Voice of America’s Hidden History
Hidden, forgotten, and distorted history can be dangerous. It helps Vladimir Putin's propagandists.
At the moment, Russia’s autocratic leader Vladimir Putin seems to be losing the propaganda war after his armies launched an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, but he has been very successful until a few days ago in manipulating both conservative and liberal political leaders, opinion makers, and citizens. Historically, the Soviet Union had much more success in manipulating liberals. These days, conservatives are more likely to fall for Russian propaganda and disinformation. A warning issued in 1943 by President Roosevelt’s Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles was about American liberals, but it just as well can be applied today to conservatives, such as former President Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, who allowed themselves to be at least partially deceived by Putin’s propaganda and disinformation network.
“If it is desired to give a distinctly liberal cast to these organisations [sic], it would seem possible to find men who are liberal in the light of their own conviction, and of the American ideal, rather than men who have, for one reason or another, elected to give expression to their liberalism primarily by joining Communist front organizations, and apparently sacrificing their independence of thought and action…” Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles April 6, 1943 memorandum to Marvin H. McIntyre, Secretary to the President with enclosures, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum, Box 77, State – Welles, Sumner, 1943-1944.
Welles, who was definitely a liberal, recommended in March 1943 that John Houseman, the man later declared the first director of the Voice of America, be removed from his job for being too much under Soviet influence and for hiring Communists. The State Department, with support from General Dwight D. Eisenhower, refused to give Houseman a U.S. passport for official VOA travel abroad and forced him to resign – one of the many embarrassing episodes from VOA’s early history that the agency’s leaders managed to hide for decades, allowing similar problems to reemerge.
The love affair with Russia among some American liberals during the last century is now the love affair of some American conservatives, although, on their part, it is not as strong as the past support of the Left for the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the Voice of America, the U.S. government-funded international media outlet, enjoyed bipartisan support. Most of the time, it was countering Soviet propaganda, although never as effectively as Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL).
VOA is not now and has never been dominated by conservatives. Yet, independent journalists under pressure from Russia's autocratic leader Vladimir Putin have complained that some VOA coverage is now manipulated by Russian propaganda. Several years ago, VOA broadcast an interview with the now-imprisoned Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. The e-mailed text turned out to be fake. "It seems the VOA has gone nuts," Navalny wrote in a Twitter post, forcing the VOA director to issue an apology. More recently, VOA hired a former employee of Russian state media who previously promoted anti-U.S. conspiracy theories with antisemitic content. He was allowed to stay until his contract expired. Another VOA reporter, who no longer works there, was not at all ashamed of his previous work for the Russian state broadcaster RT. A former, very liberal VOA Director, questioned whether requiring RT to register as a foreign agent in the U.S. was a good idea. A few years ago, more than a dozen VOA broadcasters took bribes from a foreign politician and were fired. Some senior U.S. government officials overseeing VOA were allowed to have substantial corporate or family business interests in China and Russia. VOA has been managed for several decades by the $800-million U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), previously known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), but interference from Russia with U.S. international broadcasting goes back to the Second World War.