Mend Don’t End the VOA

I was reporting for VOA from Europe when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. Immediately concluding that it was a lab-created virus produced by Chinese bioweapon research, I filed the following piece.

Subsequently, I got an email from the VOA managing editor who had recently joined the U.S. government funded agency from CNN, instructing me to limit all further reporting to pandemic itself “devoid of any geopolitical context.” There would be no challenging the mainstream narrative about a bat sandwich and they wanted livestreams of locked down Spaniards clapping and singing from their balconies as mandated by their socialist government instead of investigating why Chinese and Cuban medical teams were flying into Europe.

President Trump’s s decision last week to shut down VOA and its parent agency USAGM for being a “waste of taxpayer’s money” is understandable but comes at a time in which the world’s airwaves and social media sites are bristling with anti-American propaganda and disinformation promoted by Russia, China, and Iran. Europe’s international news networks, BBC France’s FT4, Germany’s DW, are meanwhile driven by hostility towards Trump.

Pursuing such boldly controversial foreign policy goals as negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine, acquiring Greenland, and retaking the Panama Canal will be all the more difficult without tools to counter the massive media resources at the disposal of America’s adversaries and detractors. Russia’s official media outlets broadcast in 102 languages. China Global Television Network and China Radio International broadcast in more than 40. America’s sole multilingual international news network is CNN.

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The White House believes that VOA has strayed irredeemably from its original mission of countering communist propaganda and promoting American values. A former executive producer from the Office of Cuban broadcasting recently told the Miami Herald that “it’s difficult to be an anti-communist in the USAMG nowadays.” Shutting down U.S. sponsored air waves, however, may be worse than the disease according to ambassador Otto Reich, who headed the State Department’s Public Diplomacy Office under Reagan. “It’s a mistake to disarm in the area of information especially when Putin is behaving like Stalin in an Italian suit.”

But the VOA’s increasingly Democrat far left partisan line, which placed it at odds with the previous Trump administration, has become so rooted and mired in corruption that Trump’s appointee to head the agency, Kari Lake, considers it “unsalvageable.”

Michael Pack, who was appointed to direct the U.S. Agency for Global Media under the first Trump administration, urged VOA staff to develop independent lines of reporting instead of running with mainstream media narratives. Unable to assume his post until the administration’s final days due to long delays in his confirmation by the Democrat-controlled Senate at the time, necessary personnel changes were never made and VOA drifted further left under Biden.

The agency adopted strictly Green, LGBTQ, and CRT postures promoted by Biden-appointed acting director Yolanda López, a digital media apparatchik from Mexico’s Univision described by a senior staffer as a “communist” who “went around the newsroom acting like she owned the place.” López abruptly resigned in 2024 over corruption allegations involving misuse of public funds.

On her watch, VOA produced pieces like “White Privilege; How to Know If You Are Part of It,” attacked the fossil fuel industry while providing free advertising for solar and wind, created special section on gay pride that turned off many African listeners and, according to congressional investigators, allowed the language services to be “subverted” by the very totalitarian governments they were supposed to work against.

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Republican lawmakers told the Washington Free Beacon that the head of the Farsi language service, VOA Persia, Setareh Derakhshesh Sieg, “banned Iranian regime critics from the network, creating an in-house black list of voices to censor, suppressed stories on the regime’s human rights abuses and published pieces amplifying regime propaganda.”

The situation was similar at the Office for Cuba broadcasting overseeing Radio Television Marti according to Luis Leonel León, a multimedia journalist who produced programs and special series for Cuba. He tells The American Spectator that the staunchly anti-communist executive producer, André Mendes, with whom he initially worked, was pushed out in a purge of conservative staff by directors and supervisors seeking to promote the Cuba friendly approach started under Obama in which you were no longer allowed to refer to the regime as a “dictatorship.” “They are the ones who killed RTV Marti. Trump just signed the death certificate,” he said.

“The Cuba broadcasting office turned into a hornets’ nest of Democrat party activists often following Havana’s narrative and pivoting away from issues that really concern Cubans such as systematic Human Rights violations and repression of free speech, focusing instead on gay rights, transgender issues, and fighting climate change, irrelevant to people trying to survive and stay informed in a totalitarian hell.”

Meanwhile, “with Cuba’s help, Moscow has dominated the information warfare field all over Central and South America, transmitting three times as much government-sponsored news content as Voice of America and her sister networks.” observed former director of Cuba Broadcasting, Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, in an op-ed for the Washington Times.

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VOA’s Russian Service broadcasts, on the other hand, provided less than two hours of broadcasting per day, well into a year of the war in Ukraine; an unquestionable underperformance for a news agency with a budget of $900M and staff of 1,300 journalists. But VOA’s established audience of 300 million with 75 high-powered transmitters around the globe are an asset too big to waste.

Reform the VOA Now!

VOA must undergo a total makeover with newly screened staff to effectively resume its role in promoting America’s message, according to some former employees who suggest creating small teams to run the language services composed of country specialists with deep knowledge of target audiences . In Cuba, for example, León recommends eliminating radio and TV broadcasts that the communist regime effectively jams with sophisticated Chinese electronic warfare technology and concentrate, instead, on producing social media content that gets through with satellite boosters that could be provided by Starlink. This could be done at costs far below the current budget and much reduced staff, he says.

A streamlined and leaner VOA countering U.S. foes on air waves and the blogosphere, striving to expose state terrorism, and the bureaucratic corruption of repressive governments and international organizations they often control, would be a major boost to the cause of freedom and attract new audiences.

The Trump administration should give priority placing a new management at VOA and USAGM now that Republicans have a Senate majority. The task facing America in the information sphere is urgent. “VOA was and I hope will soon again be one of the few instruments available to counter totalitarian propaganda with the truth,” said Ambassador Reich.

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Publicado originalmente en The American Spectator.

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