Free Media Online (FreeMediaOnline.org)

01/10/2023

A commentary by Ted Lipien for the Cold War Radio Museum

In doing historical research, I found a few indirect links between one of Joseph Stalin’s greatest apologists, the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent in the 1930s Walter Duranty, and the Voice of America (VOA), the international radio broadcasting station, which since 1942 until 1945 was managed by pro-Soviet U.S. government officials in the Office of War Information. President Truman abolished the Office of War Information in 1945 and transferred VOA to the State Department. In 1953, VOA was placed in the newly established U.S. Information Agency (USIA). In 1999, VOA was moved to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), an independent federal agency, which changed its name in 2018 to the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM).

In March 1939, Walter Duranty wrote in a letter to his American journalist friend John Gunther that he was angered by the Herald Tribune‘s decision to pull Joseph F. Barnes out of Moscow. Duranty thought very highly of Joe Barnes, describing him to Gunther as a journalist

who knows more about it [the Soviet Union] than anyone and was the best friend I had here, and lived quite near me.1

In November 2003, the Pulitzer Prize Board, whose then-membership read like the Who’s Who of the elite American media and academia establishment, voted not to revoke Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize despite his pro-Soviet propaganda and lies about the Stalin-engineered famine in Ukraine that took millions of lives in the 1930s.2 The 2002-2003 Pulitzer Prize Board membership reads like a Who’s Who of the American media, academia, and intellectual establishment.3

Because of the decades-long suppression of information about the Soviet propaganda influence, at least some of those Pulitzer Prize Board members who had voted in 2003 not to strip Walter Duranty of his Pulitzer Prize and later attained positions of leadership in the U.S. government’s international broadcasting may have been unaware of the entire history of Stalin’s Great Terror, the Ukraine famine, and the Duranty-led attack on Welsh reporter Gareth Jones, one of the few journalists who was telling the truth about the Holodomor extermination of peasants of Ukrainian, Russian, and other nationalities. Joining Duranty in his attack on Jones were other elite American and British correspondents in Moscow.

One of them, Eugene Lyons, revealed later in his 1937 book Assignment in Utopia that they had all deliberately lied about the imposition of Soviet rule, the Ukrainian famine, and Gareth Jones.4

Duranty’s friendship with Joseph Barnes developed somewhat later, but, like Duranty, Barnes also became an apologist for the Stalinist regime in Russia. He later served as one of the chief first officials in charge of the wartime Voice of America until he was forced to resign by the already highly pro-Soviet Roosevelt administration for being excessively pro-Soviet in a scandal that erupted in 1943 when VOA called King Emmanuel of Italy a “moronic little king.”

President Roosevelt’s close personal friend and foreign policy advisor, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, warned the FDR White House in April 1943 about Barnes:

It is reliably stated that there has been no crucial point in Russian development, since 1934, when Barnes has not followed the Party line and has not been much more successful than the official spokesman in giving it a form congenial to the American way of expression.5

In 1940, as the acting Secretary of State, Welles issued the Welles Declaration, which condemned Soviet occupation of the Baltic states: Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

Welles’s 1943 secret memorandum to the White House also led to the forced resignation of John Houseman, the Voice of America’s first chief radio producer, who later somewhat erroneously was declared VOA’s first director. Houseman had no journalistic experience and reported to Joseph Barnes, who reported to Robert E. Sherwood, OWI deputy director and FDR’s speechwriter. Welles informed the White House that the State Department would not issue a U.S. passport to Houseman for official travel abroad because, among other things, he was hiring Communist Party members for VOA jobs. Houseman resigned in mid-1943. Houseman's protege, Howard Fast, VOA's first chief news writer and editor, who in 1953 received the International Stalin Peace Prize and was a Communist Party member, was similarly forced to resign in early 1944 when the State Department refused to give him a U.S. passport for official VOA travel abroad.

