Americans are now fully focused on election-related news, but there are other things going on in the United States that many people may not know about or ignore.
On January 12, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a speech at the Voice of America (VOA) about the Voice of America and the official U.S. media, talking about China. And that speech, before and after, sparked multiple storms. These events highlight the various shenanigans of U.S. domestic politics.
Let’s look first at what Pompeo said.
Pompeo, of course, praised Voice of America for its contributions to democracy and freedom in the world and to the United States over the past few decades.
He said we were the first nation founded on the core belief that all people are born with certain inalienable rights and that government was created to guarantee those natural rights.
We have always strived to be a more perfect union. Of course we are not always right. So we need to be both proud and humbled by our past and our present. We need the truth.
Yet it is abundantly clear that when Americans united around our founding values, whether in Philadelphia, in Gettysburg, in Seneca Falls, or during Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, we delivered on our founding promises time and time again.
Now, our opponents are trying to make a different determination.
When the Chinese Communist Party attempted to use the tragic death of George Floyd to assert the seeming superiority of their authoritarian system over ours, I issued a statement that included the following passage: “At the best of times, the People’s Republic of China has brutally advanced communism. And in the midst of the most difficult challenges, the United States still guarantees freedom.”
There is no moral equivalence. It is self-evidently true.
It’s an interesting passage that even now in this situation, even when the United States is at its most difficult, the United States, or what we identify as traditionally the United States, both the government and its society, still guarantees individual liberty. However, we can’t say what the future holds. We all know why.
We have many Mandarin Chinese speakers in the United States, he said, and we are building, nurturing, teaching and educating more loyal patriots, some of whom are Chinese-Americans of great distinction.
We want to bring Voice of America back to its mission of reporting the truth without bias. We want to depoliticize what’s happening here. This is so important to the American people and to the world. Bringing this organization (meaning Voice of America), back to its charter and its mission, to spread the message of freedom, democracy and American exceptionalism.
This is not about politicizing these institutions. We’re trying to abstract away from politics.
In response to a question from Voice of America Director Robert Reilly, he said that every one of my ambassadors, every one of my mission directors understands that wherever they are, China poses a challenge to the countries where they are, in Africa and certainly in Southeast Asia. Our teams on the ground are working to protect the security of the United States from the Chinese Communist Party in the countries where they are posted.
I want your reporters, wherever they are, whether it’s in South Africa or Morocco or wherever, to be aware of the activities of the Chinese Communist Party in the countries where they are and how it affects the people in those countries.
Pompeo told VOA that we are all part of a government institution with obligations and responsibilities that are more noble, greater and more important than each of us individually. But “censorship” is dangerous and morally wrong. In fact, it is a violation of your legal duty to the Voice of America.
Censorship, wake-ism and political correctness all point in one direction: authoritarianism cloaked in moral righteousness.
This is similar to what we see today on Twitter and Facebook and Apple and too many college campuses.
This is not us. This is not us as Americans. Nor is this what the Voice of America should be.
The quote refers to a letter sent by a Voice of America employee opposing Pompeo’s speech to the Voice of America because “the Voice of America cannot be a platform for political propaganda. Sorry, the Voice of America has always been a political propaganda platform, a propaganda platform for the U.S. government, but of course, essentially, all media are propaganda platforms, they are all Propaganda.
What those journalists at Voice of America object to is not the Secretary of State going on about American values, what they’re worried about is Pompeo going on about the Trump administration’s preaching. This is essentially political censorship, which is a kind of Propaganda.
So Pompeo said the following in response to this situation.
I’ve seen reports that Voice of America employees don’t want me to come here and speak today. I’m sure that’s a very small minority.
They don’t want the voices of American diplomats on Voice of America.
Think about that for a moment.
It’s time to wake up from your slumber.
You can lead the way. You all know how to do that, and that’s why you’re here. The Voice of America has blossomed into a new dawn.
What the American public doesn’t know is that when Michael (Michael Pack) took over (U.S. General Administration for Global Media, USAGM), there were about 1,500 employees – almost 40 percent of the entire workforce – who had not been properly vetted for security, including many with high-level security clearance.
