They post anti-Trump memes on Facebook showing him with a Nazi swastika over his head, and his head as a male sex organ. One called him “Fuckface Von Clownstick.” For Labor Day, they quote American communist Angela Davis, a Lenin Peace Prize winner whom Nobel Prize author and Soviet dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn denounced as an enemy of human rights defenders in communist-ruled countries.
One might think that individuals who also posted videos in which Trump was called “pig” and “dog” must belong to some violent Antifa cell somewhere. They do not. They are federal government employees working for the Voice of America (VOA). Their six-figure salaries are paid by American taxpayers.
Under the Obama-era leadership still in charge of VOA and its parent agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a small group of partisan managers and a few biased reporters who hate Donald Trump with a religious passion have transformed what used to be an effective U.S. tool against totalitarianism into their own partisan soapbox. In doing so, they have intimidated and marginalized the rest of the VOA workforce. They now regularly violate the 1976 VOA Charter, a U.S. law designed to keep VOA nonpartisan. In their zeal to help Hillary Clinton win in 2016, VOA even went after Bernie Sanders with a one-sided attack. Sanders’ supporters accused VOA of “state media” slander.
I worked for VOA during its most successful Cold War years. I had a chance to interview Polish Solidarity trade union leader Lech Wałęsa when he was under secret police surveillance. He and many others like him were fighting for independent labor unions — not the official communist ones which Angela Davis and Poland’s Soviet puppet regime were supporting. In America, Solidarność enjoyed full backing from both President Ronald Reagan and AFL-CIO Labor Federation President Lane Kirkland. It was Kirkland who invited Solzhenitsyn to give a speech to American labor leaders, in which the former Gulag prisoner exposed Angela Davis as a hero of Soviet propaganda. Solzhenitsyn said she did not lift a finger to defend political prisoners behind the Iron Curtain.
In its Labor Day program, VOA did not even identify Angela Davis as a communist. It should have, because foreign audiences deserve to know supporters of murderous ideologies, be it communism or fascism. VOA presented her instead as a friend of labor and as a feminist. For Solidarity trade unionists and women in communist-ruled countries, nothing would have been further from the truth. VOA today has become confused about history, even to the point of implying that violent Antifa activists could be considered fighters for human rights and democracy.
Voice of America cannot hope to counter hostile Russian propaganda today if it is ignorant about history and remains under a dysfunctional management. Some of VOA newsroom reporters present President Trump as potentially just as evil as the greatest communist mass murderers of the 20th century. In actually comparing Trump to Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, VOA has shown it no longer knows what communism or fascism really are.
In the 1980s, we used to counter similarly preposterous comparisons between Western politicians and some of infamous World War II fascists by exposing Soviet-originated disinformation. Putin’s propaganda channel, RT, now uses many of the same KGB techniques to discredit and divide the West.
Sadly, today’s BBG and VOA managers are no match for Putin’s propagandists. They were recently accused of retaliating against five Chinese VOA journalists who interviewed a whistleblower who had offered to expose corruption within the Chinese Communist Party. The agency’s top management shortened the interview and accused some of the VOA Chinese journalists of not giving communist officials a sufficient opportunity to respond to the whistleblower.
Equal time for communists on VOA is a sure way to ensure America’s defeat in the war of ideas. A rudderless and partisan Voice of America is a national security risk. It must be reformed.
Ted Lipien is a former acting associate director of Voice of America.
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