Barnes’s forced resignation in early 1944 happened because of the Voice of America’s “Moronic Little King of Italy” broadcast about Italy’s King Emmanuel. The VOA insult inspired by Soviet propaganda put U.S. diplomacy and American soldiers at risk and angered President Roosevelt and General Dwight D. Eisenhower.6

NOTES:

1 S. J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York Times’s Man in Moscow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 280. Waler Duranty to Joh Gunther, 2 March 1939, Personal Files of John Gunther.

2 Pulitzer Prize Board, “Statement on Walter Duranty’s 1932 Prize,” November 20, 2003, https://www.pulitzer.org/news/statement-walter-duranty.

3 Pulitzer Prize Board 2002-2003, https://www.pulitzer.org/board/2003.

4 Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1937), p. 575.

5 State – Welles, Sumner, 1943-1944, From Collection: FDR-FDRPSF Departmental Correspondence, Series: Departmental Correspondence, 1933 – 1945 Collection: President’s Secretary’s File (Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration), 1933 – 1945, National Archives Identifier: 16619284.

6 Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years: Waging Peace 1956-1961 (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1965) 279.

A commentary by Ted Lipien for the Cold War Radio Museum In doing historical research, I found a few indirect links between one of Joseph Stalin’s greatest apologists, the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent in the 1930s Walter Duranty, and the Voice of America (VOA), the in...

02/06/2023

I don’t do more than one fundraiser per year, and this one is especially important. Please help me raise money for 55 Ukrainian children so that they can attend summer camps organized by Girl Scouts and Boys Scouts from my hometown of Mszana Dolna in Poland. You can also help by sharing this fundraiser with your friends. Please help these Ukrainian children have a few weeks to peaceful and happy time at summer camps in Poland. Thank you.

Hi, my name is Ted Lipien (Tadeusz Lipien). I'm raising money to organize t… Ted Lipien needs your support for Donate to Help 55 Ukrainian Children in Poland

18/01/2023

In my latest Washington Examiner report I argue that some American Christian conservatives like Pat Robertson and pundits like Tucker Carlson have been duped by Vladimir Putin with his propaganda lies about Ukraine.

Thankfully, not all evangelical Christians have been duped by Putin. Those who have been deceived should realize that they had joined the old leftist assembly of Stalin's fools since Putin is an ex-KGB officer who uses Stalin's favorite communist propaganda tactics in exploiting religion to corrupt and destroy it. I'm amazed how any American Christian can defend Putin when his Russian army kills Christians in Ukraine, including many civilians, women, and children. Young Russian soldiers, some Orthodox Christians, are needlessly dying for Putin. Others are ra**ng Ukrainian women and stealing.

Those conservative Christians in the United States who delude themselves that President Vladimir Putin and Russia, under his authoritarian, corrupt, and dangerous rule, defend traditional and Christian values should take note of this statistic: Only 1.4% of declared Russian Orthodox Church members.....

13/01/2023

January 12 marks the 30th anniversary of the death in 1993 in Maisons-Laffitte near Paris, France, of Polish writer and painter Józef Czapski, whose eyewitness accounts of Stalin's crimes were partially censored by the Voice of America in 1950. The VOA Polish Service reinterviewed him in 1984 when I was in charge of VOA broadcasts to Poland. Here is a short, hidden history of the Voice of America for those who have only heard the official version.

The U.S. government started radio broadcasts to N**i Germany in February 1942. They were designed to counter fascist propaganda. Still, deniers of Stalin's crimes among the "founding fathers" of what became known later as the Voice of America (VOA) also arranged to air Soviet propaganda and its lies. Broadcasts in other languages soon followed, including programs in English, but there were no Voice of America Russian-language broadcasts until 1947. Pro-communist and pro-Kremlin fellow travelers among VOA managers, some of them journalists, including Joseph Barnes and Wallace Carroll, who had reported earlier from the Soviet Union, were afraid of offending Stalin while he was America's military ally against N**i Germany, but they also believed his lies and spread them in VOA broadcasts.

