When both the Washington Post and National Review report on yet another senior management-created scandal at Voice of America , it's an indication that the poor state of U.S. international broadcasting has become a bipartisan concern. Many media and foreign policy experts are wondering when this pattern of one crisis after another in the U.S. Agency for Global Media will end. The management meltdown at USAGM and VOA needs a bipartisan solution.

Members of the House Committee on Appropriations subcommittee will have a chance on Thursday , March 9, to ask USAGM CEO and former Obama administration-appointed VOA Director Amanda Bennett to explain an unprecedented string of leadership and management failures under her watch both as the chief VOA executive (2016-2020) and now as the Biden administration's appointee to lead the U.S. government-funded media outreach aboard. Whether they will ask tough questions remains to be seen. The House Committee on Appropriations is chaired by Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX) and the ranking Democrat is Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT). Separately, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has sent letters to Bennett asking her to explain management failures at the agency and Voice of America.

From my assessment, never in VOA's history have there been so many doubts about the agency leadership's competence and effectiveness as in recent months and years, including the dangerous and embarrassing failure to evacuate USAGM staff from Afghanistan before the takeover by the Taliban. The latest incident of executive dysfunction, reported first by an English-language newspaper in Kyiv, Ukraine, and picked up by the Washington Post, stems from serious concerns that USAGM's senior leaders allowed the VOA Russian Service to hire former President Vladimir Putin's state media employees without proper vetting of their previous work in Russia. According to VOA's management, two employees have been suspended with pay pending a further investigation following an unprecedented protest by a group of other VOA Russian Service journalists. The suspension happened after the Kyiv Post and the Washington Post published their reports.

I have not examined the former output of the two suspended employees mentioned in these articles. But surely, the USAGM and VOA management should have carried out a full review of their work before the U.S. government hired these broadcasters to author VOA programs for dissemination into Putin's Russia. Suspending them now is proof of poor management.

Unsurprisingly, VOA's and USAGM's senior leaders, whose neglect allowed this crisis to develop and escalate, were not suspended even though they were already responsible for similar oversight failures earlier, some of them well documented. They have not learned any lessons from these prior incidents because they, and some of their hand-picked VOA English-language news service writers and editors, suppress or downplay such stories of internal management failures to please or protect their bosses with whom they share the same political outlook. Instead of accepting responsibility, senior American managers blame and punish VOA's foreign-born journalists to divert attention from their own failure to provide leadership and effective managerial oversight. The list of employee morale-killing crises under the current leadership team is long, affecting such VOA services as Russian , Chinese , Iranian , Horn of Africa , Hausa , and others. The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found in a report issued in October 2022 that VOA lacks written procedures for addressing lapses in journalistic standards.

In March 2019, I sent an email to Amanda Bennett, who was then VOA director, letting her know that anti-Putin pro-democracy refugee journalists working in the West were writing with concern about a Voice of America Russian Service broadcaster who, before being hired by VOA, produced anti-U.S. propaganda with outrageous conspiracy theories. I never received a reply, and the journalist continued to work for VOA for many more months. However, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which is also overseen by USAGM but tries to maintain its editorial independence and protect itself from the agency bureaucracy in Washington, immediately stopped using the journalist's VOA reports after seeing his prior work for Russian state media.

In another earlier incident, a journalist from Spain who had worked for Putin's RT channel was later employed by the Voice of America Spanish Service during Amanda Bennett's tenure as VOA director. The journalist was openly proud of his work for RT from Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine and saw nothing wrong with it. His contract was not renewed during the brief period when VOA had a Trump administration-appointed senior management. After Amanda Bennett left her job as a VOA director but under the watch of her "excellent leadership team," as she called her top aides, a Moscow-based reporter from Spain used by VOA as a freelancer was expelled from Ukraine by Ukrainian authorities, who suspected him of spying for Russia. He was later arrested in Poland, where he is still jailed and awaiting a possible trial. The journalist categorically denied the spying charges . After his arrest became public, VOA management initially tried to distance itself from the reporter and later removed his reports from the VOA websites. The public relations office would not answer whether the removed news reports met VOA's journalistic standards.

The VOA Russian Service journalists who were most recently suspended vigorously deny that they have ever produced any pro-Putin propaganda. During the Cold War, both VOA and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty hired and used a few journalists who were formerly employed by state media behind the Iron Curtain. However, they usually made a public break with their former employers and were carefully vetted to ensure they did not author any pro-communist propaganda. During the trade union Solidarity's struggle for democracy in Poland, when I was in charge of the VOA Polish Service and when VOA dramatically increased its audience in Poland, we did hire a few former state media broadcasters. Almost all of them were excellent journalists who had not done anything compromising in their prior work for state media outlets in Poland. However, most VOA Polish Service broadcasters were refugee journalists without previous communist state media employment. The VOA Polish Service broadcasters did not cause crises similar to what is happening now, and we were spectacularly successful.

