Last week, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, marked World Press Freedom Day with an excellent speech. Amid powerful remarks in defense of press freedom, Cruz recounted how the U.S. State Department had tried several times to censor out President Reagan’s famous words, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” from his 1987 address at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
Three times, State Department staff had tried to delete this now-famous phrase, objecting that it was too belligerent. Three times, Reagan put it back in. As Cruz told the story, Reagan finally explained to them: “You don’t understand. This is the whole point of the speech.”
I was in charge of the Voice of America Polish Service when Reagan delivered his Berlin Wall address. We reported on it, of course, but I remember that unlike refugee VOA journalists like myself, many VOA English newsroom reporters at that time were horrified by Ronald Reagan.
To many of my VOA newsroom colleagues, he was a dangerous warmonger. Fortunately, their view was not shared by most VOA journalists in the East European foreign language services. They admired Reagan’s courage, as did dissidents and most people in countries behind the Iron Curtain.
Voice of America did not report on Sen. Cruz’s speech and its fascinating details about the Cold War. This is interesting, because he gave it at the invitation of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which manages VOA. The agency streamed the speech live on Facebook, but this dysfunctional and obscure bureaucratic agency was only able to get five live viewers.
I think I know why VOA ignored Sen. Cruz’s speech. It’s not because his speech was not newsworthy. The answer lies within the ideologically-driven activism of some VOA officials and journalists, combined with their willingness to censor facts and viewpoints they don’t like while promoting their own left-wing political causes on the taxpayer’s dime.
Two years ago, reporters and editors in today’s VOA English newsroom had no problem playing a monologue video of American communist and Lenin Peace Prize winner Angela Davis. They presented her as a champion of human rights, failing to disclose her former support for the Soviet Union and Communist Party membership.
The State Department does not have a monopoly on poor political judgment. When one looks at the history of U.S. international broadcasting, left-wing Voice of America journalists were more eager supporters of Stalin and state socialism than most U.S. diplomats. In April 1943, the State Department intervened twice to save VOA, then in the Office of War Information, from the influence of pro-Soviet officials and VOA broadcasters. This included VOA’s first director, John Houseman, and VOA’s first chief news writer and news director, Communist author Howard Fast. After Fast was forced to resign from VOA in 1944 due to pressure from the State Department and the FBI, he was honored in 1953 with the Stalin Peace Prize, worth about $235,000 in today’s dollars.
Houseman, a Hollywood actor, was also forced to resign from his position as VOA director after Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles sent a secret memo to Franklin Roosevelt’s White House warning against Soviet influence over the Office of War Information’s domestic and foreign propaganda programs. The State Department refused to give Houseman and Fast U.S. passports for government travel abroad.
But the State Department’s behind-the-scenes intervention against collusion with Soviet Russia at VOA was only partially successful. Also in 1943, Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle and other State Department diplomats tried to warn VOA not to embrace the Soviet propaganda lie about the Katyn massacre of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD secret police. Their advice was ignored by OWI’s leadership. The FDR White House was not interested in countering this particular Soviet propaganda message, but when pro-Soviet VOA broadcasts started to threaten the lives of American soldiers by criticizing U.S. deals with Vichy France and Italy, FDR sided with the State Department and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower against the Office of War Information. Eisenhower later accused VOA’s communist sympathizers of “insubordination” against their own president.
During World War II, U.S. diplomats were not fully successful in eliminating foreign ideological influence over VOA broadcasts. The process of getting rid of pro-Soviet VOA journalists continued after the Office of War Information was abolished by President Harry Truman and VOA was moved to the State Department in 1945. Management reforms and the hires of new broadcasters who were opposed to communism were not completed at VOA until about 1952.
Contrary to conventional wisdom that journalists always seek the truth and cherish freedom, some of the best educated and experienced State Department diplomats were less fooled by Soviet propaganda during World War II than were Voice of America’s officials and broadcasters. World War II VOA programs were mostly designed to counter propaganda from Nazi Germany and Japan, but U.S. government broadcasters also started to present the Soviet Union and Stalin as champions of freedom and human progress.
In later years some VOA officials and journalists participated in the cover-up of VOA’s early love affair with Stalin and Soviet communism. They misled Americans about VOA’s history of initially supporting Stalin’s takeover of Eastern Europe with Soviet-generated propaganda and disinformation. Eventually, pressure from Congress and public opinion turned VOA into a relatively successful voice in support of freedom during the later years of the Cold War, but the early history of VOA’s cheering for Stalin and socialism in Eastern Europe has been covered up and forgotten.
The danger of the Voice of America becoming a tool of foreign propaganda — be it Russian, Iranian or Chinese — and a tool of domestic partisan and ideological activism, reemerged in the last several years under the hapless Obama-era holdover management team in charge of the United States Agency for Global Media. Independent studies have shown pro-Putin, pro-Iranian regime, and pro-communist China bias in VOA programs, as well as illegal targeting of American audiences through Facebook ads.
Responding to media reports of internal scandals not only at VOA but also at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently called for getting a new CEO to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Pompeo said that the agency in charge of foreign media outreach must have “the right leadership so they can do the traditional mission — perhaps in a different information environment than we did back in the Cold War, but can perform its function in a way that is important and noble, and reflects the enormous resources that are — that American taxpayers have put towards that.”
“I’m very concerned about it,” Secretary Pompeo added.
More Americans should be concerned. Their tax money might be going to foreign propaganda, as some VOA officials and some (not all) U.S. government-hired journalists allow ideology and foreign influence to take precedence over the journalistic requirements of the VOA congressional charter: accuracy, balance, and nonpartisanship in Voice of America programs.
Ted Lipien is a former VOA acting associate director.
