Voice of America deserves criticism, but let’s fix it to tell the American story

Many have written about the Trump administration’s attack on America’s voice, as supporters of service are reflected in this way by determining its reputation from World War II and the Cold War. For years, Voa has been skilled on this reputation, and because it is not broadcast in the United States, a few of them know here differently.

Nobody wanders more on the basement than listening to Voa on the perforated transistor radio while Gestapo or KGB is the street patrol abroad. Many of the news can be heard on other international broadcasters. She has some good adventurous correspondents, yes, but the rules for employing civil service hinder the employment of the best and brightness.

External strings provide foreign reports and dozens of language services provide immediate news from the countries that cover them. American music is broadcast – perhaps the most popular feature – as well as lessons related to English learning. However, her efforts to “build democracy” are exaggerated, however, was promoted as a way to continue receiving government financing.

Voa was created during World War II to broadcast news to the occupied countries “without fear or good”, then continued for similar reasons during the Cold War. However, it works today in a media environment that has not been conceived even 20 years ago, as news, opinion and entertainment are available around the world from countless sources around the clock throughout the week.

Over time, Voa worked to fulfill her mission with the balance of conflicting obligations to federal service. It is, after all, a federal agency, and not many of its employees like to think about it, CNN or NPR. The budgets are extended to the transition to television and the Internet while maintaining the distant radio fans. Local offices reported to American news. Its headquarters and the broadcasting center, a Cohen building at the foot of Capitol Hill, were carried by remote work and dubious transition to an expensive but uninterrupted building near the White House.

Moreover, unlike the common belief, there is no global VOA network. Its radio and video operations operate on a continued basis, and buy time for their reports from foreign broadcasters who decide what and when it is broadcast. Consequently, the public polls are a problem, and no one knows exactly the number or if any person is actually listening.

International service has been truly reduced – short wave radio – over and over to save money. To enhance a signal to the extension of the globe, the short wave requires huge amounts of electricity, which is costly. Thus, listeners were cut in hard -to -reach places such as Bangladesh that Voa broadcast supporters like to celebrate.

Some time ago, a team of external journalists has been appointed to provide an independent reading of Voa’s press content. The results have never been released, indicating that they were not good. The news room crises continue to arrange. In 2018, 15 Nigerian service employees were expelled to take payments from a government official there. The head of the Mandarin Service has been removed greatly respected to broadcast an interview with a defective Chinese businessman who angered Beijing.

The newsroom employees were asked to take training to remove bias from their reports after some disputed broadcasts in the 2016 elections. The annual employee polls are found by the Personnel Management Office repeatedly and the morale of employees from among the lowest rates in the government.

Few of the experienced American journalists speak Persian, Swahili, Urdu, Kantonian, or other strange languages ​​in which they are broadcast. Several excellent square journalists have been employed by many Voa foreign language services to fill the breach. Some inevitably reach their biases and ethical standards – and thus the Nigerian scandal.

Despite all President Trump’s runner, Hillary Clinton did not like Voa too, and she rejected it as “illogical” in the certificate of Congress during the Foreign Minister. President Barack Obama conducted the service only one interview in eight years, so he considered it unrelated to communicating with the world.

Many, Democrats and Republicans, have tried to get rid of things in VOA for years. The terrible thing is now not what the Trump administration did as it did with how to do it with a saw approach. So, as many people are suspected now, Voa may remain a lot of imitator under the umbrella of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where it works once, after all, who wants to work there?

Unlike a lot of criticism of the service, I refuse to want to close it. This country has a story that tells it, and it will be the renewed VOA that tells it in a reliable and objective way that is not available anywhere. Medical developments, technology, American culture in many flavors, sports features – while football is popular in Africa, there is a lot of wilderness for music in the American Professional League, and good and bad American news. And yes, this type of openings that the VOA administration rejects now as propaganda, and explained the American foreign policy of the foreign masses that yearn for knowing what this country is thinking about the events in their homelands.

Free radio networks, broadcasting networks in the Middle East, Middle East broadcasting networks and other granted people who are cleansed by the White House are doing an excellent work in spreading the truth in the countries -controlled by the media by authoritarian governments.

I think this is the place where the real democracy is “built”, and the discounts must be reversed there, and thus the liberation of VOA to achieve its mission as “America’s voice”. In the current media environment, the other logical basis for American taxpayers is not to support such a service.

Winston Wood wrote opening articles and broadcasts on America’s voice explaining the American foreign policy of the foreign masses. He previously held the position of Washington news editor in the Wall Street Journal.