Why China's Firewall Needs to Be Knocked Down: Michael Pack

The left, loosely speaking, has invested in culture huge amounts of money since the 60s. Every university in America has a film school. They are consciously woke as a general rule. Michael Pack is a documentary filmmaker and president of Palladium Pictures. During Trump's first presidency, he led the U.S. Agency for Global Media, USAGM, which oversees America's state-funded news networks, including Voice of America. The five broadcasters that are under the umbrella of USAGM, the budget is something like $900 million. They broadcast in over 70 languages to hundreds of millions of people a week. So it's really a potent tool, and it's designed to promote American ideas and values abroad. In this episode, we discuss his recent films, The Future of Media, and how the U.S. government can better leverage public diplomacy as a tool against its adversaries. We could do nothing better really than to knock that firewall down. I think if the people in This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Michael Pack, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. It's great to be back. Thank you for having me on, Jan. Last time we spoke on camera, over four years ago, you were the head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media in Trump 45, the previous Trump administration. We talked about many things. The big thing we talked about was actually your vision to have USAGM provide balanced information in juxtaposition to what you characterize as a biased news media in America. Has anything changed? No, and I think that mission is more important than ever. It's the core mission of the five broadcasters that are under the umbrella of USAGM, which is the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting, and Cuba Broadcasting. The budget is something like $900 million. It's only a mid-sized government agency, but it's one of the largest broadcasters in the world. It's really a potent tool, and it's designed to promote American ideas and values abroad. As you know better than most, Jan, those ideas and values are under attack from China, from Russia, from all of our adversaries. They have a different vision of the world, and we should be there explaining our vision of the world. That's what USAGM is for, and it's needed now more than ever. I was talking about your criticism of the domestic media in this instance, although you're absolutely exactly right. Has anything shifted in that realm in your mind? It does seem like, as we go into the second Trump administration, that the media is a little more open-minded about Trump and his ideas. It's the same group of people, and we'll see. The challenge will be if something starts to go wrong under the Trump administration, as things always do when you're president, and the world is a complex and dangerous place, how will the media cover that when there is a challenge? At the moment, it looks like there might be a change. You see Meta giving up its biased fact-checking department. You see newspapers that used to endorse a political candidate not doing it. There seems to be openness, but we'll see. I have cautious optimism about that. You had a vision for USAGM of promoting American values. Indeed, I think that's part of its charter. But there are very different visions about what that actually means. Well, that's right. The people running that agency and the individual broadcasters—so far, President Trump has only mentioned Carrie Lake for the Voice of America—but they will have a challenge. These organizations become very biased over the years. Very anti-Trump, for one thing, but very biased and often sympathetic to the very governments they're supposed to be critical of. But one example, the notorious recent example, is the VOA, Voice of America, refused to label Hamas a terrorist organization. For a while, they put terrorist in quotes. And then under further pressure, they finally called it a terrorist organization. But this was a time when CNN and MSNBC and the New York Times called Hamas a terrorist organization. So this is an instance of the VOA being, loosely speaking, to the left, even of legacy media. So that suggests it's a symptom of a very deep bias. That'll be the job of Carrie Lake and others to try to get to fix. I was often accused of trying to turn the VOA and these others into Trump TV, but nothing could be further from the truth. I really wanted it simply to adhere to its charter. And the charter of the VOA now applies to all of them to reflect the views of the administration, along with counter views, and to reflect the diversity of views of the American people. And if they simply adhere to their charter, they would be a force for tremendous good in the world. I mean, to some extent they are now. There are heroic journalists in all these organizations, especially working under communist and authoritarian regimes and risking their lives, but they could be a much greater force for good. And there's great potential, and I'm hoping that the next Trump team will tap into that potential. Some people, and frankly, on both sides of the spectrum or even beyond that, would describe USAGM as a propaganda agency. How do you respond to that? I think that it's designed to present news in a fair and objective way. But it is true that the Voice of America reporters are paid by the U.S. government, so they're not exactly like a CNN or New York Times reporter. But I don't think it's