The new chief executive of the agency that oversees Voice of America and other government-backed broadcasters said he did not act illegally in firing senior figures on his first day on the job.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Michael Pack denied that he was turning the outlets into a mouthpiece for President Trump, said he would guarantee the independence of journalists working for him, and accused the Biden campaign of pandering to partisan politics with its threat to remove him in the event of a change of president.
Pack took up his post with the U.S. Agency for Global Media two weeks ago after a contentious nomination process dominated by questions about his relationship with former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.
He immediately removed the heads of four of the organizations under the AGM umbrella — Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Network — and brought in political appointees to replace the boards that had governed the services previously. The director of VOA had already resigned.
What became known as the “Wednesday night massacre” brought an immediate legal challenge. A lawsuit filed by former members of the advisory boards contended that the dismissals breached federal guarantees of the broadcasters’ independence.
But Pack said the new chief executive role was part of a reorganization following years of alleged mismanagement and bipartisan agreement that a part-time board was insufficient to oversee an $800 million budget and organizations with a weekly audience of 350 million people.
“I believe when the CEO position was created, it explicitly addressed these things and wanted the CEO to have this power,” he said. “If it were illegal, needless to say, I wouldn’t have done it, and if my legal counselor told me it was illegal, I wouldn’t do it.”
He said he would now look into recent problems to work out a way forward for the AGM.
“It wasn’t doing what it should be doing,” he said. “There were scandals.”
The allegations have ranged from financial mismanagement to serious lapses in editorial judgment.
In 2013, it emerged that the agency had spent $24 million over six years flying a plane around Cuba beaming TV programming to the island’s inhabitants even though the signal was routinely jammed by Havana.
A year later, an audit found that hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts had not been properly approved but had been awarded according to personal connections.
Two years ago, TV Marti, which broadcasts in Cuba, ran video segments attacking George Soros as a “multimillionaire Jew” who was a threat to South American democracy.
Pack said the result was a bipartisan agreement that an overhaul was necessary and pointed to comments made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2013 about AGM’s forerunner. “Our Broadcasting Board of Governors is practically defunct in terms of its capacity to tell a message around the world,” she said.
Trump has gone further in his criticism, accusing VOA of parroting Beijing’s propaganda on the spread of the coronavirus in China.
“If you heard what’s coming out of the Voice of America, it’s disgusting. What — things they say are disgusting toward our country,” he said.
Pack said it was his job to look into the truth of the allegations.
“Whether they’re true or not,” he said, “I have to find out. But I think President Trump, if I may speculate, is just picking up on those stories. So, but my job is to find out what’s really going on and, if there’s a problem, to fix it.”
But he denied accusations that he was intent on turning the organizations into mouthpieces for Trump.
“The credibility and strength of these agencies rests on the independence of the journalists, and I’m not going to undercut that, or I wouldn’t be motivated to serve here,” he said, promising that he would not be telling journalists what to report but would guarantee their independence.
On Thursday, the Biden campaign made clear he was on borrowed time and would be fired if Trump lost the election.
But Pack said part of the core mission of the agencies was to promote U.S. values abroad irrespective of who is president.
“VOA is supposed to promote American values, not Republican or Democratic values, not Trump or Biden values, and that is what I plan to do,” he said.