Nearly all of the Voice of America's "founding fathers"—U.S. government officials in charge of the early radio broadcasts for overseas audiences in the World War II Office of War Information (OWI)—were doubters, deniers, and censors of news of Soviet genocidal crimes. They covered up information about the immense suffering and deaths of millions of victims of communism. While Stalin would have enslaved Eastern Europe without their help, they made it easier by making President Roosevelt's appeasement of the Soviet dictator appear justified to Americans and international audiences. As revealed in a bipartisan congressional investigation after the war, these officials also engaged in illegal censorship of ethnic press and radio stations in the United States, which reported truthfully about communist atrocities in Soviet Russia. Some OWI officials supervised the production of propaganda films justifying the illegal internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry. They were modeled after the Soviet deportations to the Gulag but were not nearly as brutal and deadly. In their foreign and domestic information outreach, OWI propagandists presented Soviet Russia as a socially progressive new democracy. They supported Stalin's demands for control over East-Central Europe until well after World War II. They also produced mild, by today's standards, domestic partisan propaganda in favor of re-electing President Roosevelt. This outraged many Republicans, but liberal northern Democrats, who were liberal and pro-labor, were also outraged by VOA's uncritical support for Stalin because they represented many ethnic communities with family roots in Eastern Europe. As a result of objections from Republicans and Democrats, the U.S. Congress quickly defunded the OWI's domestic propaganda activities in a bipartisan vote in 1943. It reduced the budget for VOA radio broadcasts overseas but did not eliminate them.

Soon after the launch of the first Voice of America broadcasts, State Department diplomats, personal liberal friends of President Roosevelt, secretly warned the FDR White House of the subversion of VOA by Communist Party members and sympathizers acting on instructions from Soviet Russia. U.S. military leaders also secretly objected to VOA's pro-communist broadcasts. The Supreme Allied Commander and later U.S. President, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, accused pro-Soviet VOA officials and journalists of jeopardizing the lives of American and allied soldiers fighting the N**is. Because of VOA's excessively pro-communist programming, some early VOA managers were forced to resign by the otherwise strongly pro-Soviet Roosevelt administration. Still, others kept their jobs until after the war.

Many of VOA's early American and foreign-born journalists—rank-and-file editors, reporters, and broadcasters—were, like their superiors, deniers of communist genocides and apologists for the Soviet regime. Howard Fast, VOA's first chief news writer and editor, wrote in his memoir that while in charge of VOA news in 1943, he excluded criticism of the Soviet Union from VOA news because he regarded such criticism as anti-Soviet propaganda. Fast was a popular novelist, Communist Party USA activist, and journalist working for communist publications, who, in 1953, received the Stalin Peace Prize. A few of his colleagues in VOA's foreign language services left the United States after the war. They worked as diplomats or anti-American propagandists for Soviet-controlled communist regimes in East-Central Europe.

Charles Thayer, a State Department diplomat and the first chief of the VOA Russian Service (1947) and VOA director (1948-1949), doubted that the Soviets were responsible for the 1940 Katyn massacre of thousands of Polish military officers in Russian captivity. Thayer did not allow strong criticism of the Soviet Union in the early Russian and other VOA broadcasts. Some VOA officials and editors censored news of Soviet and other communist crimes against human rights until about 1950 when the Truman administration started to make personnel and programming changes at the Voice of America. President Truman also authorized the creation of Radio Free Europe (RFE) as ostensibly a non-U.S. government entity but secretly funded by the CIA. RFE and Radio Liberty established a few years later, never censored news about communist atrocities. VOA partially censored writers, Polish author and painter Józef Czapski and Russian dissident author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn who were witnesses of Stalin's terror in the KGB prisons and Gulag slave labor camps.

Censorship of some news critical of the Soviet Union and communism did not completely end at the Voice of America until the start of President Reagan's administration. VOA refugee journalists from communist-ruled countries could finally report freely about the Soviet empire after 1981. They helped to advance the fall of communism in East-Central Europe. During the Reagan administration, when I was in charge of Polish broadcasts, VOA's audience multiplied in Poland, the first country in the Soviet Bloc to hold partially democratic elections in 1989, thanks to a final push against communism from the independent Solidarity trade union. During the Reagan Administration, the VOA Polish Service interviewed Józef Czapski, and the Russian Service interviewed Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and broadcast more extended excerpts from his books.

