Meltdown at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Korn Fired: Meltdown at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
As it turned out, you really and truly needed a ticket to get into the December meeting of the Broadcasting Board of Governors to try to figure out what’s going on with the complete disintegration of the taxpayer-funded Radio Liberty. Or to find out the fate of its highly problematic president, Steven Korn, a former CNN executive who has both led and fueled its meltdown. And as it also turned out, the board representatives were in no hurry to give that ticket to the press or, once the meeting was over, to encourage the press (i.e., me) to linger in order to discover what was bubbling beneath the blather. Korn especially wasn’t open to chat, his ruddy face as grim and rigid as Stonehenge, and his response to my interview request—a terse “I’m going on vacation”—as true a thing as he’s ever said.
Korn, as I soon discovered from two informed sources, will be going on permanent vacation. Come February, he was privately informed right before we met, he must leave the helm of Radio Liberty and its sister outfit, Radio Free Europe. Last week, his closest aides denied all talk of resignation to the RFE/RL staff, but then no one knows how long that inner circle will last either once they lose their champion. Just as urgent, I hear from those same sources: Korn is also not allowed to fire anyone at all during the weeks he has left. This was an essential part of the secret deal. Under his brief aegis and that of his most trusted aide, Julia Ragona, who is vice president for content, Radio Liberty, a onetime free speech and hard news beacon, has turned into a bloodbath, full of fear, fury—and almost no sound at all.
The Moscow radio component of Radio Liberty is for all practical purposes dead, in large part thanks to Vladimir Putin; and the region’s Internet service a disaster, with 41 of its best and most seasoned Russian journalists fired summarily, marched out, packed off in minivans, and dispatched to a lawyer’s office, having been told: (a) they couldn’t say goodbye to their audience and (b) they had no option but to resign with just a few months’ severance—or, as Liudmila Telen, then the editor of the Radio Liberty website, informs me, “to keep on working—but we would be denied access to the website and the office.” The Moscow editor recalls: “We asked for explanations, noting that such an immediate cessation will have a negative effect on audience [numbers] … but the answer was, ‘The decision is made, it is legal and therefore there is nothing to discuss.’” Small wonder that their page views have plummeted to 30,000-40,000 a day, from about 110,000. “No more burning issues, no more tough investigative journalism,” reports one knowledgeable source. “So there’s this huge loss of mission.”