Recent news coverage has been highly misleading as to the transfer of management at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America and other tax-funded federal and nonfederal media entities.
The media simply have not done their homework and seem determined to spread factual errors and unsupported assumptions about the agency’s new Trump-appointed and Senate-confirmed CEO, Michael Pack, and about government-managed international media in general.
The journalists covering this issue have clearly not analyzed the Voice of America’s recent content in English, much less in Chinese or Persian. And part of the reason they are assailing Pack so viciously is that they know nothing about the extreme politicization of VOA under Pack’s predecessors, appointed during the Obama Administration.
Under the Obama-era officials, almost no one among VOA English newsroom reporters raised objections externally about even the most biased reporting, because nearly all of them shared the biases — for example, the view that Donald Trump represents the greatest danger to America and the world.
Those few among VOA’s foreign language services who raised concerns about China were disciplined and even fired. Liberal media did not come to the defense to VOA’s anti-communist journalists, but it now goes all out defending VOA’s anti-Trump reporters who themselves have been flagrantly guilty of using taxpayer money to spread their political biases.
With most mainstream media journalists looking the other way, there have been multiple outright violations of the VOA Charter in recent years, most of which were never widely reported. Journalists who have made alarming assumptions and made accusations against Pack said nothing when an aide to John F. Lansing, who is now running NPR after resigning from his government job in 2019, went to federal prison for stealing money from the agency. VOA also saw multiple management and programming scandals under former director Amanda Bennett, who resigned last month before Michael Pack had a chance to fire her.
Most op-ed writers have merely glanced over Pack’s reassurances to members of Congress that he supports VOA’s bipartisan congressional Charter — a 1976 U.S. law requiring VOA news and presentations of opinions to be accurate, balanced, comprehensive and reflective in a responsible way of the entire American society. After all, the majority of U.S. taxpayers would never agree to pay for propaganda that promotes only one set of ideas in VOA programs, or for any kind of propaganda, including that of China’s regime. Unfortunately, VOA under the Obama administration holdover management preceding Pack’s appointment, repeated Chinese propaganda on multiple occasions.
The same journalists and op-ed writers now issuing gloom-and-doom warnings about the Voice of America under the Pack’s management should have been up in arms when VOA’s earlier coverage came up strangely slanted toward the interests of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, theocratic Iran, communist China and Cuba, and even North Korea.
Some of VOA’s coverage even interfered with U.S. elections — frequently enough to draw criticism from experts, refugee journalists, leaders of immigrant communities and even from Bernie Sanders’ supporters.
VOA’s coverage favored the Obama Administration on domestic U.S. issues and was strongly anti-conservative, anti-Republican Party and anti-Trump. Naturally, mainstream conservative viewpoints got hardly any representation in most VOA programs during the last decade. Some of VOA’s former leaders and some journalists themselves thought that this was the right thing to do. At least half of the Americans financing the operation would not agree.
I have observed U.S. international broadcasting for close to 50 years and I worked there for more than three decades. VOA has always had a much bigger problem with left-wing bias than with right-wing bias. This goes all the way back to Howard Fast, VOA’s chief news writer and editor in 1943, who after leaving VOA joined the Communist Party and in 1953 received the Stalin Peace Prize. Outside oversight and changes of leadership are critical if VOA is to avoid institutional stagnation, dysfunction and endemic bias. Congress should watch Pack, but it should also welcome his moves to replace the old, failed leadership with his own team.
When reporting and writing about the agency, reporters and op-ed writers should do a better job of analyzing both past and current mistakes of government officials and Voice of America’s government journalists. They ought to help readers understand what needs to be done to make U.S. international media outlets effective for the benefit of all people in the United States and to keep them free from foreign and domestic propaganda.
Ted Lipien is a former acting associate director of the Voice of America and former VOA Polish service chief during Solidarity’s struggle for democracy in Poland.
