Internews: Arcata's Window to the World

"It looks like such an unassuming building," mused an anonymous passer-by, referring to the blue and buff-colored 19th-century clapboard house standing across the street. "You'd have no idea ... "

And apparently, very few in Arcata are aware of what goes on inside this two-storystructure at the corner of Eighth and J streets, just two blocks from the plaza. They have no idea that the most heavily government-funded nonprofit media organization in the nation is run from this tiny Northwestern college town.

In the early '80s, the Internews Network Inc. was founded on a shoestring budget by three anti-nuclear activists named David Hoffman, Kim Spencer and Evelyn Messinger. Since its humble beginnings, the nonprofit organization has set out to conquer the world, and many would say it has succeeded. It now has offices operating in 19 countries that are funded by government and private institutions to the tune of $15 million annually. It also has offices in New York, Washington and San Francisco - but it is in Arcata that its world headquarters still reside, unbeknownst to much of the local community.

Founder of Internews David Hoffman shows his playful side as he supports the world.

One may wonder how it came to be that this major global force for the advance of democracy - and along with it, capitalism - has landed itself in the heart of such a town as Arcata. The story of Internews began in 1976, when Hoffman, now Internews' president, moved to a remote cabin on Grizzly Mountain in search of escape from the trappings of Western society. Hoffman had been working in San Francisco as a labor-union organizer when he saw the movie "Taxi Driver" for the first time. The film sparked a profound epiphany in the young man, and he decided to quit his job and take up a friend's offer to rent a house in the Humboldt wilderness for $65 a month. He lived for two years without electricity, growing his own food and reading works of Eastern philosophy by the light of a kerosene lamp.

The world is not something that a man like Hoffman could stay away from for good, however, and his decision to re-enter society would be one whose effects would eventually be felt around the planet.

"I ended up leaving the mountain, feeling sort of like Zarathustra," said Hoffman, reclining in front of a computer in his small office, the walls of which are adorned with world maps and tribal artifacts.

Hoffman left his rural haven in Humboldt County for Europe. It was 1979, a time when the Cold War and the advent of nuclear energy had raised anti-nuclear tension in Europe to a pitch high above that in the United States. He was confronted with a cause of which he knew he had to be a part. Upon his return, ripe for action, he presented a two-page paper on the need for a summer social movement in this country in the tradition of such historic American social movements leading up to the civil rights movement and the "Summer of Love" that kicked off earnest protesting of the Vietnam War.

Hoffman tracked down Kim Spencer, who had been making black-and-white videos about environmental issues on the East Coast before Three Mile Island, and a legendary partnership was born. Spencer is now married to the group's third co-founder, Evelyn Messinger.

Their first big production was a revolutionary new genre of television that they called "spacebridges" - live satellite dialogues designed to break down the barriers between American and Soviet citizens. The idea was picked up by ABC in the mid-'80s and turned into the groundbreaking "Capital to Capital" television series that matched lawmakers of the Soviet Duma with those in the U.S. Congress, earning Internews an Emmy for a technological breakthrough.

The spacebridges format has also evolved into the primary concept behind two recent Internews documentary projects, the PBS series "Vis a Vis" and a nonprofit organization called Internews Interactive (InterAct).

The work Internews is best known for, however, has taken place in other parts of the world. Its primary mission advanced in a new direction after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when the organization moved offices into the divided Soviet region in support of its burgeoning independent television industry.

"When any political system implodes, frequencies become available," wrote Messinger in a recent feature story for "The Nation." "Across the former Communist countries, people bribed or cajoled or otherwise wrenched frequencies away from the chaotic and corrupt remnants of the collapsing systems and won their very own TV channels."

These tiny start-up stations, however, were without funding, without equipment and without experience. Enter Internews. The organization's new focus, ten years after its inception, was the financial support and expert training of indigenous journalists and video technologists. It began its crusade in the republics of the former Soviet Union, but within the year it had spread throughout Central Asia, with the Balkans, Europe, the Middle East and Africa soon to follow. It now has offices in Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, the Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Tanzania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, France, Belgium, Jerusalem, Iran, Indonesia and East Timor.

