80 years ago, 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” was Voice of America’s first mission statement. Unfortunately, the early VOA leaders and journalists, many of them pro-Soviet fellow travelers and some Communist Party members, believed that the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, was a democrat. They convinced themselves that Soviet communism was a progressive ideology that other countries should accept.
Today, the Voice of America is managed by the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). According to official government employee surveys, USAGM has been for many years the worst federal agency to work for, with the lowest employee morale. What the successive Voice of America management teams never admitted, is that the early VOA broadcasts, while accurate on most news, did not tell the whole truth and endangered the lives of VOA listeners with disinformation. Soviet and other communist propaganda lies in early VOA broadcasts were especially harmful to listeners in East-Central Europe and China.
VOA’s World War II-era fellow travelers claimed that listeners had nothing to fear from Soviet Russia and its totalitarian leader Joseph Stalin, and should not distrust Chinese communists. The CIA reported in the early 1950s that accepting the pro-Soviet propaganda claims promoted by VOA may have caused some people in Czechoslovakia to make decisions that ultimately resulted in their deaths. Early VOA broadcasters, many of them Soviet sympathizers, some of them members of various communist parties, used propaganda to present the Soviet Union as a progressive country and Stalin as a supporter of democracy who, having won the trust of President Roosevelt, should be trusted by the people in East-Central Europe.
No Voice of America director has ever publicly admitted that the first VOA chief news writer and editor was Howard Fast. He was a future recipient of the Stalin International Peace Prize and a Communist Party activist and journalist.
The Voice of America has also never officially admitted that the first VOA director John Houseman was forced to resign after the State Department accused him of being untrustworthy. President Roosevelt’s friend, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, secretly warned the White House that Houseman was hiring communists for VOA jobs.
VOA officials have never apologized to listeners for censoring true information about communist atrocities. They have not admitted that those very few anti-communist VOA journalists hired during World War II faced retaliation for expressing their views. One of the refugee VOA broadcasters, Konstanty Broel Plater, resigned in 1944 in protest against Soviet propaganda in VOA programs. A Jewish refugee from Austria, Julius Epstein, lost his job in the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1945.
Almost all the major successes of the Voice of America during the Cold War can be attributed to anti-communist broadcasters, including the legendary Polish anti-Nazi fighter Zofia Korbońska. During the Truman administration and in later years, they replaced the pro-Soviet fellow travelers. But their contributions have been largely ignored. They faced severe discrimination from native-born senior VOA managers in the later decades. VOA was most effective against totalitarianism and propaganda during the Reagan administration.
The Voice of America has changed drastically in the last twenty years. Under its current USAGM management, VOA has been known to create programs that glorify such foreign and American communists as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Angela Davis. VOA also hired a few broadcasters who previously produced anti-U.S. propaganda for President Putin’s state media in Russia. VOA is increasingly propagandizing to Americans.
USAGM and VOA leadership still has a highly selective institutional memory and resists calls for reform. To mark the Voice of America’s 80th anniversary, I will be reposting in February some of my articles about VOA’s history. (bloggernews.net)