VOA's relevance and effectiveness against dictatorships and corrupt governments diminished significantly in the post-Cold War internet era under the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), renamed in 2018 as the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). Russian influence operations against the Voice of America resumed under President Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB officer. VOA hired several journalists who used to work for Putin's propaganda media. Anti-Putin independent Russian journalists have accused VOA of "pro-Putin bias" and, in one recent case, of misleading reporting. In 2014, VOA broadcast reports legitimizing the results of the illegal Russian referendum in Crimea after the Broadcasting Board of Governors was duped into conducting a completely unreliable poll among the Crimeans who were terrorized by the Russian invasion and occupation and could not provide honest answers. Communist regimes in China and Vietnam were able to pressure the VOA management into censoring news and interviews exposing their corruption and opposition to U.S. policies, including support for Ukraine. Iran's regime also influenced Voice of America's news coverage. At the same time, 20 years of VOA's and USAGM's heavy investment in local broadcasting in Afghanistan did not prevent the Taliban's quick victory after the withdrawal of U.S. military presence. There have been unprecedented other violations of the VOA Charter in recent years, including the airing of U.S. domestic election campaign commercials, almost all favoring Democratic Party candidates, but the VOA Russian Service broadcast both pro-Hillary Clinton and pro-Trump campaign videos. A Moscow-based Voice of America freelance reporter was expelled from Ukraine by the Ukrainian authorities and later arrested in Poland and accused of spying for Russia. VOA reported that he has categorically denied the spying accusations.

Polish military officer, writer and artist Józef Czapski, who had made a futile search for thousands of missing Polish officers in Soviet Russia during World...

24/06/2022

USAGM Watch Commentary “The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee has approved President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), clearing the way for former VOA director Amanda Bennett to face a final confirmation vote on the Senate floor,” the Voice of America ...

30/04/2022

USAGM Watch volunteer journalists join Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in mourning the death of Ukrainian Service broadcaster Vira Hyrych, a victim of a Russian air strike in Kyiv.

USAGM Watch volunteer journalists join Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in mourning the death of Ukrainian Service broadcaster Vira Hyrych.

21/03/2022

U. S. Agency for Global Media and USAGM still shows a press release about its poll in the Russian-occupied Ukraine. Its faulty and misleading 2014 poll in Crimea helped .

The U.S. Agency for Global Media shows a press release about its faulty poll in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine, which helped Putin.

03/03/2022

Blinken, at one point in his remarks, actually addressed comments to the people of Russia. So, these remarks were instantly seen across the globe by anyone watching CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and others. But NOT – by the Voice of America.

Voice of America and Ukraine: As Putin Threatens, VOA Misses Opportunity to Carry Live Blinken Message to Russian People

25/12/2021

I am an Eastern European refugee from communism, .

"I’ve concluded that recent and current VOA and USAGM officials either do not know or have forgotten what life was like for tens of millions of people living under communism."

In my Christmas Day op-ed and in my post about Józef Czapski, I write about Stalin's victims and the Voice of America (VOA) in USAGM.

23/12/2021

The U.S. government broadcaster, the Voice of America (VOA), partially censored Józef Czapski in 1950, when he tried to describe the Soviet mass murder of about 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia leaders in Katyn in western Russia and at other locations.

Censored by Voice of America in 1950, re-interviewed in the 1980s, Józef Czapski gets a plaque in Prague, where he was born. VOA censored his Katyn interview.

13/12/2021

Forty years ago, on December 13, 1981, I received a phone call at my home in McLean, Virginia from Charles E. “Sam” Courtney. He was at the time Deputy Associate Director of the Voice of America (VOA). Martial law has just been declared in Poland.

I was in charge of the VOA Polish Service since my boss Feliks Broniecki was ill and would soon retire. Sam asked me how VOA should respond to the imposition of martial law and communist leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski‘s attempt to crush the independent trade union and pro-democracy Solidarity (Solidarność) movement. I proposed an immediate expansion of VOA Polish Service medium wave and shortwave radio broadcasts from two and a half to seven hours daily.