In these countries, Internews' primary focus is to help nongovernmental radio and television stations flourish. It has often had to build workable atmospheres virtually from the ground up.

"In some of these places, it's like working in the Wild West," said Internews' Director of Contracts Mark Hubbard. "Some of them have only four or five hours of electricity a day and no hot water. Even in big cities, the basic infrastructure is impaired or missing altogether."

Internews has provided training by Western experts to more than 10,000 journalists and other media professionals, as well as millions of dollars in broadcasting equipment and technical assistance to independent stations. It facilitates the development and exchange of newscasts within struggling countries with the purpose of keeping information flowing freely in lands where state-fed propaganda was once the only source available.

Perhaps the greatest testament to the success of Internews' mission was the Internews- supported Russian stations' coverage of the first Chechen war in 1995. Many sent their own correspondents to the battlefront to bring back images of a decimated Grozny and coffins returning from Chechnya, disputing the Kremlin's claim that the war was already over. However, Internews Russia's weekly analytical news program, "Fourth Estate," recently broadcast an episode describing the media's failings in the current Chechen war. It disclosed that the danger of abduction of reporters by Chechens and the government's renewed commitment to strict control of information have returned the nation's media exposure of this event to the sway of state propaganda.

Despite such obstacles, Internews' influence is steadily gaining strength in recently democratized nations. It offers legal advocacy in matters of free expression and media law, and even assists governments in making laws.

Internews HQ is a hotbed of activity.

By 1994, Internews felt it was necessary to begin offering marketing advice, as well. In Russia, it started a temporary Media Development Program to "speed the institutional and commercial development of Russian media." The program assisted the Independent Broadcasting System, which links more than 120 independent stations across seven Newly Independent States, by offering up capitalist wisdom to Russian media professionals that are new to the free market.

Eager to make their multinational mark in undiscovered country, the first and highest- paying advertisers to sell their wares on Russian independent television have hailed almost exclusively from the corporate West: Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, Mars, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Revlon, Cadbury Schweppes. The international market proved so high paying, in fact, that Russian businesses were unable to pay the inflated ad rates of their own airwaves.

The irony of the part he plays in inaugurating less-developed nations to the commercial society in which he once could not bear to live is not wasted on Hoffman.

"I often worry whether our support for independent media in countries transitioning to democracy has had the unintended effect of introducing the worst sins of American entertainment culture," he said. "Are we, as one trainer noted, 'making the world safe for "Baywatch"'?"

As an invading force of Western civilization with a Zen-inspired conscience, Hoffman's life and work continue to be fraught with such moral dilemmas. Since his exodus from the Humboldt woods, he has managed to bring the West's highest ideals with him to untouched lands across the seas; but perhaps it's his knack for working within the system that makes him a uniquely successful ideologist. "Unbridled corporate greed or a fundamentalist rejection of the modern world represents threats to the environment, human rights and democracy," insists Hoffman. "We need an open media for the free exchange of ideas, for all the world's citizens to have equal access to information, to expose corruption and injustice, and to participate in a global marketplace."

An integral part of his practical persona, as well as the fire that fuels the Internews machine, is Hoffman's role as the group's head fund raiser. This means that it is Hoffman, a man dubbed the "nonprofit Ted Turner" by post-Soviet media experts, that goes to Washington to schmooze with the people with the money - and an exceptional amount of money, at that.

Internews' largest source of funds is the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the federal agency that implements America's foreign aid programs. USAID issues yearly grants to Internews in amounts exceeding $10 million.

Hubbard describes the government's willingness to fund their projects as preventative. "If Russia were to become our enemy again, it would cost billions of dollars to avoid war," he said. "Internews helps them see us as people just like them, and that makes it that much harder to want to nuke us."

The government is not the only establishment with a financial interest in the projects of Internews. It is also backed by such private financial heavyweights as the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller Financial Services (which has a representative on Internews' board of directors), and the Open Society Institute, which was founded by billionaire philanthropist and international businessman George Soros.

