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13/10/2023

Why are US-funded Voice of America journalists defending , over the massacre of in ?

My new op-ed in The Hill includes comments on the latest barbaric attacks by Hamas terrorists on Israeli civilians—defenseless Jewish women, children, and the elderly. I discuss the hard-to-understand and explain defense of propaganda and disinformation from Iran and Russia by U.S. government-managed and funded U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) journalists, including federal employees working for the Voice of America (VOA). They went as far as to contradict interview answers from Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), without offering any evidence to support their exoneration of the main supporters of Hamas terrorists: Iran and Putin’s Russia. Rep. McCaul is currently investigating allegations of corruption at USAGM, including charges of bias in favor of Iran’s regime in VOA programs, VOA’s alleged hiring of former Putin propagandists, and dismally low employee morale.

I also tried to provide some broader historical perspectives. The New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty made it respectable to lie in defense of a “progressive” ideology and received the Pulitzer Prize for his deliberately deceptive reporting, which later included lying about millions of Ukrainian peasants who had died from starvation (Holodomor) forced on them by Joseph Stalin and his Soviet communist secret police. Since Duranty received his journalistic award in 1932, which the 2002-2003 Pulitzer Prize Board—whose membership reads like Who’s Who in journalism, media industry, U.S. government service, NGOs, and academia—refused to revoke, many communist and post-communist regimes and terrorist groups could claim the mantle of human rights and anti-imperialism to excuse and/or hide their total contempt for human life and their genocidal crimes. This propaganda has duped many Western journalists. A major part of the problem seems to be that Soviet communist atrocities, unlike those of the N***s in Germany, were never put on trial or punished.

I was Voice of America’s Polish Service chief during Poland’s peaceful struggle for democracy in the 1980s during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and later VOA’s acting associate director. I also served briefly in 2020-2021 as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty president in a non-political and non-partisan role.

Great British-Polish writer Joseph Conrad, whose timeless novels are deeply humanistic, warned at the beginning of the previous century that “the Government of Holy Russia” has been “arrogating to itself the supreme power to torment and slaughter the bodies of its subjects like a God-sent scourge.” Before becoming a refugee in England, Conrad was one of Russia’s many non-Russian conquered subjects. Conrad also wrote about imperial Russia, “Western thought, when it crosses her frontier, falls under the spell of her autocracy and becomes a noxious parody of itself.”

A parody of the truth is what is delivered as Putin’s propaganda to naïve Western journalists. As for the conservatives who think that Putin is right about Ukraine, they ought to ask how a leader like Ronald Reagan, who called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire,” would have reacted to Russia’s current attempt to restore it.

As a political refugee, Joseph Conrad was understandably pessimistic about Russia, but there have always been Russians who risked everything to defend the truth. In one of his “Kolyma Tales,” Russian writer Varlam Shalamov (a Gulag survivor like his friend Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) described the slave labor camps there as “Auschwitz without the ovens.” Shalamov wrote about how the starving Kolyma prisoners stole and ate engine grease sent to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease program and how American-made bulldozers were used to dig mass graves.

What can one say, faced with such evidence of inexplicable brutality and genocide, about Owen Lattimore, an American academic, journalist, and U.S. government official in charge of Voice of America broadcasts to China (soon to be ruled by communists), who, in his December 1944 National Geographic article informed millions of American readers that workers in the Kolyma Gulag gold mines were all volunteers and heroes of socialist labor served a special vitamin-rich diet of vegetables grown for them in hothouses?

There was no shortage of Walter Durantys in the early Voice of America, but almost all of them were removed or forced out by the end of the Democratic Truman administration. President Truman also supported the establishment of Radio Free Europe.

Several former VOA journalists later worked for communist regimes in Eastern Europe. The first VOA chief news writer and editor, novelist Howard Fast, was a Communist Party USA member who later worked for the Daily Worker party newspaper and in 1953 received the Stalin International Peace Prize. And even during the conservative Nixon and Ford Republican administrations in the 1970s, VOA banned Russian Service interviews with Solzhenitsyn, fearing that they could damage relations with the Kremlin.

Fortunately, at that time, the independent management of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty resisted such censorship. Conservative Republicans, including the late Senator James L. Buckley, criticized the Voice of America, President Ford, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for their snubbing of Solzhenitsyn. James Buckley served as President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich from 1982 to 1985. Sadly, RFE/RL is now under the management control of the USAGM’s federal bureaucracy.

READ MORE in The Hill

Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel are a handy gift to Russia’s autocrat Vladimir Putin. They distract the free world’s attention from his own atrocities in Ukraine. They may lead to higher energy prices that will benefit his regime. They also contribute to the Kremlin’s propaganda, which is influencing public opinion on the radical wings of both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Why are US-funded journalists defending Russia, Iran over the Hamas massacre?

