{"id":171713,"date":"2026-07-30T10:58:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T10:58:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/171713\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T10:58:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T10:58:16","slug":"how-donald-trump-silenced-the-voice-of-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/171713\/","title":{"rendered":"How Donald Trump Silenced the Voice of America"},"content":{"rendered":"

America\u2019s news effort was launched on February 1, 1942, when the playwright Robert E. Sherwood took to the mike to deliver V.O.A.\u2019s first words<\/a>: \u201cToday, America has been at war for seventy-nine days. Daily at this time, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth.\u201d Sherwood\u2014along with other early V.O.A. leaders, such as Edward R. Murrow, of CBS, and John Chancellor, of NBC\u2014believed in presenting the news straight, but the argument about the agency\u2019s mission and methods remained fractious. Presidents often grew frustrated that America\u2019s voice was not plainly on America\u2019s side. In 1943, on the day after Mussolini was overthrown, a V.O.A. broadcast quoted a New York Post columnist calling<\/a> the Italian monarch, Victor Emmanuel, \u201cthe moronic little King.\u201d President Franklin Roosevelt, in turn, criticized V.O.A. for conducting its own foreign policy, and directed its programmers to stick to undermining enemy morale.<\/p>\n

A few years later, President Harry Truman, who saw no need for peacetime information programs, asserted that the private news business should be the primary \u201cmeans of informing foreign peoples about this country.\u201d But, once the Cold War erupted and American concern about Communism metastasized, Truman reversed course. In 1951, he established the Psychological Strategy Board to supervise the war of words with the Soviets and instructed V.O.A. to broadcast hard-hitting anti-Communist messages from new transmitters in Okinawa, Munich, several locations in the Philippines, and on a ship in the Mediterranean Sea. In 1952, V.O.A. programs were broadcast in forty-six languages, aimed mainly at Communist countries behind the Iron Curtain. Each language desk at V.O.A. headquarters met daily to go over \u201cguidances\u201d from the State Department\u2014a few pages that didn\u2019t mandate specific language to be used in newscasts but did give V.O.A. editors \u201cthe word for the day,\u201d as Arthur Larson, the director of the U.S. Information Agency, which oversaw V.O.A. at the time, put it.<\/p>\n

In 1953, televised hearings of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in Room 318 of the U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan\u2019s Foley Square, focussed on \u201cmismanagement and subversion\u201d at V.O.A. \u201cThere are some people in the Voice of America who are doing a rather effective job of sabotaging\u201d U.S. foreign policy, Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin who led the nation on a frenzied anti-Communist search, declared. His chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who would go on to mentor a young Donald Trump, interviewed more than a hundred V.O.A. staffers. The hearings made for great TV. Employees of V.O.A. were accused of harboring an interest in collectivist nudist camps, softening scripts to downplay the Soviets\u2019 antisemitism, and positioning V.O.A. transmitters where magnetic storms might make it difficult for signals to reach the Soviet bloc. In March, 1953, Raymond Kaplan, a V.O.A. engineer who had worked on the transmitters, walked in front of a truck in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leaving behind a suicide note that told his family that he\u2019d wanted to spare them the pain of being dragged through McCarthy\u2019s hearings. McCarthy, who referred to V.O.A. as \u201cVoice of Moscow,\u201d called the suicide note fake news.<\/p>\n

The subcommittee\u2019s final report, signed only by its Republican members\u2014Democrats had walked out of the hearings and resigned from the subcommittee\u2014charged V.O.A. with broadcasting \u201canti-American content\u201d and employing people \u201cnot dedicated to the American way of life.\u201d V.O.A. fired thirty-one employees \u201cfor security reasons,\u201d but little else came of the subcommittee\u2019s findings. Still, for decades, V.O.A.\u2019s identity crisis persisted. In the nineteen-sixties, three V.O.A. directors complained of pressure to conform to Administration policies. One such director, Henry Loomis, quit in 1965, to protest meddling by political appointees from Lyndon Johnson\u2019s White House. (Chancellor, of NBC, wrote that V.O.A.\u2019s reporters faced too much \u201cinterference by policy officers.\u201d) And another director, John Daly, resigned in 1968 to protest \u201cundercutting\u201d by V.O.A.\u2019s parent agency.<\/p>\n

Other Western democracies had established a measure of independence for their international broadcast services; the BBC and Germany\u2019s Deutsche Welle, for example, are protected by rules that restrict political leaders from influencing programming. The U.S. Agency for Global Media was similarly created to provide V.O.A. with a buffer from government interference. V.O.A.\u2019s 1976 charter mandates \u201caccurate, objective and comprehensive\u201d reporting; the 1994 U.S. International Broadcasting Act also created a firewall to protect its editors from a President\u2019s predilections. That is the firewall that V.O.A. journalists now say has been burned to the ground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"America\u2019s news effort was launched on February 1, 1942, when the playwright Robert E. Sherwood took to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171714,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[6902,10,11],"class_list":["post-171713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-donald-trump","tag-columns","tag-potus","tag-president-of-the-united-states"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/117008577919968286","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}