"I often worry whether our support for independent media in countries transitioning to democracy has had the unintended effect of introducing the worst sins of American entertainment culture." -David Hoffman

Soros, who has had a particular longstanding interest in Russia, has raised eyebrows as a benefactor for the advance of democracy. Some would say that the man leads a double life: he makes his fortune as an international speculator, but funds programs whose job it is to clean up the messes that such speculators make. Soros insists that his intentions have always been entirely pure on both accounts, but critics have questioned the probity of his access to insider information - in effect, the ability to make the rules for the field upon which he plays. He also has had over $1 billion invested in Russian companies that, perhaps coincidentally, would stand to benefit from the arrival of capitalism that Internews' programs have helped to hasten.

So the question may arise: what do these funders expect for their respective dollars? Hoffman does not deny that sometimes there are strings attached to the money that Internews is offered.

"They don't come out and say that you won't get their money unless you do something specific - they're very subtle," he explains. "But you know what they want ... and it's sometimes very hard to resist that temptation, when they're waving millions of dollars in front of you."

For example, according to Hoffman the U.S. government tendered large-scale funding to Internews on the condition that it open an office and begin programs in the southern "protected zones" of Iraq. The organization, however, opted not to take them up on that offer.

It has ruffled government feathers on other occasions, as well. "One of the heads of Internews Middle East, David Michaelis, suspects that U.S. government support for independent broadcasters was cut off because of complaints of Yasir Arafat, who feared that the stations were undermining his authority," said Hoffman. "During the Gulf War, many of these stations broadcast coverage of pro-Iraqi, anti-American demonstrators, and so both Arafat and the U.S. government had reasons to cut off assistance to them. We can't prove this, but many of the station managers in Jerusalem are convinced this is true."

Such setbacks have not hindered the success of Internews, however. It continues to expand its global enterprise, taking up the banner of free expression and democracy on ever-new frontiers. For instance, it has recently established a new satellite TV station called WorldLink TV (DirecTV channel 375), which it touts as the first public-affairs channel for Americans to broadcast since PBS.

The group's latest sphere of influence is the Internet. It has a well-established Russian language site (www.internews.ru) that averages more than 70,000 hits per month, and also funds the Arabic Media Internet Network (AMIN) site (www.amin.org), which has since become the largest source of Arab-language news on the Internet. Its newest project on the digital horizon is Open Media, which will strive to give a voice to the world's poor.

Internews has even enlisted the help of Humboldt State students. HSU students edited and currently maintain the site for its programs in Nigeria (www.internews.org/nigeria), and an HSU student that interned at Internews wrote much of the text on the "Vis a Vis" site (www.pbs.org/visavis). Most of the organization's interns come to Internews from HSU's master's program in social sciences, which began a new two-year program in 1997 that focuses on the theme of globalization.

Internews, as a purveyor of the international spread of the Western ideals of free expression and democracy, has risen to success on the wings of the globalization movement. It is, in fact, perhaps the boldest local example that we live in a time when a single person with a vision can obtain millions of dollars in funding for the purpose of disseminating that vision to nearly every corner of the planet.

Hoffman views the issue as complex. "It is not a matter of favoring or rejecting globalization, but of placing legitimate controls over it," he said. "The protesters in Seattle had many important points to make, not least of which is the lack of transparency in the World Trade Organization and other international financial institutions. ... Globalization is here. There is no turning back the clock. Information wants to be free."

In his personal life, however, Hoffman has always preferred the small-town coziness of Arcata life to the rest of the globe. With wide-eyed and sincere enthusiasm, he asserts that "Arcata is the greatest place in the world!" He has chosen to raise his children in this town and to run his international organization from here despite - or perhaps because of - the obstacles its isolation may impose. Living in this community, far from the bustling life of lunches and meetings that he is sure would occupy his life in New York or Washington, he says he is able to accomplish his work without such distractions while remaining close to the values that inspired him to begin Internews in the first place.

In the end, it is the necessity of exposing all truths that drives a newsman like Hoffman and a news organization like Internews to conquer the world. They believe that communication is tantamount to our survival - and as the unification of the planet becomes a reality, it is only by communicating with each other that we will be able to overcome our fears, reconcile our natures and work things out. Internews' mission is to make this possible, because, in Hoffman's words, "The only thing in the world that's as powerful as nuclear weapons is television."