Mourning the Voice of America and all it stands for

More than most government projects, Voice of America might almost have seemed to embody President Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.” VOA correspondents as I observed them, from the Vietnam War to Tiananmen Square, from Japan and Korea, made a show of covering news related to U.S. interests from a distinctly American point of view.

Inevitably they would have to report news that did not enhance the American image, of course, but most of what they put out reflected on America as a beacon of democracy and free speech.

VOA correspondents did not imitate the legacy media’s edge of intellectual superiority or omniscience. Nor did VOA stories have the tone of NPR reports, which tend to cover controversial events in the understated accent of self-consciously dispassionate observers. VOA stories, for the benefit of foreign audiences, were not just bereft of annoying interpretation — they were often rather boring, in fact.

VOA reports might be available on the internet, but VOA did not broadcast to American stations. Banned by law from broadcasting in the U.S., VOA was unheard in the morning and evening rush hour “drive time” when radio news chalks up its greatest numbers of listeners.

For VOA, either straight, factual reporting or carefully balanced analysis was the norm. There was no covering up American bungling in Vietnam when I was there in the late 1960s and early 1970s. VOA correspondents were always on hand for the “5 o’clock follies” — the afternoon briefings by military officers and civilian officials — reporting both the good and the bad. VOA correspondents were not known for having “investigated” or “exposed” corruption or conflicts of interest or embarrassing policy failures. They did, however, report those stories when they were out there making headlines.

Straight news, of course, could be upsetting to the governments or societies from which VOA was reporting. The uprising of 1989 in Beijing, when demonstrators filled Tiananmen Square, is a case in point. Everyone I met on the square told me they got their news from VOA and BBC. Certainly, they were not getting anything other than propaganda from the Chinese state media, whether print or broadcast. Nowhere else could they find out what was going on, they told me. These days, in the era of the internet, China dedicates sophisticated resources to blocking anything that might undermine Chinese Communist Party rule, including Facebook and Gmail.

It was remarkable to me at the time that Chinese protesters, listening to VOA and BBC in Chinese, would equate the two. Unlike VOA, BBC reports on the British government. Though it’s sometimes accused of being a mouthpiece for British interests, the BBC’s reporting on crises and controversies is often more thorough and reliable than that of commercial international networks, including its American rivals. VOA, by comparison, was a state information factory, and that meant it sometimes sounded like propaganda. No one doubted, however, that VOA reports were an antidote to the official lines put out by authoritative regimes, notably China and the Soviet Union, and it was certainly more reliable than those of other state broadcasters.

Kurt Achin, a former VOA correspondent in Seoul, New Delhi and Hong Kong, was proud of the dispassionate way that VOA correspondents covered the news from Washington and overseas. He told me of “a strong culture of trust in our basic charter, enshrined into law by Congress, that VOA tells the truth and does not embody the views of any single sector of American life, nor certainly any administration or set of political officers, but does its best to represent as a whole the entity which is the United States.”

Nowhere in VOA stories did you see an effort to infuse a political viewpoint. Just look at the case of VOA’s former chief national correspondent, Steve Herman, who was placed on leave for stating on a VOA program after Trump’s election that “loyalty” was “the number one attribute rather than experience” for getting named to Trump’s Cabinet — a seemingly unassailable insight.

It would be hard to dispute Achin's take on the decision to silence the broadcaster, as someone intimately familiar with government censorship and crackdowns; he told me that “disemboweling the organization in this manner is very unlikely to be centered on concerns for budget line item savings.” Rather, he said, it was “consistent with a pattern of authoritarian-friendly and authoritarian-aspirational behavior that this administration is exhibiting in broad daylight.”

One can only hope the VOA can be saved, or that a new VOA will emerge to perpetuate the values of the one we’ve just lost.

Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He is currently a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea, and is the author of several books about Asian affairs.

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