How USAGM officials misused taxpayer resources to attack their critics

A group of highly paid officials in the perennially scandal-ridden U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), and a handful of federal employees of its Voice of America news operation, have found a new way to discredit media critics. They started using some of the $944 million of taxpayers’ money they control to feed disinformation and selectively provide legal and logistical assistance to outside individuals to smear those shining a light on their behavior.

Congress must stop them, as more American watchdog journalists could become targets of this rogue agency’s interference with their First Amendment rights. 

USAGM bureaucrats found a new opportunity to go after perceived media enemies when three British academics asked them to help write a book about the short tenure of President Trump’s USAGM CEO, Michael Pack. 

Sadly, at the cost to U.S. taxpayers of thousands of dollars in staff time, a genuinely frightening cooperation agreement between the academics and USAGM resulted in linking Cold War journalists with “aggressive anti-Communism” and “right-wing” causes. Never mind that I have been a supporter of gay marriage, environmental protection and racial equality and critical in my op-eds in The Hill of ultra-conservative Republicans, including Tucker Carlson, for being easily duped by Vladimir Putin’s propaganda.

I disagreed with some of Pack’s decisions but never doubted his honesty as a public servant. He approved my choice of a Democrat for a senior Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty position. He was proven correct that USAGM’s lax employee vetting led to the hiring of former Putin state media propagandists, apologists for Hamas and at least one alleged Russian spy as a Voice of America freelance news reporter — stories first brought to light by USAGM Watch, the watchdog website I co-founded.

USAGM officials have a long history of hindering the volunteer work of USAGM Watch (known as BBG Watch before 2018). They registered the domain name USAGMWatch.com to prevent us from using it. (We got it back after a two-year battle.) One of VOA’s star reporters banned our volunteers from following his VOA Twitter account, to stop us reporting on his violations of the VOA Charter.

USAGM did not merely answer a media inquiry from these British professors. Eleven government-employed senior managers and eight VOA reporters spent hours being interviewed with unprecedented official approval to remain anonymous. It is a sad reminder of my young life in communist-ruled Poland that, as an immigrant and American citizen, my political views are under scrutiny by U.S. government executives enjoying official guarantees of anonymity. 

Incredibly, USAGM also provided the British academics with legal advice and reviewed their manuscript, in which officials slandered me and other former VOA and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcasters. The researchers decided not to interview Michael Pack or any current or former VOA journalists who could question their information or conclusions. I don’t know how a reputable British publisher and three academic institutions could have approved such a one-sided methodology.

The researchers’ excuse was that further interviews could “interfere” with a U.S. government “sensitive investigation.” But if they had asked, any number of VOA journalists could have corrected their many errors. They would have learned that my main reason for taking the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty job was to evacuate our journalists from Russia to EU countries to prevent more arrests by Putin’s secret police, and to get our reporters out of Afghanistan. Incompetent USAGM management subsequently left them stranded under Taliban rule.

For the information of these British academics who canceled our voices with assistance from unwitting taxpayers, USAGM Watch is not a “right-wing” blog; its co-founders include former VOA federal labor union leaders. The British professors also allowed U.S. government employees to slander one of USAGM Watch’s contributors — a highly regarded former senior VOA White House reporter during Barack Obama’s presidency and a lifelong Democrat.

In the British authors’ uninformed version of Cold War history, we are dismissed as “disgruntled.” Contrary to what they wrote, our response at the VOA Polish Service to the challenges in the 1980s was not “aggressive anti-Communism” but rather a carefully crafted programming policy that more than quadrupled our audience in Poland. Václav Havel agreed to my invitation to be an advisor for one of VOA’s projects. I interviewed George H.W. Bush, Cardinal Wojtyła (before he became Pope John Paul II) and Solidarity labor union leader Lech Wałęsa, as well as socialists, and communists. 

Far from being “disgruntled,” we were the most successful language service in VOA’s history in our reach and impact, as attested by multiple awards from Democratic and Republican VOA directors.

USAGM officials, on the other hand, repaid us with slander for helping to bring down the Berlin Wall.

“Anti-Communists” among VOA, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty Cold War broadcasters were not at all anti-liberal; we were anti-totalitarian opponents of Russian colonialism. The largest group in the initial Radio Free Europe Polish Service who had declared party affiliations were anti-communist socialists. 

It is ironic that, while portraying themselves as champions of pure journalism, the British authors (they even declined my interview request) confessed to collaborating closely with the Agency’s lawyers and, appallingly, handed over their manuscript to USAGM for review. 

USAGM officials, therefore, bear direct responsibility for any errors and harm to the reputations of independent American investigative journalists. As an ardent Bernie Sanders supporter once wrote, U.S. citizens should not be required to subsidize their own defamation.

Ted Lipien is a journalist and media freedom advocate who was chief of the Voice of America’s Polish Service during Poland’s successful struggle for democracy and later served as VOA’s acting associate director and President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.