Consider This from NPR - How Trumpism Led To An Ideological War Over Voice Of America

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

In its very first broadcast, the U.S.-government-run service called Voice of America pledged honesty."The news may be good and it may be bad. We shall tell you the truth."The idea was to model a free press, especially for audiences in places that might not have one. Places where political parties and governments might pressure or intimidate journalists.But over the past seven months, Voice of America and its federal parent organization, U.S. Agency for Global Media, have been caught in an ideological war. Employees say agency CEO Michael Pack, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, obsessed over staff loyalty and embraced conspiracy theories.NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik talked to more than 60 current and former staffers. He's put together a comprehensive picture of Pack's radical tenure.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

It must have been a surprise the day in February 1942 when Germans turning their radio dials heard this. This is a voice speaking from America, it said, breaking through a steady stream of Nazi propaganda. It was the debut broadcast from a U.S. government-run service called Voice of America, and it would bring news from an American perspective to Europe. And its very first dispatch pledged honesty. The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth. When the war ended, Voice of America continued, and that promise eventually became part of its mandate. The idea was to model a free press, especially for audiences in places that might not have one, places where political parties and governments might pressure or intimidate journalists.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Might demand control over how stories are told. This isn't the vice of America focusing on everything that's wrong with our great nation. It's the voice of America. A few weeks ago, before leaving office, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave It's the Voice of America. A few weeks ago, before leaving office, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave an address at Voice of America headquarters, where he said the network had a much bigger mission, one the Trump administration believed the VOA had lost sight of, a mission to promote democracy around the world, a mission Pompeo said

set it apart from the rest of the American press. It is not fake news for you to broadcast that this is the greatest nation in the history of the world and the greatest nation that civilization has ever known. Now, the visit happened just days after the violent attack on the Capitol building by Trump supporters seeking to overturn the U.S. election. And when a Voice of America reporter, Patsy Whittaker-Suara, tried to ask Pompeo about not recognizing Biden's win back in November, the former U.S. Secretary of State walked away. The director of VOA at the time, Robert Riley, scolded the reporter, saying she doesn't, quote, know how to behave.

Hours later, she was taken off her beat covering the White House. In a whistleblower complaint, a group of staffers attacked Pompeo's visit and the decision to broadcast it as propaganda. That episode was an exclamation point on a chaotic seven months for Voice of America and its parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, where employees say a Trump-appointed CEO, Michael Pack, obsessed over staff loyalty and embraced conspiracy theories. Consider this, the ideological war over Voice of America is a case study in how the Trump administration tried to reshape the federal government. From NPR, I'm Adi Kornish. It's Thursday, January 28th.

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It's Consider This from NPR. And to get a sense of how unusual things were after Michael Pack took the reins at Voice of America, consider what happened to Dan Hanlon. It was actually one of the most surreal times of my career in federal government. Now, Hanlon is a Republican. He'd worked for Trump's chief of staff before he got sent over to help the chief of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM. But when Michael Pack was named CEO, he told other staff members that Dan Hanlon couldn't be trusted. And this wasn't idle office gossip. You know, we were banished to the cubicle farm, never to be seen from again, but we still reported to work. That meant that instead of advising Pack, Hanlon and another aide showed up to the offices of the Spanish Language Service

Division and hit the foosball table. Almost every day. Since they weren't talking to us, we would come in, you know, nine o'clock and stamp out at five o'clock and we play foosball all day. And we just sit there and comment about how absurd this whole thing was. And that was only the beginning, not just for Hanlon, but for the whole agency. David Volkenflik, who's NPR's media correspondent, has been doing a lot of reporting on this throughout PAC's seven months on the job. He's put together a picture of sort of what happened under his tenure. Hey there, David. Hey, Audie. And before we start, we should, of course, say that NPR's current CEO, John Lansing, he was also once the head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. So because of that, no senior news executive or corporate executive at NPR has actually reviewed this podcast before it was published. And to be fair, Audie, that's been true for all of our coverage on the subject throughout.

And what we're going to talk about is not just Voice of America, but what this tells us about the Trump approach to government, right? Yeah, I think it actually, over time, it just became clear to me this offered an incredible case study in what Trumpism looks like, both in terms of Trump's conception of implement a Trump vision based on loyalty, based on bending, not just reporting, but independent thought to the will of the person at the top of the structure and what it means to just sort of have a scythe going through the corridors of a real federal agency winnowing out people who put up strong objections or even were seen to possibly cut against the intent of the person at the top. So as you said, it starts with the top. And so we're going to start with Michael Pack's appointment that the role is officially CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. It requires a Senate confirmation. If confirmed, Mr. Pack will oversee the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe. And there were concerns off the bat, right? Democrats like Bob Menendez of New Jersey.

How can we expect someone who has publicly embraced his role as a conservative documentarian to steward an agency that is charged with supporting independent, politically unmotivated press. How did Michael Pack counter that? I mean, what did he say his plans were for the agency? Well, so it's interesting, right? This guy was first nominated back in 2018 and went pretty much nowhere. There were some hearings. Today, the committee will hold a nominations hearing for four very important positions. And Pack had really talked about the importance of both its reporting being straight ahead and also the importance of

shielding it from political influence. Without that, without that trust, I think the agency is completely undermined. So I think that's a bedrock principle. It kind of went nowhere, though. Senators like Menendez and others focused on his past as a conservative documentary maker. He had never led an institution like this. There were some questions raised about whether or not he was abusing his family's not-for-profit to kind of funnel money from donors into his for-profit documentary unit. There were a lot of questions that came out and not simply from Democrats. It went nowhere until President Trump at the beginning of April breathed new life into it. And he did it by launching a rhetorical assault against the voice of America. Well, things they say are disgusting toward our country.

