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GovoritAmerika.us, September 9, 2009, San Francisco — A former employee of Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) has asked the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to look into charges that the US taxpayer-funded radio station broadcasting to countries without free media discriminates against foreign-born journalists and other workers by denying them the same legal protections available to American and Czech employees.
FreeMediaOnline.org, Free Media Online Blog, GovoritAmerika.us, Commentary by Ted Lipien, June 04, 2009, San Francisco — President Obama’s recent announcement of a new Global Engagement Directorate that will combine “diplomacy, communications, international development and assistance” was short on specifics how this new structure might change the focus of U.S. public diplomacy and broadcasting initiatives. That’s hardly surprising, considering that the White House has to deal with many other seemingly more pressing problems.…
Interview with Former Director of Radio Liberty’s Russian Service, Italian journalist, writer and Russian expert Mario Corti. In a nutshell, the station [Radio Liberty] has abandoned its uniqueness, its identity, its face. Mario Corti Those among the old KGB and the new FSB , who see the U.S. as an enemy rather than a valuable and generous partner of Russia, could only be…
FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog, May 11, 2009, San Francisco — What viewers are subjected to during Alhurra’s version of primetime are three hours of mindless chatter interspersed with shallow assessments of selected current events and random feature stories (some of which are marginally entertaining). There is no depth in the news coverage, nor in the rest of the…
FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog, Commentary by Ted Lipien, April 15, 2009, San Francisco — When Anna Karapetian, an Armenian-born journalist, accepted a job offer in 1995 from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a U.S. government-funded radio station that promotes democracy and the rule of law mostly in the countries of the former Soviet Union, she could not have imagined that nearly 15…
Miro Dobrovodsky passed away on July 23, 2009. FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog Commentary by Ted Lipien, March 25, 2009, San Francisco — Miro Dobrovodsky, one of the best journalists who came to the U.S. from Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War to escape media censorship in their native countries, sent me an email pointing out that the process of silencing the Voice of America…
FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog Commentary by Ted Lipien, March 4, 2009, San Francisco Senator Richard Lugar is right about past mistakes that had crippled U.S. public diplomacy, but new actions by the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors also continue to silence America’s voice abroad Closed Down American Centers and Crippled Voice of America In an insightful and candid article posted on the Foreign Policy magazine blog,…
FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog, January 29, 2009, San Francisco — President Obama may have been surprised to find out that the Voice of America, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described as largely responsible for “telling America’s story” to the world, no longer has programs in Arabic of any kind due to actions taken by the Bush Administration and…
Anna Karapetian, a journalist from Armenia who in radio broadcasts funded by the U.S. government reported on human rights abuses in her country, is one of many people around the world who see Barack Obama’s inauguration as a hopeful beginning of a new era of change in Washington. Ms. Karapetian hopes that with Mr. Obama’s strong commitment to protecting workers’ rights, the new administration will…
FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog Commentary by Ted Lipien, January 13, 2009, San Francisco — State Department videos embarrass the U.S. among audiences abroad while the Department’s top promoter of Public Diplomacy 2.0 pushes to eliminate Voice of America radio journalism in favor of TV and Internet propaganda advertising and broadcasting based on Cold War models. While I was an elementary school…