Putin’s influencers? Why is taxpayer-funded VOA spreading his propaganda?

Voice of America (VOA), the U.S. government-funded media agency, created and uploaded to its YouTube channel a video of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko speaking at a World War II anniversary ceremony in Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), Russia.

The footage included propaganda messages from the last two autocrats in Europe, which had already been widely reported by state media in Russia and Belarus. There was no added context or balance from VOA.

Why would Voice of America want to repeat, under its logo, what these two master propagandists wanted to say, without challenging their narrative? And was it appropriate to end the video with the VOA slogan “Free Press Matters”?

I posed these questions to several current and former VOA journalists and a few former VOA executives. For fear of career consequences and retaliation, some asked not to be named.

“This seems like some promo, worse yet, a platform for Putin,” one wrote back, adding that “clips used in a BALANCED news report would have been in order (if some sort of news were made).”

Another one answered: “No! What’s wrong with these people?”

A former VOA Russian Service broadcaster wrote: “Disgusting — why is VOA doing the job of the Russian/Putin’s press service? I just don’t understand it!”

Another journalist observed: “It’s the bloody voice of AMERICA, not the former USSR. U.S. international broadcasting has gone to the dogs.”

VOA did not hint anywhere in its reporting that there was anything inappropriate about this video. Instead, VOA helped convey Putin’s not-so-hidden propaganda message that his aggressive war against Ukraine is a continuation of Stalin’s war against fascism.

Of course, VOA should have explained to its international and domestic audiences (much of VOA’s English-language content is viewed online in the United States) that Hitler and Stalin were allies at the start of World War II. Each attacked and occupied several countries with the help of the other before Hitler turned against Stalin. 

I asked former colleagues working for VOA and its parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (2024 budget request — almost $1 billion), whether this video had any journalistic value for the American taxpayers who had paid for it. More answers came, with no one defending the production of VOA’s Putin-Lukashenko video based on raw footage from the Associated Press.

“No,” one answer came back. “Where’s the added journalistic value of posting something people can presumably see ad nauseam in the state-controlled media? Just a dictator-friendly photo op? Then no.”

David S. Jackson, former VOA director (2002-2006) during the George W. Bush administration, correctly observed that the video could have had a helpful impact if it had shown Putin’s hypocrisy by focusing on his invasion of Ukraine.   

“It might be more defensible if (1) it added some context of who these guys are and noted the similarities between Germany’s assault on Leningrad and Russia’s current assault on cities in Ukraine; and (2) VOA covered far more important and relevant (to its charter obligations) stories in the U.S. and abroad, which it routinely does not.”

David Satter, a journalist and historian who writes about Russia and the Soviet Union made the same salient point: “Not without reference to the current slaughter of Ukrainians.”

I wrote to VOA asking for a comment. They acknowledged the question but didn’t have an answer for me before deadline. Back in 2017, when I asked why VOA was posting raw video showing the burning of American and Israeli flags and not adding any balancing content, I received the answer that VOA sees nothing wrong with that.

It happens that the current USAGM CEO, Amanda Bennett, who was VOA director from 2016 to 2020, introduced the “Free Press Matters” slogan at VOA. Unfortunately, the Voice of America and USAGM management do not seem to understand that a “free press” can only be free when many private and public news organizations, both partisan and independent, compete against each other in a democracy for the attention and trust of news consumers.

A single U.S. government-funded news organization, staffed by federal employees and contractors, cannot meet these standards alone. That is why, under the law imposed by Congress, known as the VOA Charter (Public Law 94-350), all Voice of America news reports must always be accurate, objective, and comprehensive. The VOA video with Putin and Lukashenko did not comply with the VOA Charter. Nor did many VOA news reports transmitted into Iran, China, and Russia in recent years.

I discovered recently that Bennett had been a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board, which in 2003 had refused to revoke the 1932 Pulitzer Prize given to Walter Duranty. This fact did not even surface during her Senate nomination hearing. Walter Duranty, a New York Times Moscow correspondent, had been a chief Western apologist for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. He denied in his reports that millions of peasants were starving to death in the communist-engineered famine in Ukraine in the 1930s. The Pulitzer Prize board should have withdrawn his prize long ago, but it did not. 

I see the same reluctance of the senior agency leaders to challenge VOA journalists, whom they have hired, praised and promoted, as long as they advance a preferred ideological narrative under cover of “free press.”  

The recent VOA Putin video is not the first of its kind. It is one of many. In the last several years, VOA journalists have glorified Che Guevara and Angela Davis, and posted videos showing the burning of Israeli and U.S. flags. These violent images have received hundreds of thousands of views in the Middle East and many in the United States. No wonder Hamas terrorists seemed confident that Western journalists would find excuses for their slaughter of defenseless Jewish women and children. Even taxpayer-funded U.S. journalists give them aid and comfort.

Some VOA journalists want to call these murderers and war criminals “fighters” rather than terrorists. Some have been posting anti-Israeli memes on their personal social media pages, calling for the violent destruction of Israel. 

House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) has tried writing letters to Bennett, demanding answers and reforms, especially in VOA’s Persian Service. Despite (or perhaps because of) hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars spent every year on USAGM, even countries in Africa are now siding with Russia against Ukraine and with Hamas against Israel and the Free World.

Senator Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) has said that he is dismayed how the leadership of the VOA newsroom “not only doubled down on VOA’s absurd editorial guidance against referring to Hamas as terrorists but also showed contempt for congressional oversight.”

The senior agency leadership added to these problems by allowing the hiring of former Putin state media propagandists and other questionable journalists, without proper vetting. A VOA freelance video reporter was expelled from Ukraine and arrested in Poland, suspected of spying for Russia and for spying on dissident Russian journalists — charges he has denied through his lawyer, who curiously also represented Edward Snowden. 

Honest and outstanding VOA broadcasters, of whom many still remain, have been silenced, forced to become anonymous whistleblowers. They say that the agency leadership sides with their woke activist colleagues, who think that Hamas are freedom fighters resisting “colonialist” Israeli “occupation.”  

VOA journalists who try to go against these trends have told me they fear being ostracized and passed up for promotions.

I can only ask: What else must go wrong at USAGM before President Biden and the Congress take notice?

Ted Lipien is a journalist and media freedom advocate who was chief of the Voice of America’s Polish Service during Poland’s  successful struggle for democracy and later served as VOA’s acting associate director.