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4252199-why-are-us-funded-journalists-defending-russia-iran-after-hamass-attacks/

Why are US-funded USAGM journalists defending Russia, Iran over the Hamas massacre of Jews? Ted Lipien asks in his op-ed in The Hill.

08/03/2023

USAGM Watch Media Commentary When both the Washington Post and National Review report on yet another senior management-created scandal at Voice of America, it’s an indication that the poor state of U.S. international broadcasting has become a bipartisan concern. Many media and foreign policy ...

08/11/2022

Stalin Peace Prize laureate Howard Fast has been erased from the history of the Voice of America, but an honest analysis of his Soviet agent of influence role as the station’s first World War II news chief could help VOA confront propaganda and disinformation today from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state media and intelligence services. Fast is also still waiting to be included among VOA’s famous authors, most of them, unlike him, opponents of Communism.

🔊 Listen to this Stalin Peace Prize laureate Howard Fast has been erased from the history of the Voice of America, but an honest analysis of his Soviet agent of influence role as the station’s first World War II news chief could help VOA confront propaganda and disinformation today from Russian...

03/07/2022

Radio Free Europe (RFE) was launched and started broadcasting from New York to Czechoslovakia on July 4, 1950.

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 ...

06/06/2022

Some of the early Voice of America officials and broadcasters, who were indoctrinated by communist propaganda and duped by Stalin, can also count themselves among the many victims of Communism and subversion by Soviet Russia.

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.

13/04/2022

April 13 marks the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Katyn Massacre – the brutal killing by the Soviet security service NKVD of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers in 1940 when Soviet Russia and N**i Germany were still allies after their joint attack and occupation of Poland in 1939, which started World War II.

In recent weeks, some Western politicians, news organizations, and social media users have made comparisons between the Soviet propaganda lies about the Katyn murders and the Russian government’s current denials of war crimes committed by Russian soldiers in Bucha and in other towns and cities in Ukraine. Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša tweeted that the Russian army behaved in Ukraine “as a horde of KGB executioners at Katyn.”

However, should the Voice of America report on the anniversary of the announcement of the 1943 discovery of the Katyn graves (VOA English News website has so far not mentioned comparisons between Katyn and Bucha), it is doubtful that today’s VOA reporters and editors will admit that from 1943 until 1945 VOA officials and journalists promoted the Soviet Katyn lies and later, at different times, tried to limit reporting about the Soviet responsibility for this war crime.

In a recent panel discussion, former VOA director Sanford Ungar admitted somewhat reluctantly in response to a question that VOA’s first chief English news writer and editor, Howard Fast, was a pro-Kremlin Communist Party activist, who after leaving VOA in 1944 received the 1953 Stalin Peace Prize.

Ungar, who heads the Free Speech Project at Georgetown University, implied that such information about Fast’s pro-Soviet propaganda at VOA may “amuse” and suggested that even asking questions about it may be a form of McCarthyism.

Millions of Stalin’s victims, including those from Ukraine and their relatives, may not agree with Mr. Ungar that talking about VOA’s Stalin Peace Prize winner is amusing, but Mr. Ungar deserves some credit for being the first Voice of America director to acknowledge that Howard Fast did work for VOA.

Current Voice of America officials, editors, and journalists have not made comparisons between Katyn and Bucha because they either do not know enough history or they are ashamed to admit that their predecessors were duped by Soviet propaganda and promoted the Soviet lies about Katyn. If they were not afraid to talk about this topic, they could point out, however, that refugees from communism hired by the Voice of America after the end of World War II replaced pro-Soviet VOA propagandists. They tried hard to get the management to change its policies on reporting on Soviet atrocities and found many allies among both Republicans and Democrats in Congress. The Truman administration carried out the initial reforms at the Voice of America. Extensive VOA reporting about the Katyn massacre started in 1951-1952. All remaining restrictions on VOA reporting about Katyn were removed during the Reagan administration in the 1980s.

April 13 marks the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Katyn Massacre – the brutal killing by the Soviet security service NKVD of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers in 1940 when Soviet Russia and N**i Germany were still allies after their joint attack and occupation of Poland in 1939, wh...

21/03/2022

The U.S. Agency for Global Media still shows a press release about its poll in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine. Its faulty and misleading 2014 poll in Crimea violated Ukraine’s sovereignty and helped to reinforce Putin’s propaganda and disinformation about Ukraine and illegally occupied and annexed Crimea.

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.

20/03/2022

Ukraine is today “the area of decision between Russia and the Free World” and “the one big problem” for Russia’s ex-KGB leader Vladimir Putin. Ukraine is today “the area of decision between Russia and the Free World” and “the one big problem” for Russia’s ex-KGB leader Vladimir P...

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

01/03/2022

As a Polish American journalist and a media freedom advocate, I would like to end Black History Month by honoring an African American news reporter and writer. Homer Smith, Jr. (1909-1972) was a 20th-century fighter for freedom and human dignity who deserves to be admired and remembered by more people.