propaganda. I don't think that would be useful, and I don't think that would be fair. There's a lot of talk about cuts. Doge is supposed to cut $2 trillion. Is USAGM something that should be on the chopping block, given some of the problems that you just described? We proposed to consolidate the five broadcasters into one. You could still have brands called Radio for Europe or Radio Liberty, for example. But why have five legal departments, five personnel departments, five comms departments? So we could propose a consolidation that would save $200 million on the budget. I mean, they surely could do that. And out of a $900 million budget, that's a significant cut. So I think it could be made efficient and brought into the modern world and save a lot of money. I also think there is a lot of extra staff that could be a leaner, meaner organization as well. So you could save money. But I think like a lot of organizations, it needs to actually fulfill its mission. If it fails to fulfill its mission, it's not worth spending a penny on it. One thing that we did talk about last time is the use of firewall circumvention software, most notably in China, where the biggest firewall is. Well, I think it's a huge, huge issue and a huge opportunity really for the U.S. government. USAGM has a pot of money for internet firewall circumvention technology. And there are similar pots of money in other parts of the government, like the State Department and the Defense Department. But they don't coordinate and they're not enough. To take the China example, and that is the big one, they spend a huge amount of money building up their firewall. And it's a unified concerted effort. And the U.S. government should have a unified concerted effort to circumvent that firewall. I think it should be beyond USAGM. Even though I think USAGM tries to do a good job in that area, it's not really the business of journalists and broadcasters to do that. It's really a technological engineering task. And it should be a sort of all-government task. There should be a group put together with representatives from USAGM, but also from other parts of the government. And there should be a big unified budget to do it. And we should start to spend something like the money to get around the firewall that China spends building it up. And I think that would do a huge amount. We believe here in the United States, of course, in the free exchange of ideas. And we believe our ideas would win if people have a chance to hear them. The Chinese government builds the firewall because it knows very well that their ideas would not work if there were really a free exchange of ideas. So we could do nothing better really than to knock that firewall down. I think if the people in China had a chance to hear the range of ideas out there, it would change the country more than almost anything else. And it's not expensive compared to the military and all the other things we have to fund in relationship to China. And I think it's a really important thing. I would like it to be given priority in the next Trump administration if I had my way, which I don't. It also strikes me as one of the nicest ways to approach the communist regime in China. Well, it's not an act of aggression to say that people should hear lots of viewpoints. It's not like building up the military or patrolling the South China Seas or anything else. It's not a hostile act. It is just an act that reflects our view that the world needs a free exchange of ideas and that the best ideas need to be the ones that win, not the ones that are simply sponsored by an authoritarian government. Michael, we're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back. And we're back with Michael Pack, president of Palladium Pictures. It would signal the return of the United States to the use of public diplomacy, namely engaging the people of countries as opposed to the regimes. That's right. Public diplomacy is way cheaper than military action. And so, I think we need to use all of our soft power better than we've been doing so far. Let's talk about something else. You've been a filmmaker for many decades now. You made Created Equal, one of my favorite films I've seen certainly in the last 10 years. You're making a series of short documentaries, most recently, The Prime Minister versus The Blob, if I remember the name correctly. Let's talk about your work as a journalist, as a filmmaker. Well, that's right. I've been making documentaries for many decades. We've done over 15 that have been nationally broadcast on PBS. The last one was the one you just mentioned, Created Equal, Clarence Thomas and His Own Words, still available on Amazon for those who want to watch it, or anybody can find any of our films through our current website, palladiumpictures.com. But because of the success of the Clarence Thomas film, and it did really well. It was in movie theaters until COVID shut them down. It had a national broadcast on PBS that was very well viewed, and now it's streaming. And it got great reviews, won awards, and got a lot of attention. And so, we were given the funding to up our game, to produce more and do more. So, we started this new company, Palladium Pictures, and it has really three pillars. One is the traditional long-form documentary, like Created Equal, that we've been doing for years. But it has two other pillars as well. One of them is short-form documentaries that we're doing in collaboration with the Wall Street Journal