the Voice of American or Radio Free Europe were so controversial that they would offend people in the US? I don't think so. Because the views were so poorly supported that broadcasting them in the US would make clear VOA or RFE were sham operations? Doesn't sound right. Because the Communist Party was so strong domestically that it would have staged mass demonstrations against this kind of broadcast? Of course not. Because private businesses didn't want to face any competition from government-supported media? Maybe. But I have no idea. Since the Freedom of Information Act didn't exist when Smith-Mundt was passed (~25 year gap), the motivation wasn't to forestall any FOIA requests to get files from VOA or RFE. In short, I'm totally puzzzled and hope someone better informed will add this to this stub. Interlingua 13:18, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
-
- I would like to second this request, if anyone knows anything more. It does seem quite odd. To my knowledge, VOA content was never particularly controversial nor "so poorly supported...", etc. I think that the "competition with domestic media" explanation is probably the most likely, although then why was the ability to examine broadcasts limited only to researchers and so on? Also, are VOA broadcasts copyright? Being works of the US Government I would think not, but suppose today someone decided to record them and rebroadcast them domestically in the US, perhaps via the Internet? Would that violate this law? Gee, that seems impossible, due to 1st Amendment implications, even if the government forbids itself from disseminating this stuff domestically... Anyway, this is a fascinating topic.--69.22.75.205 13:53, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Also Fulbright Program
Wasn't this act also the basis of the Fulbright Program? Badagnani 10:30, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