Voice of America and martial law in Poland 40 years ago – a quick response by the Reagan Administration to the communist regime's attempt at holding on to power and destroying Solidarity. Photo: Polish Army tanks enter the town of Zbąszyń while moving east towards Poznań, 13 December 1981....

03/12/2021

On November 29, 2021, the United States Embassy in Tirana, Albania, posted on its official page a message celebrating the so-called Day of Liberation of Albania (November 29, 1944). The post received many angry comments from Albanians in Albania and Albanian-Americans. A highly respected former Voice of America journalist Ilir Ikonomi wrote: “The U. S. officials have never celebrated the so-called Liberation Day in Albania. IMHO this is a gross diplomatic mistake on your part and those who suffered from the communist oppression in Albania are due an apology ASAP.” A retired former VOA Albanian Service chief and former VOA Eurasia Division Director Frank Shkreli wrote in an article for an Albanian news website: “I am addressing Mrs. Kim [U.S. Ambassador to Albania, career diplomat Yuri Kim] because as of today, I, as an American citizen and taxpayer of Albanian origin, do not consider you as my ambassador to the homeland of my ancestors.” The U.S. Embassy in Tirana page is full of similar angry comments from Albanians, but as of December 2, the Voice of America Albanian Service news website is not reporting on the controversy. In the past, the U.S. State Department never issued official statements on the so-called “Liberation Day” (the U.S. Embassy in Tirana may have had low-level events to mark it), but chose instead the Day of Independence (November 28, 1912) to send routine greetings to the people of Albania. Most Albanians consider the so-called “Day of Liberation” the beginning of the communist dictatorship and brutal repressions. The U.S. Embassy Facebook post comes at a time when there have been unprecedented moves by former Albanian Communists, including some socialist members of the Albanian Parliament and some historians, to rehabilitate Albania’s infamous Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha.

Voice of America propaganda for Albania from a noted American playwright who trusted Stalin and Tito can be a lesson for today's U.S. diplomats.

17/11/2021

NOVEMBER 17, 2021 12:00 AM
BY TED LIPIEN

The taxpayer-funded Voice of America is increasingly being fooled into advancing hostile foreign propaganda and being used by agency officials and some partisan editors to propagandize to Americans.

Independent Russian journalists accuse the VOA of spreading President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda. In an interview with Forbes Russia, independent Russian journalist Galina Timchenko said that the Voice of America “listens to bulls***.” One of her colleagues tweeted that a recent VOA news report was “irresponsible and amazingly stupid” and that whoever approved it should be fired. In Africa and in the United States, the Tigrayans accuse VOA of ignoring the genocide in Ethiopia.

Recent VOA broadcasts glorified such communists as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro without mentioning their countless victims. Early VOA broadcasters glorified Joseph Stalin, who during World War II was in control of America’s most important military ally against N**i Germany, but was also a mass murderer like Adolf Hi**er.

The Democrats in Congress would be wrong to assume that partisan VOA videos, such as this one in 2016 and this one in 2020, which violate the VOA Charter and therefore U.S. law, are good for the Democratic Party in the long run. In combination with other VOA scandals, they will create a backlash in immigrant communities and among foreign audiences.

The same would be true if the Republicans tried to use VOA for their partisan domestic advantage. Longtime agency leaders accused a former Trump-appointed CEO, who was in charge for only a few months, of such violations, but they were themselves responsible for allowing anti-Republican partisan propaganda in VOA programs over several years in addition to permitting Chinese, Russian, and other foreign propaganda to seep unchallenged into some VOA programs.

Several Republican lawmakers allege that the agency’s management is creating a culture that tolerates substandard journalism and violations of professional ethics. Sen. Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, expressed his concern about some of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (which supervises VOA) personnel decisions with regard to Cuba. This time, calls for reforms also first came largely from immigrant communities.