The Voice of America rubber-stamped J-1 visas (exchange visitor visas) for foreign nationals, including some from communist China. We shouldn’t do that.
Pompeo’s speech at the Voice of America was targeted at the Chinese Communist Party, but a previous Voice of America employee, before he spoke, objected on the grounds that he was speaking as political propaganda.
And as Pompeo left Voice of America, a Voice of America White House correspondent named Patsy Widakuswara trailed behind and tried to ask Pompeo questions.
From a distance, Widakuswara loudly asked Pompeo questions, including whether he regretted saying he would have a smooth transition to a “second administration” or even that Trump lost the election to Democrat Joe Biden.
In the video, the reporter can be heard turning to Riley and then asking him why he didn’t ask “the questions reporters want to know the answers to.
Riley is the current director of Voice of America. Riley asks her who she is and then tells her, “You’re not authorized to ask questions.”
Vida Kuswara responded that she was a journalist and it was her job to question.
This Vida Kuswara, formerly a reporter in the Indonesian language department, was later a reporter for the Voice of America at the White House. Subsequently, Voice of America announced that she had been transferred to another department.
As I think we can all imagine, there was a backlash against this decision by Voice of America.
The Government Accountability Project wrote letters on behalf of some Voice of America reporters to Michael Pike, the executive director of the U.S. General Administration for Global Media, and Riley, the Voice of America station manager, criticizing Vida Kuswara over the transfer.
In a further exaggeration, the report in question quotes Nick Cull, a professor of public diplomacy at the University of Southern California School of Journalism and Communication, as saying that allowing a live broadcast of a speech by a senior U.S. official is an attempt to turn the Voice of America into a national broadcaster.
He said, “It reduces Voice of America from being a state-funded broadcaster to a national broadcaster.”
Let’s talk about these “national broadcasters” in the United States. Those administered by the U.S. Global Media Agency include the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe, the Middle East Radio Network, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Marti, a Cuban radio station.
The Voice of America, which receives $200-300 million a year from the U.S. Congress, and those other stations, which are not for-profit, are all funded by Congress.
They are all administered by the State Department, with an agency underneath, formerly the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), and now the Global Media Directorate, which directly manages these “government-funded broadcasters. I’m sorry to say that this is Professor Kuhl’s term, but I think these are simply government broadcasters.
When Voice of America was founded in 1942 during World War II, it was a government agency, operated by the military. It later became a funding agency, but it was still directly managed and personnel were basically directly appointed.
For example, Radio Free Asia (RFA), after Libby Lau left, Fangbei became the station manager. Who is Fangbei? She was an official in charge of East Asian affairs at Hillary’s State Department. And for a long time, the BBG was controlled by the Democrats, and these media outlets, of course, were controlled by the Democrats.
The Voice of America has a so-called firewall, meaning a barrier to government interference in the editorial power of the news. When Michael Pike became CEO of the GMA and replaced all the directors and principals of the five radio stations, there was opposition. They reasoned that the U.S. government should not be upset that it could not interfere with editorial autonomy, such as when the Voice of America praised the Chinese Communist Party’s measures to deal with the epidemic, etc.
Last November, a district federal court barred Pike and his assistants from interfering directly with Voice of America until claims about firewall violations were resolved; the Office of the Surveillance Chief had sent a letter to Pike reminding the CEO to protect whistle blowers from retaliation; and the special counsel’s office had ordered the CEO to investigate allegations of misconduct by agency officials.
In my opinion, these are not laws, not systems, but politics. The only reason for this is that Pike is a friend of Bannon’s and a Trump supporter.
I know that when Pike forced out the leadership of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia last year, he was threatened that he would die a horrible death when Trump was out of office. Looking at the current environment, I don’t doubt for a second that such threats are true, and they will certainly do so. There’s also word that Riley, the new director of Voice of America, an old Voice of America reporter, and Stephen Yates, the new director of Radio Free Asia, won’t be in either organization for too long, I’m afraid.
There are of course many, many shady things about these organizations, and I’ll talk more about them later when I have a chance.
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