This article by the Committee for U.S. international Broadcasting (CUSIB) Executive Director Ann Noonan was published in National Review. We republish it from CUSIB’s website. BBG Ready to Drop the Ax on Cantonese and Tibetan Services By Ann Noonan March 5, 2012 In December 2011, the Broadcasting Board of Governors issued a proclamation in observance of Voice of America’s 70th anniversary…
This report is republished from Free Media Online and BBG Watch. In a Digital Journal news commentary, Op-Ed: America’s radios dancing to Putin’s tune in Moscow, former Voice of America acting associate director and journalist Ted Lipien revealed that Voice of America and Radio Liberty, funded by US taxpayers to promote media freedom abroad, self-censor news on two stations in…
“More than 30 years have passed since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about the “Soft Voice of America” in an article that first appeared in National Review on April 30, 1982. Incredibly, today we appear again to be headed in the direction bemoaned by Solzhenitsyn all those years ago. While the budget for international broadcasting has certainly grown since Cold War days,…
Ted Lipien, a former Voice of America (VOA) acting associate director, has been warning for some time that marketing and staffing policies pushed by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) executives have changed the focus of VOA and other BBG broadcasters from serious, accurate and well balanced journalism to ratings-chasing entertainment and sloppy reporting produced by inexperienced, poorly paid, otherwise…
In a Washington Times Op-Ed, a Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting member Ted Lipien warned about a pro-Putin bias in the Voice of America Russian programs. Lipien reported that a highly respected independent journalist in Russia hired by the Broadcasting Board of Governors to evaluate the VOA Russian website concluded last year that it has a pro-Kremlin bias and downplays…
Republished from the Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB) website: 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…
Radio of the Martial Law Thirty years ago, on December 13, 1981, General Wojciech Jaruzelski had declared martial law in Poland, imprisoning Lech Walesa and other Solidarity Trade Union leaders. The Polish communist rulers placed the country under a complete information blockout, but thanks to radio programs in Polish from the Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe (RFE)…
The Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB) members paid tribute to victims of human rights abuses in China by placing flowers Wednesday, December 7, in Washington, D.C. at the Victims of Communism Memorial. President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers Reggie Littlejohn, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 1812 Timothy Shamble who represents the Broadcasting Board of…
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…
BBG Watch has learned that individuals associated with U.S. human rights, labor, and media freedom organizations have formed the Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB) with the aim of working with the Administration, Congress and media to promote free flow of uncensored news from the United States to countries in which journalists are threatened or lack sufficient resources. Many of…
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…
SENATOR CHARLES H. PERCY, 1919-2011 by Alan Heil Senator Percy passed away September 17 at the Washington Home in the District of Columbia after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 91, just ten days shy of his 92nd birthday. The Illinois Senator and former Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee played a key role in enactment of…
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…