As things stand now, the Democrats face a greater risk than the Republicans of paying the price at the ballot box if ethnic voters continue to be displeased with U.S. international broadcasting. The dishonesty about Voice of America’s history and its current news coverage open USAGM and VOA leaders to criticism from audiences abroad and from Americans. Recent immigrants from Iran , China , Russia , Cuba , and Ethiopia have expressed for several years their displeasure with some past and present VOA and USAGM executives and editors, as have many independent foreign journalists and human rights activists.

The failures of agency executives can harm the Democratic Party unless the Biden administration and the Democrats in Congress intervene and together with the Republicans try to resolve the problems at USAGM and VOA. This was done successfully in the past, particularly during the Truman administration and the Reagan administration, when both parties had worked together to reform and strengthen the U.S. international broadcasting with good results for America’s security and for human rights abroad.

Being honest about history is the first step to being honest about the present and the future. Admitting past mistakes might help VOA and USAGM executives address current problems, rather than trying to hide them and attacking critics of their mismanagement. Recent scandals at USAGM included having leaders with corporate or family business interests in China and Russia, visits and calls to the Chinese Embassy, taking bribes from foreign officials, hiring journalists who previously produced anti-Western propaganda for Russian state media, plagiarism , and repeating Russian, Iranian, Cuban, Ethiopian and Chinese propaganda in Voice of America broadcasts.

The U.S. and other countries and regions (particularly Iran, China, Tibet, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Belarus, Ethiopia) can benefit from honest journalism supported with money from U.S. taxpayers, but don’t expect it from a government bureaucracy that refuses to learn its own history and hides information from media and members of Congress. The historical lesson for the Biden White House and the Democrats in Congress is that managerial and journalistic failures at the U.S. Agency for Global Media and the Voice of America sooner or later will cause them to lose support among some ethnic voters in the U.S.

There are already thousands of posts on social media from Chinese Americans, Iranian Americans, and Tigrayan Americans highly critical of the current and recent agency leaders and managers. Mismanagement at USAGM is a bipartisan issue that needs a bipartisan solution based on the VOA Charter, which is U.S. law. The charter requires the Voice of America broadcasts to be completely free from partisan bias and free from foreign and domestic propaganda of any kind.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media and the Voice of America's management need to set an example for honesty in America if they want to become credible and relevant abroad. U.S. international broadcasters must have competent leaders who are honest about history, enjoy bipartisan support, don’t have business interests in China or Russia, and are untainted by scandals.

Ted Lipien is a journalist, writer, and media freedom advocate. He was Voice of America’s Polish service chief during Poland’s struggle for democracy and VOA’s acting associate director. He also served briefly in 2020-2021 as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s president.

At Voice of America, history repeats itself because of poor USAGM leadership and violations of the VOA Charter.

28/08/2021

In 1954, General Lucius D. Clay, Rtd. was the former first chairman of the Crusade for Freedom, a semi-private initiative supported by General Dwight D. Eisenhower and other prominent Americans, which was designed to raise private contributions for Radio Free Europe, and to hide the fact that RFE was almost fully funded by the U.S. government through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). General Clay said in 1954 that unlike the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe was “not bound by diplomatic limitations.” He was right on that point. He was also right when in response to the question why Radio Free Europe is so important to Americans, he answered:


“Because it is devoted to the single most important job in the world-to help keep World War III from happening. If 70,000,000 people in the six Iron Curtain countries continue to resist Soviet tyranny, the Kremlin is kept off balance in one of the most strategically sensitive areas in the world.”

One of the questions was: What is the difference between Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America?

His answer was:

General Lucius D. Clay: “The Voice of America is run and paid for by the Government. Radio Free Europe is operated as an independent American enterprise by a committee of private citizens. It is people talking to people–Poles telling the truth to Poles, Czechs and Slovaks telling the truth to Czechs and Slovaks, etc. It is not bound by diplomatic limitations. The Voice of America broadcasts to many countries and can only devote a limited amount of time each day to any one country. But Radio Free Europe’s ‘Voice of Free Czechoslovakia,’ for example, broadcasts about 20 hours each day to Czechoslovakia alone.”

  General Lucius D. Clay, Rtd