A Reckoning at Voice of America

National Review Online

Thursday, July 11, 2024

 

Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and other U.S.-funded international broadcasters exist to bring truthful, reliable news to millions of people living under authoritarian repression. They helped the free world win the Cold War; today, they’re bringing the world stories from the camps in Xinjiang and the front lines in Ukraine. This can be a wise investment of taxpayer dollars that advances U.S. foreign-policy interests, not to mention, obviously, a moral good.

 

But lapses by the leadership of the U.S. Agency for Global Media — the federal agency that funds and oversees that journalism — are undermining this enterprise.

 

During testimony before a congressional panel on Tuesday, the agency’s CEO Amanda Bennett ducked accountability and provided inaccurate information about one of those failures, VOA’s woeful policy against referring to Hamas members as terrorists outside of quotes.

 

The backstory here is that after the October 7 massacre, VOA’s acting standards editor, Carol Guensburg, issued a memo directing reporters to “avoid calling Hamas and its members terrorists, except in quotes.” She wrote that this conformed with how major U.S. outlets were covering the war and prevented reporters from using language that would “demonize” people with whom they disagree.

 

It was a strange stricture that clearly violated VOA’s statutorily enshrined mandate to provide news that is “accurate, objective, and comprehensive.” This fueled concerns that the VOA newsroom had an anti-Israel bias.

 

After National Review exposed the policy, Representative Darrell Issa and Senator Bill Hagerty pressured USAGM and VOA into reversing course. On December 5, VOA’s then-acting director John Lippman issued a memo internally “correcting” Guensburg’s instructions.

 

At Tuesday’s hearing, Bennett, who is a former director of VOA, declined to admit any wrongdoing on the part of the outlet or the broader agency and, worse, spun a misleading narrative.

 

The directive was Guensburg’s “personal opinion” and “not by any means the policy,” she claimed, responding to a query from Representative Scott Perry.

 

Bennett continued: “The thing that started this discussion was mistakenly described as a policy,” apparently referring to   ’s December 5 report on the reversal, which indeed used that word.

 

But it clearly was a policy. It came from VOA’s top editor responsible for ensuring compliance with journalistic standards. Guensburg’s message also gave reporters detailed instructions about activities they should avoid to maintain the outlet’s journalistic objectivity.

 

It’s also not accurate, as Bennett claimed, that VOA does “not shy away from using the word terrorist in conjunction with Hamas or referring to any other terrorist organization.”

 

Even after the policy had officially been reversed, a senior editor told his reporters to stick with it, because “Hamas is not seen as a terrorist group everywhere that we broadcast to.” To this day, VOA stories very rarely refer directly to members of Hamas as terrorists.

 

Issa didn’t miss a beat. He challenged Bennett on the assertion that Guensburg was one employee voicing an opinion, rather than a manager explaining a policy. She responded that Guensburg’s memo was merely a “loose interpretation” of VOA guidelines: “It was immediately reinterpreted by management.” (Again, this is provably false — unless by “immediately,” Bennett meant a month and a half later.)

 

Congress is now poised to pass a budget that imposes cuts to the media agency’s funding. As Issa explained to Bennett, the agency has doubled down and, behind closed doors, derided congressional oversight efforts. “It’s a classic leadership failure, one that can bring down entire agencies,” he warned.

 

Bennett’s performance is sadly representative; she has allowed VOA to drift toward being just another left-leaning news outlet. Congress needs to use every tool at its disposal to right the ship.