And Michael Pack would get in. He'd do a great job. But he's been waiting now for two years. But you had Michael Pack saying, look, I believe in an independent press, really kind of talking up that aspect of things. And then after he's confirmed, the tone changes, right? I mean, it sounds a lot more like the kinds of things that President Trump was saying. It was as pure an embodiment of, you know, singing off the Trump hymnal as you'll find in government. There was a consistent notion articulated by Michael Pack as he came into office that there

was, in a sense, a deep state afoot at USAGM, that there was fake news. He used that actual phrase about the journalists on his own payroll. It's the swamp. It's corruption. It's bias. He kept popping up on places like the Trump-friendly Federalist. And it's up to me to fix them all. I mean, this agency is right with these problems. He gave interviews to and wrote op-eds for a number of consistently conservative outfits because he was speaking not to the swath of the American people who are funding this and might support this mission, but in fact, speaking to the core Trump voter. When you hear what happened, as we heard to Dan Hanlon, that Republican advisor to the CEO who ended up at a foosball table every day, it's more than rhetoric. It sounds like Michael Pack actually took a lot of action in the agency.

Yeah, I think that there were a lot of headlines just paying attention to how much scandal there was. But it seemed to me that the human toll was obscured. You had a guy who had been a Trump figure, Dan Hanlon, during the Trump transition. He was seen as not loyal. What would that mean for everyone else? Well, what it meant was they were throwing people out the sides of the windows. Six of his top agency executives, he tries to fire them, finds he can't do it that quickly. And so then he suspends them, says they've done all these things wrong. And then he pays millions of dollars to a private law firm to investigate them, to try to find substantiation for the claims he's already made.

And he did something else. PAC refused to extend any visas for any of their foreign staffers. Basically, we're talking about contractors working as journalists and translators and broadcasters in, you know, all these scores of languages to serve people across the globe, implying without any evidence that they could well be spies, saying that this is a place ripe and rife for espionage and saying that the national security has been somehow endangered because these visas have been used to allow people who have foreign language skills and knowledge of foreign lands. He says that these guys are somehow suspect in their loyalties as well. David, it sounds like what you're saying is that this purge wasn't just about the executive level, like that it also reached into the newsroom itself. And in your reporting, you told the story of Benazir Samad, right? Who she came to the US from Pakistan on a Fulbright Journalism Fellowship,

studied at Arizona State's Cronkite School. I mean, she's here to do journalism. But what happens to her after she is hired at VOA in 2019? Well, she does fine until 2020. And then there's this Urdu language service segment, and it involves Joe Biden's outreach in summer 2020 to Muslim voters. It's based on Associated Press story. And PAC determines in his mind, this is clearly an effort at essentially doing campaigning for Joe Biden. And folks inside VOA tell me this is nuts. VOA takes great pains. The Erdo service takes great pains to make sure that its broadcasts aren't aimed at the United States. They actually try to block promotions of it from reaching Americans through like Facebook

and Google. There are only 15,000 Michiganders who even speak Urdu over the age of five. They think the whole idea of this is both counter to everything they try to do and insane. But Samad has her contract ultimately severed. So do three of her colleagues. We were fired because they thought it was, you know, against, it was like biased towards Trump. It sends a message that essentially, if you do stuff about Biden and Trump, you're going to be watched like a hawk. It has threatened to turn my entire life upside down permanently through not a fault of my own. How did Michael Pack defend this record? Pack went out and argued that essentially there was a kind of deep state at work,

that journalists are so liberal they may not even see the degree to which they're prejudiced against the president. And he was the one to straighten out the scales. We've watched President Joe Biden try and undo some aspects of the Trump administration's work. But we also know it's pretty common in the federal government for some people and policies to kind of outlast the presidents that put them in place. What does that mean for VOA or Michael Pack's legacy? You know, Biden came in pretty strong. His team sought to undo things quickly. Michael Pack was pressured to resign and resigned within two hours of Biden

taking the oath of office. And Biden, you know, appointed to the head of the agency, Kaylu Chao, a woman who had been a whistleblower on the question of interference with the newsrooms as a way of indicating we're not appointing a political person, we're appointing a lifelong journalist. That said, you know, trust and credibility are, you know, slowly and painstakingly built and easily broken down. There's no question but that PAC's actions will be used by some of America's strategic adversaries to try to discredit in Russia, by China, by other countries that take issue with the kinds of coverage that, you know, Radio Free Europe and Voice America and other networks provide

and say these are propaganda outlets that really can be bent to the will of the president. And that's going to be tough to rebuild. And similarly, there have been a lot of foreign journalists who have taken great risks themselves and who have essentially made themselves pariahs with some of the anti-American regimes in their homelands. Their ability to trust these networks may be severely eroded because they can say, look, it's all well and good if Biden's appointees are respectful now, but what about the next person who comes in? And so I think there are some elements of PAC's legacy

which will outlast him in office that are going to have to take some time to be remedied. David Folkenflik, he's NPR's media correspondent, and you can find his most recent reporting on the VOA in our show notes. You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish.