Time to scrap TV Marti, critics say

MIAMI - Everything about the evening newscast at TV Marti looks and sounds as it might at any live broadcast studio.

Cameras, lights, a smooth-voiced anchor and a roomful of technicians sitting in front of monitors get ready as the seconds tick down to 6 p.m.

All that is missing is the audience.

For the past 18 years that has been the daily dilemma at TV Marti, the world's least-watched news station. The United States has spent an estimated half billion dollars over the past two decades broadcasting TV and radio programming into Cuba.

But the U.S. government has yet to find a way to stop Cuba from jamming the signal of TV Marti, according to a report issued this month by the Government Accountability Office, the research arm of Congress. Even though the radio signal has better reception, both TV and Radio Marti had audiences of less than 1 percent of Cuba's 11 million residents, it said.

Critics say enough is enough. Recalling how President Obama used his inaugural address to state his belief in "government that works," some argue that the time has come to pull the plug on TV Marti. "It's our taxpayers' money, and these are hard times," said John Nichols, director of communications at Penn State University.

Radio Marti began broadcasting in 1985 as part of an effort by the Reagan administration to promote democracy by countering Cuba's state-run media. TV Marti was added in 1990. In the early years the stations operated out of Washington, as part of the U.S. international broadcasting arm, which includes Voice of America.

But political pressure from Cuban exiles in Miami brought about the stations' relocation to Miami in 1996. Critics say that move doomed the stations by bringing them under the domination of Miami's hard-line Cuban exile groups. As a sign of that influence, the stations' offices today are housed in a building named after Jorge Mas Canosa, the late and legendary founder of one of the main exile groups.

The GAO report has revived questions about the effectiveness of the Marti stations, as well as a perpetually poor standard of journalism. Internal reviews over the last five years found repeated problems, such as editorializing and "the presentation of individual views as news," the report said. It also found use of "unsubstantiated reports coming from Cuba," and the use of "offensive and incendiary language in broadcasts."

Officials at TV and Radio Marti, who are almost all Cuban exiles, concede that the report was fair. Even so, they strenuously defend the $34 million annual budget allocated by Congress.

"Overall, we are fairly satisfied with the report," said Pedro Roig, a Cuban-American attorney who heads the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which manages the stations.

But he went on to question the methodology used to measure the audience, pointing out that Cuba does not allow independent polling,