By pure chance I stumbled recently on a news report posted on the U.S. taxpayer-funded Voice of America website. It was a news feature story about the personality cult of Argentine Communist Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
He is described as a “Marxist revolutionary” in a complimentary narrative that would make any antifa sympathizer proud. Americans who know something about the history of communist atrocities of the last century might find it shocking and wonder how their tax money is being spent. What VOA failed to mention is that Che was a ruthless communist, directly and indirectly responsible for brutal murders of tens of thousands of innocent human beings in Cuba and elsewhere.
I discovered through further research that this news feature report was originally prepared by Reuters, but VOA posted it on its main desktop website without giving credit to the news agency. VOA staff even put VOA letters on a Reuters photo showing the famous image of the communist hero. Whether or not it gives proper credit to Reuters, VOA is still responsible for everything it offers for public view under its name. The feature glorifying a Communist mass murderer was presented by the U.S. government as VOA’s own work.
In another historically ignorant report, VOA English and Russian services recently posted a video about the end of World War II with some true facts but also with some Soviet-style propaganda from Putin’s Russia. VOA failed to mention that the 1945 liberation from fascism brought Soviet enslavement to tens of millions of East Europeans for several decades. For many, one tyrant was replaced by another.
Putin’s media use such distortions of history and fake news as a propaganda weapon designed to divide Americans and interfere with U.S. elections. What most people don’t realize is that VOA can also influence outcomes of U.S. elections with biased reporting. While VOA’s federal agency gets only statistically insignificant 0.8% weekly reach for its costly TV/web Current Time program in Russia, thanks to the internet and social media, VOA news reports are now increasingly read by Americans in English and in some cases by U.S. citizens and residents in foreign languages. Many of the readers are American voters. This raises the troubling issue of U.S. government-employed journalists, writers, editors, and officials in charge of VOA being able to propagandize to Americans by promoting their personal ideological viewpoints and causes or otherwise misleading their audiences at taxpayers’ expense.
To minimize the threat of U.S. government employees interfering with domestic public opinion, Congress had made dissemination of VOA radio broadcasts in the United States practically impossible under the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which was mainly designed to promote foreign educational and cultural exchanges. But the ban was weakened several years ago in new legislation signed by President Barack Obama. This makes the need for keeping VOA accurate, balanced, and free from ideological bias critically important.
The budget of the federal U.S. Agency for Global Media, USAGM, is now about $800 million annually, more than what the U.S. government spent on information and propaganda during World War II. A large chunk of this money is given to VOA. In 1976, the U.S. Congress passed another law designed to keep VOA news free from ideological or partisan bias. Known as the VOA Charter, the law mandates that VOA news must always be accurate, balanced, comprehensive, and reflective of all responsible American opinions, both liberal and conservative.
Provisions of this law, which was not changed, have been nevertheless massively violated in the last several years, not by the Trump administration as some media reports warned, but by Obama administration officials still in charge of VOA and USAGM. VOA editors and reporters were caught targeting Americans on Facebook with biased and sometimes obscene attacks on President Trump, his family, and conservative members of Congress, including Sen. Ted Cruz. In 2016, some of these VOA editors even maligned Sen. Bernie Sanders when it seemed that he might defeat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination.
Mainstream American conservatives are rarely quoted on VOA, and more radical conservative journalists are simply ignored by VOA even if they are beaten up by antifa militants. One VOA reporter was caught blocking a U.S. journalist on Twitter. Another VOA reporter called for young Americans to be punished for staging a peaceful protest. Agency employees also tried to interfere with a U.S. watchdog website exposing such abuses. Both VOA and another USAGM media outlet, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, illegally targeted Americans with Facebook ads.
Growing up in communist-ruled Poland in the 1960s, I used to listen to Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. They had changed my life, but they were then radically different from what they are today. Communists and Marxists were not glorified in VOA Cold War broadcasts as fighters for freedom.
I never thought that only a decade after my retirement, the Voice of America, which with the exception of a few shameful periods did so much for the cause of democracy in my home country and elsewhere, would promote communists such as Che Guevara, or lionize Angela Davis as a human rights activist. VOA did this once before during World War II, when pro-Soviet communists joined its staff. One of them was the 1953 Stalin Prize winner, American writer, and Communist Party journalist Howard Fast. Many current VOA leaders and journalists don’t know the full history of their government organization. This contributes to the problem of ahistorical news reporting.
Much of the blame for the return of journalistic bias and chaos to the Voice of America in recent years rests with the recent and current leadership of the agency, which seems have a distorted view of VOA’s past and its mission, in addition to being managerially challenged.
But the biggest problem is the political bias, partisanship, and the ineffectiveness of many VOA programs. VOA still has a few excellent and unbiased journalists, but they are deeply unhappy being unable to practice their craft the way they think most Americans would want to support with their tax money. “Professionalism at VOA is dead, because [VOA Director] Amanda Bennett and [USAGM CEO] John Lensing killed it,” a VOA employee was reported to have said.
Americans would be shocked if their tax dollars were used by VOA to promote Nazi symbols and figures. They should be shocked when the Voice of America does the same with Communist icons and figures. Both are ideologies of hate. I have no doubt that Hitler would have killed more people in more brutal ways if he had held on to power much longer than he did, but as matters stand many more millions were murdered or starved to death by communist regimes over the longer period of time during which leaders of these regimes and their enablers such as Che Guevara were in power.
An ahistorical Voice of America can be a dangerous anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-conservative and anti-humanist propaganda tool both abroad and in the United States, regardless of which party controls the White House. VOA needs much better oversight from Congress and American taxpayers than it has now.
The Voice of America should be completely nonpartisan and objective as a source of accurate and balanced news. It should focus mostly on countries experiencing press censorship and countries of strategic interest to the United States which may pose a threat to our security. Agency officials should not have corporate, personal, or family business interests in countries such as Russia and China as some of them have been reported to have.
The current Obama administration officials in charge of VOA have demonstrated their partisanship and remarkable managerial incompetence. Haroon Ullah, a top aide recruited and frequently feted by USAGM CEO John Lansing as a strategic planner, recently pleaded guilty to federal charges of stealing tens of thousands of dollars from the agency.
Award-winning PBS film documentarian and former federal government official Michael Pack is President Trump’s nominee to become the next agency head. He is conservative, but from what I can tell from his documentaries, he possesses a good grasp of history and seems ideologically less dogmatic than some of the current agency leaders and editors. He appears to have much more public service experience to run a government media program than any of the holdover officials currently in charge of USAGM. However, he and any other future VOA officials also need to be constantly watched and scrutinized to make sure that they fully obey the VOA Charter, which is U.S. law.
Ted Lipien was in charge of VOA broadcasts to Poland during the Cold War. When he retired in 2006, his last job was VOA acting associate director.
