It’s Over

A Google StreetView of the entrance to the Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station for the Voice Of America, near Greenville, North Carolina

The Voice of America is silent.

To Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Kari Lake (who now runs its corpse), the VOA was corrupt, biased, unnecessary, and needed to go. To nearly everyone else who cares, it was America’s voice on radio, and mattered enormously to an audience in the hundreds of millions, listening in forty-eight languages. For many of those, the VOA was the best, and in some cases the only, source of relatively unbiased news.

I am sure some of it was biased. Reporters tend to stand in a place, and most who report on political matters stand on the left (see here and here). Dan Robinson, who spent thirty-four years with the VOA, stands on the right and posted a long bill of particulars in Voice of America, Global Media Agency are rightly in budget cut bull’s-eye: Entire operation should be dismantled, in the Washington Times. An excerpt:

I have monitored the agency’s bureaucracy along with many of its reporters and concluded that it has essentially become a hubris-filled rogue operation often reflecting a leftist bias aligned with partisan national media. It has sought to avoid accountability for violations of journalistic standards and mismanagement. The list includes:

• During President-elect Donald Trump’s first term, VOA allowed and often encouraged key correspondents to carry out opposition journalism against him. This included an uprising, growing out of VOA’s central newsroom, against Mr. Trump’s choice of chief USAGM executive in 2020.

• That newsroom and the agency have a known left-wing bias. Between 2016 and 2020, some VOA reporters did little to hide their disdain for Mr. Trump in their reports and social media posts.

• Since Amanda Bennett, VOA director from 2016 to mid-2020, returned as USAGM chief in 2022, managers and employees dissed Republicans in Congress who criticized VOA’s inexplicable refusal to refer to Hamas terrorists as terrorists. One agency official called lawmakers “silly.” VOA’s new director has equated congressional critics to troublemakers.