Still, during my more than three-decade tenure at the agency in various journalistic and executive positions, I saw a good share of senior management failures and some censorship at the Voice of America. Some pro-Soviet censorship continued until the Reagan administration carried out management reforms at VOA. These old controversies were nothing compared to my observations of how VOA has been managed in the last several years.

Voice of America has become, to a large degree, a pro-Democratic Party partisan news outlet trying to target not only foreign audiences but also American voters. During most of the Cold War, the VOA management and its central newsroom were also dominated by administrators and journalists who were partisan Democrats but not nearly as much as now. In the 1980s, they profoundly disdained Ronald Reagan. However, there was still some ideological and programming diversity and bipartisanship within the agency. Many foreign language journalists in services broadcasting to countries under communism tended to identify with the Republican Party. Overall, outright partisanship was discouraged and largely avoided in the VOA news output. While working for VOA, I voted in favor of some Republicans and some Democrats, but like most VOA journalists at that time, I did not let my political sympathies affect my work. I have been registered as an independent voter for many years.

However, the VOA newsroom has been now almost uniformly and openly partisan for quite some time in favor of Democratic administrations. VOA editors avoid reporting critically of the Biden administration. (If they can't avoid such reporting, they use news agency reports rather than risk being ostracized by their colleagues and angering the management.) They tend to censor criticism of news showing the current Democratic administration in a negative light, including accounts of scandals within USAGM, assuming they are even mentioned. One example was the VOA press freedom team's refusal to report on the VOA management's censorship of a Vietnamese Service news video critical of the country's communist prime minister after Vietnam's Embassy complained about it to VOA acting Director Yolanda Lopez, a close associate of Amanda Bennett and former USAGM acting CEO Kelu Chao. Chao had once even called on VOA journalists to volunteer for DHS work at the border in processing immigrants in support of the Biden administration’s immigration policy. Had a Republican as the agency head issued such an appeal to VOA employees, he or she would have risked a lawsuit for violating the firewall separating VOA journalists from the executive branch.

Censorship to protect the management and the U.S. administration violates the VOA Charter . Yet, according to McCaul , VOA censored its report on the most recent VOA Russian Service controversy scandal by removing some of the information that showed poor leadership by the senior management.

The saddest part about the latest incident is that the principal writers and editors involved in putting together the story on the VOA Russian Service readily agreed to make these cuts and did not see them as censorship or self-censorship.

The younger generation of reporters and editors does not know VOA's history because the agency's management has been distorting it for years. They seem to think that 15 VOA Russian Service employees signing a letter of protest is a small number. It is, in fact, remarkable that this group of foreign-born VOA employees risked their chances of future promotions by signing such a protest letter.

The VOA public relations office insists that the letter signatories will not be punished for their protest. But from my experience and the study of the organization's history, I know that such assurances cannot be trusted. When VOA was created in 1942, VOA's first director, John Houseman , employed many pro-Soviet communists, including VOA's first chief news writer and editor, Howard Fast , a future recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize. During World War II, a VOA Polish Service broadcaster, Konstanty Broel Plater , protested against their blatant pro-Stalin propaganda. The agency's management strongly warned him not to pick a fight with the VOA director. Rather than repeat Soviet propaganda lies, he resigned from VOA in 1944. Among several thousand VOA and the Office of War Information employees at that time, he is believed to be the only one who resigned in protest against propaganda news about Soviet Russia and Stalin. VOA's management was later reformed during the Truman administration, and the pro-Soviet agency officials and broadcasters were forced out. Still, brave journalists like Plater were erased from the official VOA history because they were an unpleasant reminder of the failure to protect VOA from Soviet propaganda.

Leadership and personnel are policy. The first step to reforming VOA is to appoint experienced leaders who would know how to select mid-level managers, vet employees, and produce programs that could have the desired impact in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and other countries that lack a free press. Everything will remain the same at the U.S. Agency for Global Media and the Voice of America until that happens.

Ted Lipien is a journalist, writer, and media freedom advocate. He was Voice of America's Polish service chief during Poland's struggle for democracy and VOA's acting associate director. He served briefly in 2020-2021 as RFE/RL's president.