Cold War Radio Museum By Ted Lipien A partial answer to the question of why the Voice of America (VOA) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had no Russian-language radio broadcasts to the Soviet Union until after the end of World War II can be found in the biography of William Benton by Sidney Hyman. William Benton (1900–1973) was a…
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…
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…
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…
Zapowiedź nowej książki polsko-amerykańskiego dziennikarza Tadeusza Lipienia: Głód prawdy — walka Józefa i Marii Czapskich z propagandą Kremla. Słowo wstępne Głód prawdy analizuje wkład dwóch wybitnych postaci polskiej emigracji politycznej drugiej połowy XX wieku do walki z cenzurą i indoktrynacją w krajach za żelazną kurtyną i z propagandą komunistyczną na Zachodzie. Józef Czapski i Maria Czapska — brat i siostra…
OPINION My op-ed in The Washington Examiner was written in response to recent media reports suggesting that leaders who have been long in charge of both the Voice of America (VOA) and the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) are responsible for a management culture which allows major abuses of journalistic practices and the VOA Charter to occur, such as…
Treated for decades as second-class citizens and denied direct access to wire services by native-born, mostly white, mostly left-leaning, and mostly male Voice of America (VOA) managers and reporters, these VOA immigrant broadcasters, some of them outstanding women journalists who spent time in communist prisons, did their best to win the propaganda war with the Soviet Union and its satellite…
The News Bureau room of the Office of War Information (OWI), November 1942, at about the same time Howard Fast started writing Voice of America newscasts. The photograph’s official caption said: “It is arranged much the same way as the city room of a daily newspaper. Here, war news of the world is disseminated. In the foreground, are editors’ desks handling such special services as trade press, women’s activities, and campaigns. The news desk is in the background.” Smith, Roger, photographer. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540.
VOA logo, 2019.Yankee Doodle Voice of America (VOA) signature tune reportedly proposed by VOA chief news writer (1942-1943) Howard Fast who later received the 1953 Stalin International Peace Prize.
“I established contact at the Soviet embassy with people who spoke English and were willing to feed me important bits and pieces from their side of the wire. I had long ago, somewhat facetiously, suggested ‘Yankee Doodle’ as our musical signal, and now that silly little jingle was a power cue, a note of hope everywhere on earth…”[ref]Howard Fast, Being Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990), 18-19.[/ref]
Howard Fast, 1953 Stalin Peace Prize winner, best-selling author, journalist, former Communist Party member and reporter for its newspaper The Daily Worker, decribing his role as the chief writer of Voice of America (VOA) radio news translated into multiple languages and rebroadcast for four hours daily to Europe through medium wave transmitters leased from the BBC in 1942-1943. Howard Fast, Being Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990), pp. 18-19.
Tadeusz Lipień 4-go lipca Ameryka obchodziła Dzień Niepodległości. Podczas wizyty w Polsce 6-go lipca, prezydent Donald Trump dołączy do wielu innych amerykańskich przywódców, którzy w przeszłości potwierdzali znaczenie sojuszu polsko-amerykańskiego i przyjaźni między Stanami Zjednoczonymi a Polską. Ten szkic ma na celu przypomnienie jak mieszkańcy międzywojennej Rzeczypospolitej obchodzili w 1926 r. w wyjątkowy sposób 150-tą rocznicę podpisania amerykańskiej Deklaracji Niepodległości.…
By Ted Lipien Today, July 4, 2017, America celebrates its Independence Day. During his upcoming visit to Poland on July 6, President Donald Trump will be among a long line of American leaders reaffirming the importance of the Polish-American alliance and friendship. This article is about a unique way in which the citizens of the interwar Polish Republic marked in…
U.S. Responses to WWII Soviet Propaganda Against Poland — Lessons for Confronting Putin’s Propaganda By Ted Lipien Aggressive propaganda in support of territorial claims against other, almost always smaller and weaker nations, has been a constant feature in Soviet history. There are many similarities between Soviet propaganda and propaganda currently employed by the Kremlin against Ukraine and the West. Soviet…
