Cold War Radio Museum By Ted Lipien We know of only one Voice of America (VOA) journalist, Konstanty Broel Plater, who resigned from his job at the U.S. government radio station during World War II in protest against the orders from the VOA management and the editors in the Office of War Information (OWI) in New York and Washington to…
Anti-communist atheist Bertram D. Wolfe discovered that Voice of America (VOA) English writers could not write persuasively about religion in communist-ruled nations in the early 1950s. Religious programming was then and continues to be a challenge for VOA’s American-born officials and broadcasters, partly because of the wrongly perceived separation of church and state concerns and partly because of a certain…
There is a long history of censorship at the Voice of America, which shows how easily some VOA leaders, editors, and journalists were duped by propaganda from communist and other authoritarian regimes. During World War II and in some periods of the Cold War, the VOA management protected Stalin. Today’s VOA leaders protected from embarrassment Vietnam’s communist Prime Minister Pham…
USAGM Watch Commentary As reported by Paul Farhi in the Washington Post on Tuesday, the Voice of America (VOA) management in the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which is now headed by a former VOA Director, Amanda Bennett, removed a news story that embarrassed Vietnam’s prime minister. The removal of the story by the Voice of America was requested…
Evelyn May Lieberman (née Simonowitz; July 9, 1944 – December 12, 2015) was the Director of the Voice of America (VOA) from 1997 until 1999 during the Clinton administration. She was the first woman to serve as White House Deputy Chief of Staff and was the first United States Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. It was Lieberman who transferred former…
Soviet jamming was a sign of the effectiveness of Western radio broadcasts. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were consistently jammed. The Voice of America was jammed only during some periods. Ted Lipien for Cold War Radio Museum In his book Operation Suicide: “Those Strange Bridges to Communism,” published in 1967, American journalist Eugene Lyons, a former communist sympathizer who interviewed Joseph Stalin…
Disinformation governance by government propaganda experts can be dangerous, judging by the record of the early officials in charge of the Voice of America and journalists duped by Soviet propaganda. As the Voice of America (VOA), the United States government’s radio station for international audiences, observes its eightieth anniversary in 2022, it may surprise some Americans, assuming they have heard…
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. I could not find any photographs of Homer Smith, Jr. which are in the public domain. The featured photo above shows A. Marcus Garveyite reading the OWI (Office of War…
80 years ago today, on February 1, 1942, the first Voice of America (VOA) radio broadcast in German may have gone on the air. There is some uncertainty as to the exact date of the first VOA radio transmission, and the programs did not acquire the official Voice of America name until several years later. Selling “the religion of democracy”…
80 years ago today, on February 1, 1942, the first Voice of America (VOA) radio broadcast in German may have gone on the air. There is some uncertainty as to the exact date in February 1942. Moreover, for the first several years, the name “Voice of America” was not yet used. The early broadcasts had various names, such as “America…
One of Voice of America’s fellow travelers who spread Soviet propaganda lies in VOA’s early years was a celebrated American journalist, Wallace Carroll. Commentary By Ted Lipien The Voice of America (VOA), the U.S. taxpayer-funded broadcaster with a budget of $252 million (FY20) in the federal U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), plans to observe in February its 80th anniversary.…
Voice of America at 80 – the hidden record of VOA’s pro-Soviet fellow travelers, Howard Fast and John Houseman, offers lessons for today Commentary By Ted Lipien The Voice of America (VOA), the U.S. taxpayer-funded international broadcaster with a budget of $252 million (FY20) in the federal U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), plans to observe in February its 80th…
Commentaries about Stalin’s victims, Voice of America By Ted Lipien (Tadeusz Lipień) In my Washington Examiner Christmas Day op-ed, and in my post about Polish artist, writer, and witness of genocide Józef Czapski, I write about Stalin’s victims and the Voice of America (VOA) in the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). I am an East European refugee from communism.…
Censored by Voice of America in 1950, re-interviewed in the 1980s, Józef Czapski gets a plaque in Prague By Ted Lipien On December 21, 2021, a plaque at Józef Czapski’s birthplace in Prague, the Czech Republic, was unveiled in a ceremony attended by ambassadors from Poland, the Holy See, Lithuania, and Estonia. The Embassy of Italy, which now occupies the…
The announcement of a new book by Polish-American journalist Ted Lipien (Tadeusz Lipień): Hunger for Truth – Józef and Maria Czapski’s Fight Against Kremlin Propaganda. Foreword Hunger for Truth analyzes the contribution of two prominent Polish political exiles in the second half of the 20th century to the struggle against censorship and indoctrination in countries behind the Iron Curtain and against…