Editors at National Review Online focus on necessary changes for one high-profile piece of the federal government.
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.