opinion section, to reach a sort of different audience. And those are designed to be about ideas and events that, usually from the recent past, that have been misreported, underreported, or memory hold. And the first two are now available for free on the Wall Street Journal website, wsj.com, or via our website. And the first one is about the worst anti-Semitic race riot in American history in Crown Heights in 1991. And I think it has lessons for today about anti-Semitism, which is on the rise. And just so very briefly, what happened for starters? I think it's actually incredibly important to know this. Well, it was 1991, a hot summer day, and there had already been a little tension between the Black community and the Jewish community. Louis Farrakhan was in sort of his heyday. And, you know, Leonard Jeffries, for instance, a CUNY professor, chair of their African-American history study department, uncle of Hakeem Jeffries, he talked about Blacks being Sun people, and Whites being Ice people, and mixing, and Jews being responsible for the slave trade. So there was a lot of tension in the air. And this section of Brooklyn, Crown Heights, is where the Chabad community is, which is a Hasidic sect run by, at that time, their very famous Rabbi Schneerson was alive, and he was very much revered. And he was, every month he went to visit the graves of his wife and his predecessor. And because he was such a famous religious figure, he had a police escort. And he was returning back from that visit, his first two cars of his motorcade went through a light, and the third car, which had his assistance in it, ran either a yellow or a red light, hit another car, careened off that car, hit a pillar, and then ran into two young Black children who were playing on the street, hurting one, and eventually the other one died of his wounds. So that caused a riot in the Hasidic community. He was accused of doing it on purpose, although how you could hit a car and then careen off another pillar and hit somebody on purpose, I don't know. But it whipped up frenzy, and a guy named Charles Price whipped up the crowd, and they went careening through the neighborhood looking for Jews to beat up. Charles Price and a group of others ran into this Hasidic student, Yankel Rosenbaum, said, there's a Jew, get him. They attacked him, stabbed him, and he died of his wounds. And that further inflamed the riot. It went on for two or three days. Al Sharpton came the next day. There were a lot of riots, you know, and a lot of marches and anti-Semitic slogans, you know, houses were trashed, Jewish merchants were terrorized, and the police and the mayor really did very little until the mayor and the police chief themselves were attacked, and then this was into the third day, and then they ended the riot. They turned to their deputy police chief, had him end it, and he ended it in hours. So the issue is, why did it go on so long? Why is the city of New York unable to stand up to this anti-Semitic violence? And what does it say about today? So that's the sort of general thrust of the film. What does it say about today? It says that if you have a democratic government, they have trouble standing up to violence on the left, period, and especially anti-Semitic violence. I don't believe the mayor, Mayor Dinkins, was himself even a little bit anti-Semitic. He was the first black mayor of New York, but he just couldn't stand up to Al Sharpton and others that were whipping up the crowds. If there had been anti-Semitic violence from the right, if there had been neo-Nazis, no problem for Mayor Dinkins. But I think he just could not stand up to anti-Semitic violence from the left. And you see that, you saw that recently on college campuses, where college presidents, also not anti-Semitic, just couldn't stand up to defend Jewish students when they're under attack from what they perceive to be progressive forces defending Hamas. I'll encourage people to watch the film. Indeed, watch the film. Let's talk about The Prime Minister and the Blob, which I had the pleasure of seeing not too long ago. When I watched that film, it struck me that you take the idea of taking a balanced approach very seriously. I'm glad you brought that up, Jan. There are a lot of great progressive, woke, left-of-center filmmakers, and this is in a way a renaissance for documentary filmmaking. There are more of them than ever, and they're on Hulu and Netflix and Amazon and everywhere, and the quality has gone up over the years. But they all have one point of view. We did a documentary, as you point out, about Clarence Thomas. Another group with a different bias did many documentaries about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That's fine, but we need both kinds of documentaries out there. We really need more documentaries, more media, period, on the conservative, non-woke side. We want to reach the middle. I think what is out there on our side that is successful tends to be preaching to the choir, which I think has a use as well. There are red-meat conservative documentaries, and that's fine. I know many of the people who produce them. But we need to reach people in the middle, and I think the way you reach them is by a fair, unbiased presentation of the facts and by telling a good story. So we are careful to do both those things. In the Crown Heights film, we interviewed Al Sharpton. I tried very hard, and I think I did, to be fair to his point of view, and he has a strong point