By Ted Lipien Published July 27, 2013 by Digital Journal Washington – Federal employees were told to identify U.S. stations but not to make offers of government-funded news to domestic media. With the controversy swirling over media reports that after a recent congressional modification in the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, U.S. officials may try to target Americans with government propaganda, the federal agency…
By Ted Lipien Published July 16, 2013 by Digital Journal Washington – Government officials used deceptive propaganda to get congress to overturn a ban on government news distribution in the U.S. Would government officials resort to deceptive propaganda to help them get the U.S. Congress to overturn an old law, the Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibited them from distributing government-funded news to…
By Ted Lipien Published September 14, 2012 by Digital Journal Washington – Former U.S. Ambassador to Poland Victor Ashe criticizes the executive staff of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) for using a weak language in describing the death of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens. Public relations officials of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) — the U.S. government agency responsible for…
By Ted Lipien Published May 20, 2012 by Digital Journal Blind Chinese legal activist and dissident Chen Guangcheng had been secretly listening to Voice of America (VOA) Mandarin shortwave radio broadcasts while he was in prison in China. The Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting – CUSIB – reported that blind Chinese legal activist and dissident Chen Guangcheng, who arrived Saturday in the…
By Ted Lipien Published April 12, 2012 by Digital Journal Annette Lantos, the wife of the late Congressman Tom Lantos, has joined efforts to oppose the Broadcasting Board of Governors’ (BBG) proposals to cut Voice of America (VOA) services, the independent Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting reported. In a letter addressed to the presidentially appointed members of the Broadcasting Board of Governors…
Voice of America is celebrating its 70th anniversary amid devastating programming cuts being imposed by the Broadcadting Board of Governors. One of the programs scheduled for elimination are VOA radio broadcadts to Tibet. The BBG also wants to close down the VOA Cantonese Service. The VOA HISTORY was written in the early 2000s by the VOA external affairs office.…
By Ted Lipien Published March 2, 2012 by Digital Journal Moscow – Voice of America and Radio Liberty, funded by US taxpayers to promote media freedom abroad, self-censor news on two stations in Moscow to comply with Russian media law prior to Russia’s presidential elections on March 4. US government-funded media freedom broadcasters, Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Liberty (Radio Free Europe and Radio…
This report was published first by CUSIB. In an article published in American Diplomacy, a quarterly electronic journal of commentary, analysis, and research on American foreign policy and its practice, the Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB) director Ted Lipien warns against diminished public stake in U.S. international broadcasting. Lipien, a former acting associate director of the Voice of America,…
Celebrated Voice of America Breakfast Show host Pat Gates Lynch died after a struggle with cancer Sunday at her home in Fort Belvoir. From the mid-50s until 1969, Pat served for about 15 years as host and interviewer on the VOA Worldwide English Breakfast Show, which drew significant audiences around the world that even surpassed at times those of jazz…
This report was prompted by the news of the Voice of America Croatian Service being forced off the air and the Internet on the orders of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) officials. VOA Croatian radio and TV broadcasts and online news content have served an important information and public diplomacy function, representing U.S. views, policies, interests, and concerns while…
Silencing VOA programming would end U.S. support for China’s freedom. John Lenczowski, who as President Reagan’s Soviet affairs adviser was instrumental in increasing funding for Voice of America and Radio Free Europe broadcasts to Poland during Solidarity’s struggle for democracy, wrote in a Washington Times op-ed that by proposing to end VOA radio and TV transmissions to China, the Broadcasting…
Now, as the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks nears, it may be time for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) to consider its mission and how it achieves it, wrote Michael Rubin in Commentary magazine post Why Would U.S. Taxpayers Publish a Celebration of the 9/11 Attack? This is about yet another example of how BBG’s directives to use a wrong…
In a paper published by the Public Diplomacy Council, Alan L. Heil Jr., a former deputy director of VOA, the author of Voice of America: A History, argues for a multi-platform U.S. international broadcasting that in addition to new media takes advantage of both radio and television. In his paper LANDSCAPE OF INTERNATIONAL BROADCASTING VOA and the BBC at a…
Fox News reported — Lawmakers Scramble to Keep Voice of America On Air in China — that Congressional lawmakers are scrambling to prevent America’s international media arm from going off-air in China, arguing that a plan to shift much of its reporting to the Internet won’t do much good in a country notorious for its web censors. In a full…
The BBG-managed Voice of America (VOA) websites were hacked on February 21, 2011, apparently by the “Iranian Cyber Army,” as reported by PiratesWeek and Kim Andrew Elliott, a Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) employee who publishes his own private international broadcasting website, In 2009, VOA websites were out of comission for at least two full days during President Obama’s official…