End the culture of corruption at the US Agency for Global Media

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) just released a report on the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), accusing its federal executives of tolerating a “culture of corruption” in managing government-funded news broadcasts for audiences abroad, especially at the Voice of America (VOA)

The report describes “severe abuses of power,” including “a stark failure of employee vetting — particularly when foreign credentials are involved — that confirms longstanding security concerns about the agency.”

My connection to the Voice of America and its managing agency deepened my concern after the committee released its latest report. I dedicated my career to the cause of press freedom, working at VOA and its agency from 1973 until 2006, where I played a pivotal role in bringing democracy to Poland as the chief of VOA’s Polish Service.

I reported for VOA from behind the Iron Curtain. I interviewed dissidents and pro-democracy leaders, including Solidarity leader and future Polish President Lech Wałęsa, future Pope John Paul II and George H.W. Bush. Later, I built a network of affiliate stations in Afghanistan and other countries and served in various leadership roles. This personal history underscores my fears over the gravity of the situation. 

Recent management failures, as described by Rep. McCaul, would have been ample grounds for the White House to ask USAGM CEO Amanda Bennett and longtime key aide Kelu Chao — both severely criticized in the report — to resign, even though the Foreign Affairs chairman is from the opposing party. Perhaps to forestall any action by the Biden administration, Bennett lashed out at McCaul, accusing the committee of “callous attempts to malign hardworking civil servants.” 

Yet it seems to me that hiring not one but several former Putin propagandists to do news reporting for the Voice of America on sensitive international affairs topics, as the Voice of America did under Bennett’s watch, does not suggest arduous work or vigilance by these highly paid USAGM and Voice of America executives.

Let us also not forget that they failed to predict the rapid fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban and allowed hundreds of USAGM employees and contractors to become stranded in extreme danger. Almost two decades of easy access to the Afghan audience, thanks to arrangements with a network of local Afghan rebroadcasting stations made no difference and did not stop the Taliban from winning. 

Bennett’s attack on the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman is an unprecedented move for the head of the U.S. government-funded media agency. Still, the record of her poor management is long and well-documented in government and media reports. 

According to the federal Public Buildings Reform Board, from January to September 2023, the agency’s offices at 330 Independence Ave. SW were only 2 percent full, the lowest among the federal offices surveyed in Washington, DC. USAGM employees told me that senior and mid-level agency and VOA managers are not seen at the building for long periods, presumably because they were working from home.

As someone who spent long hours in VOA offices while running a VOA foreign language service during the sensitive time of the peaceful struggle for democracy in Poland by the dissident Solidarity trade union, I can unequivocally state that one cannot manage journalists or a billion-dollar U.S. government media operation dealing with sensitive news and national security issues while working from home. The House Foreign Affairs Committee report described one of the senior agency executives as “absent, incurious, and inattentive…with a weak grasp of both the laws and regulations governing her agency, and of the actions of her subordinates.” 

USAGM’s and Voice of America’s failures should be apparent to any critically thinking American, regardless of what these government executives say about the growth of their online audience. The large numbers of hits and views the management announces occasionally, especially when facing outside criticism, are essentially meaningless and deceptive. It is the impact that matters, and lately that has been woefully lacking. 

As a refugee from communism, a multilingual journalist and a former media executive, I know that Voice of America and Radio Free Europe have the potential to change the world for the better, as some of us did when we worked for those organizations in the 1980s to bring about the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Soviet Empire.

The current USAGM management team, in contrast, seems focused on generating more YouTube views to impress members of Congress. But some of the most popular VOA videos on YouTube showed nothing else but pro-Hamas and pro-Iran demonstrators burning American and Israeli flags with no attempt to provide balance or context, as required by the congressional VOA Charter.

It should also not surprise anyone that in recent years, most African countries have sided at the UN with Russia on votes about Ukraine and Israel. How could they not, when they see an introduction to a VOA news video quoting a Columbia University Apartheid Divest activists speak about “a martyr murdered at the hands of the genocidal Israeli state at the age of six years old”?

The word “apartheid,” when falsely applied to Israel and unchallenged in a VOA program, can have a powerful effect on any audience, especially in Africa. Again, several recent VOA news reports did not contain denials or differing points of view about Hamas, as required by the VOA Charter, a law passed by Congress and signed by President Ford in 1976. 

This is not the first time unchallenged antisemitic Hamas and Iranian propaganda has found its way into agency-funded news programs under the watch of the current USAGM leaders. Why wouldn’t Hamas think that they could murder and rape defenseless Jews and still have international support?

Some of Voice of America’s senior journalists, praised and promoted by the USAGM executives, urged their colleagues not to call Hamas “terrorists.” These VOA reporters and editors wanted to refer to murderers of women and children as “fighters,” whose aim in the October 7 attack, as one of them assured her colleagues, was “to free Palestinian prisoners, stop Israeli aggression on al-Aqsa Mosque, and to break the siege on Gaza.”

Chairman McCaul said that the House report on the U.S. Agency for Global Media represents only “the tip of the iceberg” of mismanagement at USAGM and VOA. In 2019, I warned Ms. Bennett, then-VOA Director, and her former boss, USAGM CEO John Lansing, who later went to run NPR, that a television journalist hired by VOA Russian Service had produced anti-American and antisemitic propaganda for President Vladimir Putin’s media in Russia. I received no response, and the journalist continued to work for VOA until his contract expired.

The Washington Post reported in February 2023 that VOA later brought on board even more former Russian state media propagandists.

Voice of America also hired a Russian-Spanish freelancer who produced several video news reports under his name. But in February 2022, he was expelled from Ukraine and arrested in Poland on suspicion of spying for Russia, including spying on dissident Russian journalists in the West. The freelancer denied the charges, and Voice of America came to his defense. And Voice of America reporters and editors failed to discover that their freelancer’s lawyer was a former felon convicted in Spain on terrorism-related charges. The same lawyer also represented American spy Edward Snowden, who now hides from American justice in Russia.

I don’t see any possibility of reforming U.S. international media outreach unless Chairman McCaul, President Biden, and Democrats in Congress act together in a bipartisan manner to save an institution crucial for national security. 

This may be difficult, as the current management has had years to fill the agency with highly partisan managers and journalists. But many talented and unbiased broadcasters remain, especially at USAGM’s non-federal entities such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Instead of cutting funding for Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, or Voice of America, Congress and the White House should dismiss a substantial segment of USAGM bureaucrats and eliminate their operations while making media entities more independent. The Biden administration should increase the powers of the bipartisan International Broadcasting Advisory Board.

Biden should also accept McCall’s recommendation to establish a USAGM Office of Inspector General, independent of the State Department’s OIG to help end the manifest corruption and managerial incompetence at the agency.

Ted Lipien is a a journalist, writer, blogger, press freedom advocate and former international media executive.