I’ve been covering the Voice of America lately. The VOA looks like an ordinary media operation to most people, but it’s really an arm of the government that is supposed to promote our aims abroad.
The VOA instead smeared the David Horowitz Freedom Center and pushes anti-American propaganda including, in a recent shocking expose, by a former Afghan Jihadi.
Trump brought in Brent Bozell and Kari Lake to clean house. And the media is worried.
“I expect that VOA will be put under intense pressure to promote the USA. This seems likely to involve … only selecting news that paints the country in a positive light,” Kate Wright, associate professor of media and politics at the University of Edinburgh, wrote in an email. Trump, she predicted, will try to correct supposedly “liberal bias” at VOA. “The risk is that this will push journalists to create false balance — treating perspectives or statements as equally valid when they are not.”
“Promoting the USA” is literally why the VOA exists. Its origins lie in anti-Nazi propaganda broadcasts during WWII and then more formally efforts to counter Communism.
I believe VOA has a legitimate mission and that mission is indeed to promote our interests.
It’s not to run Taliban propaganda attacking Trump or this kind of stuff.
When a Muslim terrorist drove a truck into a French crowd on Bastille Day, killing 86 and wounding over 400, Farivar responded with an article titled, ‘Learn to Live With Terrorism’ Strikes Some as Good Advice”. When Front Page Magazine covered the Hamas Oct 7 attacks, he wrote an article smearing us as an “anti-Muslim” hate group for telling the truth about Jihad.
Last year, Farivar wrote a VOA analysis headlined, “The Hidden Cost Of Being Branded A Terrorist By The US Government” echoing claims from CAIR, a terror-linked organization which celebrated the attacks of Oct 7, that America was wrongly accusing Muslims of terrorism.
After the rise of Trump, Farivar switched from covering Afghanistan and the Muslim world for domestic coverage that attacked Trump, with articles like “Hate Crimes Surge After Trump Victory” and “Timeline: Trump’s Involvements With Russia” others that promoted Islamist narratives “Most Terrorism Victims Are in Muslim Majority Countries” and “With Surge in Hate Crime, Muslims Seen ‘Most Disdained’ Minority” or even did both “How Muslim-Americans Drifted to the Democratic Party” and “Arab Opinion Poll Shows Support for Clinton”.
The Voice of America should return to being a voice of freedom abroad, not leftist and Islamist taxpayer-funded propaganda targeting Americans.
