Mira Złotowska, later known as Mira Michałowska, who during the Cold War published books and articles in English in the United States and in Great Britain as Mira Michal and used several other pen names, was one of many radically left-wing journalists who had worked in New York on Voice of America (VOA) U.S. government anti-Nazi radio broadcasts in the…
Today’s Voice of America (VOA) reporters might benefit from seeing a historical example of how a former VOA journalist who during the Cold War became an anti-American propagandist for the communist regime in Poland wrote one-sided narratives using a few news facts and some true information about the United States and Canada to create an almost entirely false picture of…
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.
By Ted Lipien for Cold War Radio Museum
Two extraordinary refugees from Poland helped to expose in 1956 to the U.S. Congress anti-U.S. propaganda activities of a communist journalist Stefan Arski, also known as Artur Salman.
In July 1979 an American businessman and former journalist David Harold Karr who had arranged the building of the first Western hotel in Moscow was found dead under reportedly suspicious circumstances in Paris, France. Karr’s new biography, The Millionaire Was a Soviet Mole: The Twisted Life of David Karr, by Harvey Klehr, expected to be published in July 2019, will…
Cold War Radio Museum Updated: January 2024 A State Secret Polish children from World War II Santa Rosa refugee camp, Guanajuato, Mexico. Source: Embajada de Polonia en México, Wikipedia. The date and photographer are unknown. CC BY 3.0. How the Roosevelt Administration Shipped Polish Refugee Orphans to Mexico In Locked Trains and Lied About It to Protect Stalin The Untold…
Cold War Radio Museum Voice of America Then and Now Historically, partisanship at the Voice of America has been most often associated with Left-wing bias of some of its officials and central English newsroom reporters. By Ted Lipien After leaving the White House in 1961, former President Dwight D Eisenhower condemned a biased Voice of America (VOA) reporter who…
Cold War Radio Museum A recent (2017) independent study by the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) focusing on Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts to Iran has found that under Obama administration officials these broadcasts “perpetuated to audiences the appearance of pro-regime [Iran] propaganda, rather than objective reporting, on the part of both the VOA and Farda.” Radio Farda broadcasts to…