Steve Herman

I'm apparently still the chief national correspondent of the Voice of America and a former VOA White House bureau chief and author. of the nonfiction book Behind the White House Curtain, which goes into some of the stuff that we're going to talk about today, dealing with the challenges VOA faced in the first Trump administration.

That's the perception that there was a high-ranking U.S. government official who took umbrage with a particular post that I had quoted from a news release from an NGO which was upset with what was happening to the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID. And – That official reacted saying that because I'm with VOA, I should basically just be a mouthpiece of the US government.

And that what I had posted on social media, this innocuous quote from an NGO president was, I don't remember the exact language, but basically saying that I was probably a traitor, which if you look up the punishment for treason, it's relatively dire in the United States.

Yes, we broadcast radio, television, streaming, online, social media apps, all that sort of stuff in about 50 languages. Our original language was German, then Japanese. We do not broadcast in German or Japanese anymore. The languages change over time based on what is the geopolitical situation of the world.

And we are not only telling America's story to the world, but we're telling people what's happening in their regions of the world in their own languages. We are very integrated in the Washington, D.C., inside the Beltway press. And that's been the case for many decades. Of course, there are people that scoff and say, oh, you know, VOA, because it's funded by the U.S.

government, must just be propaganda. Well, I urge people to watch the newscast. There's still stuff up on the web at VOANews.com. I don't know how much longer it may be up there, but draw your own conclusion about what VOA is and is not.

Well, yes and no, I would say. We went on the air in the early days of World War II. And, of course, you could actually be in the United States, turn on your radio, and you could hear the broadcast from Berlin about how the Germans were winning every victory and they were the greatest people on the planet and they were going to liberate the world.

VOA came on the air saying, whether the news is good or bad, we're going to essentially tell you everything. what it is like it is, which was a radical concept at the time because most state-funded broadcasters around the world, possibly with the exception of BBC, were propaganda outlets. That's what they were designed to do. And so VOA was very unique and unusual in that regard.

It's like, we're going to build credibility by getting people to believe that what we're putting out on the airwaves has some credibility, that it's true. Now, VOA was under the Office of War Information, which was under wartime censorship conditions. So the VOA reporters weren't just free to put on the air anything that they wanted.

And then after World War II, there was what I call a struggle for the soul of Voice of America, which has continued, I think, since then, about whether there was any need for it, whether it should continue. And with the Iron Curtain descending across Eastern Europe,

There were lawmakers on Capitol Hill said, hey, you know, we may have some qualms about the government being in the broadcasting business, but as long as it's not targeting the United States, as long as it's not a commercial operation, we'll fund this. And there are historians out there who would say Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe,

contributed to the bringing down of the Berlin Wall, not only for the news and the information, giving hope to people, but also for putting on programs such as jazz music, which apparently was considered quite subversive if you were listening in communist countries at the time. And of course, it was assailed by those in Moscow, in Beijing, as American propaganda. And it still is.

In fact, the people who are celebrating the demise this week of VOA are those in the halls of power, in the autocratic regimes, in Moscow, in Beijing, in Naypyidaw, in Tehran.

You're not hearing any programming. And most, I think, people in Iran watch VOA. It comes to them via satellite television. A lot of people in Tehran have satellite dishes up to watch it. So there's just a video loop running. There's no programming. It's just a promo.

Explaining what the Voice of America is, which is kind of ironic because we're voiceless at the moment.

Oh, they're astounded. I can tell you, I've been a foreign correspondent, Sean, in a number of countries. And when state media, all of a sudden, that the programming would stop and maybe music would come on, that was indicative that there was a coup being carried out, right? It was something really dire.

And so a lot of people who are in these countries that don't have a free press or are autocratic are wondering – What is really going on in the United States? There's been no broadcast explaining to them why VOA is suddenly off the air. And the American people are not our audience, but they are stakeholders. Your taxpayers pay for this.

And a lot of people will tell you in the realm of public diplomacy, this is probably the biggest bang for our buck in terms of the hard edge of soft power.

They did not shut it down, but we're seeing actually some of the language that I've seen in recent days coming out of the administration echoed what we had seen during that time, which was accusations that there were – You know, subversives in the voice of America. In other words, that there were somehow there were some foreign spies.

And so what they did is they canceled all the people on the J-1 visas and sent some of them back home. And that appears to be happening again. Some of these people will be going back possibly to end up in prison or worse.

Well, I think anytime you're getting a new politically appointed leader, you're anxious at least. But there was some hope based on public statements that she had made that she didn't want to destroy. Right. the voice of America. She wanted to reform it.

And we've seen this with past people who've come into the VOA with all sorts of politically motivated intentions, and they come in and see what the place is really about, and they go, aha, this isn't what I thought it was. Of course, everyone at VOA would acknowledge there's room for improvement, right?

There definitely can be reform and sometimes it's frustrating to us when you're using government money how slow it can be. But when I write a story, Sean, it goes through a couple of editors and then if there's anything remotely political in it, it would go through a balance editor, a third editor. I've even had stories that go through four editors.

And again, the stuff that gets out there is going to be shorn, hopefully, of being inaccurate, incomplete, or biased in any way.

You raise an excellent point. It makes it much more of a challenge to make this relevant to the American people because it's an external entity. And these sort of... exercises, activities will have geopolitical ramifications. The war in World War II was as much a battle for hearts and minds

keeping morale up or trying to destroy morale of the troops, of the people who were having their family members die in combat. That's a really, really important part. Now, we're not engaging in psychological operations or overt propaganda, but we believe that by basically telling the truth, reporting accurately, that that is something really, really powerful. And

And when we're talking about a kind of asymmetrical warfare, which is what's going on between the West and Russia and China, talking about human rights, talking about what's happening in Ukraine, talking about the intimidation that China is carrying out against its neighbors. These are really, really powerful messages.