of view, and he has a right to express it. We try to stick to the facts and not engage in character assassination or biased reporting. It is the same thing with the Liz Truss documentary, which you saw at that wonderful screening. As you know, Liz Truss was the shortest prime minister in British history, 44 days until she resigned, 49 days total until the next prime minister came into office. So the issue is, why so short? What happened? The kind of major media story is she proposed a mini-budget that crashed the pound, and then there was such a financial disaster that she was forced from office. There's truth to that story, but there's really way more to it than that. A lot of the crashing of the pound had to do with her battles with the Bank of England and other forces in the government that were opposed to her Thatcherite, more conservative economic views. So we wanted to present the story from multiple points of view. We have a long interview with Liz Truss, but we have a long interview with people also from the Labour Party, conservatives who don't agree with her, cabinet members who disagree with her on different things. So we try to present the story in a straightforward manner so that viewers can make up their own minds. I take a lot of inspiration from your work as well in this area. We have a lot of people that, of course, really love and appreciate our work, but ultimately, it's really important to try to reach the people that don't. Indeed. I think there are a lot of people out there. In a way, the election indicates that there are lots of people who are instinctively critical of the sort of woke agenda, but don't really understand why. They know it's wrong, but they kind of need facts, need information. I think that there's really a need for people like us at Plain and Pictures, like the Epoch Times, and we need many others in this space to present the facts from another point of view, really. There's just not enough of us. So I hope that this moment leads to a resurgence of more people joining the work that you and I are both doing. There's a third thing that you're doing at Palladium, which I find very exciting. In fact, I'm going to be recommending one of our filmmakers to apply to your incubator, which has made its first batch of films recently. So just tell me about that, and there might be budding filmmakers who are keen to get some support in their work. Just because of what we've been talking about, because there's just a dearth of good documentaries on our side, one of the reasons for it is there are just not enough talented filmmakers. There's really a shortage, and part of the reason for that is because the left, loosely speaking, has invested in culture huge amounts of money since the 60s. I like to say they spend like tens of billions of dollars in this space, and on the right, we spend tens of millions of dollars a thousand times less. They've built institutions. They've built systems of training. They've built an ecosystem for young left-of-center filmmakers, starting in film school. Every university in America has a film school. They are consciously woke, as a general rule. Often they advertise that they're going to train advocacy filmmakers, and they graduate tens of thousands of people every year. So even if only 10% of them have talent and succeed, that's still a very big talent pool, and we don't have that. In order to help start to redress that problem, we have this training program, this incubator program, to sort of develop the talent that we have. So the program is not for people right out of film school, but people who've made a few films, and they can apply. They can go to our website, planningpictures.com, where there's an incubator button, and apply. And every year we accept four or six. We are just now reviewing the second group, but we'll do it every year. And the goal is to sort of teach people to make the kind of films that we are talking about, that are fact-based, that are designed to reach the center, and that are story-oriented. So we are very proud of the first group of four. This incubator is run by my son Thomas, which I'm proud that he has done. He started it from zero. We pull from people who maybe work in conservative organizations, and have done documentaries maybe for think tanks, or non-profits, but they've never done their own film. So they need to learn how to tell a story, not just make an essay. Thomas always says, documentaries combine journalism and art. And we really work with these people on both those wings. And it's been a very, I'm amazed at how far along all four of them came. And we are very pleased about the group that's coming this year. And I hope that you do send more people to us for next year. And I hope that your listeners, if they know anybody like that, sends them to our website and applies too. A final thought as we finish? I think that the big themes that we've talked about are important, that it's very important to encourage new kinds of media that can speak to the people, for instance, who voted for Donald Trump or the people who are uncommitted in the middle of the country. A process that both the Epoch Times, Palladium Pictures, and a few others are involved in doing. But I hope more join that process in the months to come. Michael Pack, it's such a pleasure to have you on again. Thank you very much, Jan. Pleasure to be on. Thank you all for joining Michael Pack and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.