Ted Lipien with his mentor, former anti-Nazi underground Home Army radio coder in German-occupied Poland, journalist Zofia Korbońska, at the Voice of America Polish Service in Washington, DC, circa 1974. Faulty research by three British academics distorts the history of the Cold War. Tadeusz “Ted” Lipien This postcard was sent from Poland to the Voice of America Polish Service in…
A clip from raw footage posted by the Voice of America in 2017 without any balance. VOA’s refusal to call Hamas attackers ‘terrorists’ helps to perpetuate violence | BY TED LIPIEN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR FOR THE HILL Here is some background reading for my latest op-ed in The Hill, in which I react to how Voice of America (VOA) senior journalists,…
WWII Pro-Soviet U.S. Government Propaganda in Polish Was Spread in Pamphlets and Voice of America Radio Broadcasts During World War II, the Office of War Information (OWI) produced and distributed printed propaganda material in the United States and abroad and was also responsible for the Voice of America (VOA) shortwave and medium-wave radio broadcasts for worldwide audiences. Sometime in 1942…
Mark Pomar’s new book about the Cold War political radio could help American government officials unfamiliar with the history of U.S. international broadcasting. Mark Pomar’s book Cold War Radio [Mark G. Pomar, Cold War Radio: The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Lincoln: Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2022), Amazon Link] is, in my…
Disinformation governance by government propaganda experts can be dangerous, judging by the record of the early officials in charge of the Voice of America and journalists duped by Soviet propaganda. As the Voice of America (VOA), the United States government’s radio station for international audiences, observes its eightieth anniversary in 2022, it may surprise some Americans, assuming they have heard…
80 years ago today, on February 1, 1942, the first Voice of America (VOA) radio broadcast in German may have gone on the air. There is some uncertainty as to the exact date of the first VOA radio transmission, and the programs did not acquire the official Voice of America name until several years later. Selling “the religion of democracy”…
80 years ago today, on February 1, 1942, the first Voice of America (VOA) radio broadcast in German may have gone on the air. There is some uncertainty as to the exact date in February 1942. Moreover, for the first several years, the name “Voice of America” was not yet used. The early broadcasts had various names, such as “America…
One of Voice of America’s fellow travelers who spread Soviet propaganda lies in VOA’s early years was a celebrated American journalist, Wallace Carroll. Commentary By Ted Lipien The Voice of America (VOA), the U.S. taxpayer-funded broadcaster with a budget of $252 million (FY20) in the federal U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), plans to observe in February its 80th anniversary.…
Voice of America at 80 – the hidden record of VOA’s pro-Soviet fellow travelers, Howard Fast and John Houseman, offers lessons for today Commentary By Ted Lipien The Voice of America (VOA), the U.S. taxpayer-funded international broadcaster with a budget of $252 million (FY20) in the federal U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), plans to observe in February its 80th…
Commentaries about Stalin’s victims, Voice of America By Ted Lipien (Tadeusz Lipień) In my Washington Examiner Christmas Day op-ed, and in my post about Polish artist, writer, and witness of genocide Józef Czapski, I write about Stalin’s victims and the Voice of America (VOA) in the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). I am an East European refugee from communism.…
Censored by Voice of America in 1950, re-interviewed in the 1980s, Józef Czapski gets a plaque in Prague By Ted Lipien On December 21, 2021, a plaque at Józef Czapski’s birthplace in Prague, the Czech Republic, was unveiled in a ceremony attended by ambassadors from Poland, the Holy See, Lithuania, and Estonia. The Embassy of Italy, which now occupies the…
Russian propaganda influence in the United States is not new. “I established contact at the Soviet embassy with people who spoke English and were willing to feed me important bits and pieces from their side of the wire”* *Howard Fast. Being Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990), p. 18. Howard Fast was Voice of America (VOA) chief radio news writer…
By Ted Lipien for Cold War Radio Museum The Argonaut Building in New York City at 224 West 57 and Broadway, where first Voice of America (VOA) radio programs were produced in 1942, is now the headquarters of Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, originally created and funded by billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros to help countries move…
In 1948, Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate charged that Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts contained “baloney,” “lies,” “insults,” “drivel,” “nonsense and falsehoods,” amounting to “useless expenditures” and “a downright tragedy.”
In 1948, U.S. senators called VOA programs “ridiculous,” “unjustified” and “deplorable.” Liberal, moderate, and conservative lawmakers, some of whom even accused the Voice of America of “slander” and “libel” in how several U.S. states were described in radio programs acquired from NBC under a government contract, did not seek to de-fund and close down VOA but wanted to make it more effective in presenting America to the world and in countering propaganda from Soviet Russia. Their criticism eventually led to partial personnel and programming reforms in the early 1950s. In 2019, history seems to be repeating itself, with similar problems being reported at the Voice of America as the United States tries to respond to propaganda from Putin’s Russia, communist China, theocratic Iran and other nations under authoritarian rule. Today, there is little interest in the U.S. Congress and no obvious signs of management reforms, while some of the problems seem now more difficult to solve than those besetting the broadcaster in 1948.
The News Bureau room of the Office of War Information (OWI), November 1942, at about the same time Howard Fast started writing Voice of America newscasts. The photograph’s official caption said: “It is arranged much the same way as the city room of a daily newspaper. Here, war news of the world is disseminated. In the foreground, are editors’ desks handling such special services as trade press, women’s activities, and campaigns. The news desk is in the background.” Smith, Roger, photographer. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540.
VOA logo, 2019.Yankee Doodle Voice of America (VOA) signature tune reportedly proposed by VOA chief news writer (1942-1943) Howard Fast who later received the 1953 Stalin International Peace Prize.
“I established contact at the Soviet embassy with people who spoke English and were willing to feed me important bits and pieces from their side of the wire. I had long ago, somewhat facetiously, suggested ‘Yankee Doodle’ as our musical signal, and now that silly little jingle was a power cue, a note of hope everywhere on earth…”[ref]Howard Fast, Being Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990), 18-19.[/ref]
Howard Fast, 1953 Stalin Peace Prize winner, best-selling author, journalist, former Communist Party member and reporter for its newspaper The Daily Worker, decribing his role as the chief writer of Voice of America (VOA) radio news translated into multiple languages and rebroadcast for four hours daily to Europe through medium wave transmitters leased from the BBC in 1942-1943. Howard Fast, Being Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990), pp. 18-19.
