OPINION:
If you let a lie stand unchallenged, people will assume it’s true. When news organizations refuse to call Hamas “terrorists,” they become complicit in perpetuating a lie. When the government-funded Voice of America (VOA) in the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) forbids its journalists to describe as terrorists those who deliberately target and murder defenseless civilians, including women and children, the lie will guide some people’s opinions and actions to see murder as part of a fight for freedom. They will accept barbaric violence as normal and be at peace with it.
Challenging these VOA federal employees is not a blow to the free press. It may save it. In violation of the federal VOA Charter, their reporting is now informed by a far-left ideology of excusing violence of what they think are anti-colonialist freedom fighters but who are, in fact, right-wing war criminals who murder Jews and use Palestinians as human shields. I call it Walter Duranty journalism after the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Moscow correspondent who, in the 1930s, lied about Stalin’s victims, including millions who had perished from forced starvation in Ukraine’s Holodomor.
Whether it is naïve far-right media deceived by Putin’s propaganda on Ukraine or USAGM’s activist reporters on the far left, duped by Hamas but also by Russia and Iran, their validation of aggression and violence against Ukraine and Israel will only lead to more unspeakable atrocities in the future.
Still, there are a few VOA journalists left who oppose Duranty-style journalism. Whistleblowers have leaked the VOA management’s directive “to avoid calling Hamas and its members terrorists, except in quotes.” One correspondent had to revoice an already recorded script, which included the banned word.
I cannot remain silent because those who refuse to expose terrorism or delay condemning it today will find themselves unable to stop it later.
When I was very young, my late mother, Helena Maciaszek, told me about her childhood girlfriend, who was Jewish. In August 1942, when my mother was only ten, she overheard her parents whispering about the Germans planning to murder hundreds of Jews in their small town of Mszana Dolna in southern Poland. Their house stood facing the Gestapo command post. The next day, the Germans killed my mother’s young friend, her parents, and nearly 900 other Jewish men, women, and children. The Nazis did not spare infants and pregnant women. Neither did Hamas in Israel.
Silence would also mean a betrayal of my wise and caring mentor at the Voice of America, a heroic anti-Nazi Polish resistance member, refugee journalist Zofia Korboński, who, together with her husband Stefan, a Yad Vashem honoree, risked her life, sending coded radio messages from Poland to London, including one about the brutalities against the Jews in my hometown. But the BBC initially doubted their reports and delayed using them for months as the Nazis proceeded with their genocidal plans.
The Voice of America, where a future Stalin Peace Prize winner Howard Fast worked as the first chief VOA news editor, ignored the Holocaust. Millions of lives might have been saved if Western journalists reported more fully on the extermination of Jews, and Duranty and Fast did not censor information about Stalin’s Gulag—the communist “Auschwitz without gas ovens.”
What the current USAGM’s senior leaders deserve is the “Walter Duranty Prize” for tolerating VOA propaganda in favor of Hamas. In 2003, the Pulitzer Prize Board refused to revoke his journalistic award. Their statement exonerating him of “deliberate deception” saved the apologists in U.S. universities and newsrooms for violent antisemitism from the condemnation they deserve.
Seven GOP senators led by Bill Hagerty (R-TN) protested against what they called VOA’s “absurd and vacuous moral relativism that is specifically generous to Hamas’ genocidal objectives.” They sent a letter to USAGM CEO Amanda Bennett, who was VOA director from 2016 to 2020 and has been the agency’s CEO since 2022. USAGM has been ranked among the worst-managed federal agencies for years. Already in 2017, VOA posted on its social media several long videos depicting the burning of American and Israeli flags without any challenge.
Republican lawmakers were right to protest, although they should have addressed their letter to President Biden instead and tried to get Democrats to join them. Those who need to be held accountable are the agency’s top executives, who have been in charge of VOA and USAGM for many years. They hired Putin’s state media propagandists and, after two decades of costly media outreach, could not predict and did not help to prevent the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. You can’t win if you tell reporters, as VOA did, “not to take sides” against those who would kill their daughters if they date the wrong men, every gay person, and every Jew.
On crucial foreign policy issues, human decency and national interest must take precedence over any partisan divisions. The Biden administration and Congress should work together to reform the U.S. Agency for Global Media, whose senior management again and again showed itself unworthy of being trusted and supported by American taxpayers. Anything less will lead to more pro-Hamas censorship by the Voice of America and more terrorist violence in the future.
• Ted Lipien was Voice of America’s Polish service chief during Poland’s peaceful struggle for democracy and VOA’s acting associate director. He served briefly from 2020 to 2021 as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty president.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.