The Hill Op-ed Against Anti-Semitism in Media and Walter Durnaty-Style Journalism at USAGM's Voice of America (VOA)
Sometimes editorial 'neutrality' means propagandizing for totalitarians
In his latest op-ed in The Hill, former Voice of America (VOA) acting associate director Ted Lipien, who also served briefly in 2020-2021 as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) president, quotes his former VOA Polish Service colleague, Jewish-American writer Henryk Grynberg: "the president of a leading American university cannot apologize for her lack of basic human values" toward Jews. Grynberg, a much-admired writer, poet, and chronicler of Jewish history in Poland, who is also a child survivor of the Holocaust, said that the real culprit is "the culture that brought her up so high." That culture must purge itself of antisemitism before apologies can be made, Grynberg added.
Lipien also sees Walter Duranty-style journalism at the Voice of America:
As journalists, he and I are both sorry that our former employer, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, also does not want to refer to Hamas' murderers and war criminals as "terrorists," preferring instead to call them "fighters" so as to remain "neutral." But can those who murder defenseless women and children — people who cannot fight back — be called "fighters?" Doesn't the word "fighter" inherently imply an actual fight between combatants, as opposed to the systematic rape and massacre of civilians?
Ted Lipien, "Sometimes editorial 'neutrality' means propagandizing for totalitarians," The Hill, December 29, 2023.
READ MORE: "Sometimes editorial 'neutrality' means propagandizing for totalitarians," Ted Lipien, The Hill, December 29, 2023.