During World War II, elite Western reporters, including those working on Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts in the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI), almost all repeated Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s lies about the massacre of thousands of Polish military officers and intellectual leaders who were prisoners in the Soviet Union. But Homer Smith, who at that time lived in Russia, chose not to participate in the Kremlin’s propaganda charade. Smith should be recognized for his principled refusal to contribute to the manipulation of the Western media by the Soviets, as well as for his struggle against racism in America.

Smith should be recognized for refusing to contribute to the Soviet manipulation of Western media, his struggle against racism in America.

26/02/2022

Voice of America English News is not the only Washington public media with puzzling and insensitive tweets. tweet that “Russia’s attack on Ukraine means there’s a stressful news cycle ahead of us” was seen as “silly” by a Yale professor. VOA is part of the federal U.S. Agency for Global Media

Privileged American public media executives, editors, and reporters may not realize how insensitive they appear to the Ukrainians

06/01/2022

Members of Congress Criticize Management Over Cuts for OCB Programs Under recent and current USAGM and Voice of America leaders, posted controversial reports favorable to the Castro regime

Cuts for OCB Cuba programs by the senior management of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) have been criticized by members of Congress.

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.

21/12/2021

68 years ago today, on December 21, 1953, the Soviet press agency announced that American novelist and journalist, Howard Fast, was awarded the International Stalin Peace Prize (the official name: the International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples). Fast was also at that time a Communist Party USA activist.

What Soviet media and the Associated Press news agency, which reported on the Soviet announcement, did not mention was that the U.S. government international broadcaster, the Voice of America (VOA), employed Howard Fast during World War II as its chief English-language news program director and news writer.

This prominent wartime VOA pro-Soviet news program chief had the distinction of being the recipient of both the Stalin International Peace Prize and the Lenin International Peace Prize, since after the Soviet Communist Party condemned Stalin in 1956, all Stalin Peace Prizes were renamed Lenin Peace Prizes. The prize was created as the International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples on December 21, 1949 by an executive order of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in honor of Joseph Stalin‘s seventieth birthday (although this was after his seventy-first birthday). Stalin was born on December 18, 1878. He died on March 5, 1953, a few months before Howard Fast was honored with the prize named after a communist mass murderer, responsible for the deaths of millions of people. At that time, Stalin was still revered in the Soviet Union.

Yet, this historically significant Soviet recognition of an important former Voice of America first news director has never been mentioned by any of VOA’s former directors or former VOA managers, editors and reporters, with one or two exceptions. Fast’s work for the Voice of America has not been mentioned or analyzed in books about the history of the U.S. government broadcaster written by VOA-friendly scholars and former officials.

Howard Fast – Chief of Voice of America News Who Won the Stalin Peace Prize By Ted Lipien for Cold War Radio Museum.

13/12/2021

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....

11/12/2021

"A Picture Story of the Voice of America" was the title of an early 1960s (possibly 1962) VOA promotional pamphlet.

President John F. Kennedy's photograph was on page one with this caption: "President John F. Kennedy at the microphone. The Voice of America broadcasts statements of the President and other key Government officials as part of its mission of explaining and interpreting the policies and objectives of the United States." (circa 1962)

VOA had a checkered history. Its first officials and broadcasters during World War II glorified Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, censored news about his crimes and spread the Kremlin's propaganda lies. The first chief VOA news writer and editor, American Communist and best-selling novelist Howard Fast, received the 1953 Stalin Peace Prize. Censorship of criticism directed at the Soviet Union continued for a few years after the war until the Truman Administration got rid of the remaining Soviet sympathizers (Fast was forced to resign in early 1944) and replaced them with anti-communist refugee journalists. Under presidents Truman and Eisenhower, VOA was more direct in criticizing communism, but it could not compete in popularity in East-Central Europe with Radio Free Europe (RFE). During the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, VOA entered a period of stagnation in programming to Soviet Block countries. The Voice of America became much more popular in East-Central Europe during the Reagan Administration when previous restrictions on criticizing the Soviet Union and communism were lifted. VOA's audience in Poland increased fivefold during the Reagan years. By the end of the 1980s, communist regimes in Eastern Europe were on their way out and were being replaced by democratically-elected governments.

Please join our Voice of America Refugee Broadcasters, Families and Supporters Facebook Group – https://www.facebook.com/groups/902628163662800

06/12/2021

Even Russia’s RT had more information on Senator Bob Dole’s foreign policy positions than the late and short report from Voice of America VOA News English central newsroom. .

BBC beat VOA on the Bob Dole story by close to three hours. The BBC report was much longer than the late news report from VOA.

RT: “Dole also advocated rapid expansion of NATO to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic while calling for a ‘firm security relationship’ with Russia. He was an ally of former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who chaired his 1996 campaign, and helped lead America’s support for the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo.”

In another example of news failures at VOA (the Voice of America), VOA central newsroom was late in posting a report on the death of Bob Dole.

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.