Voice of America is under assault
The Trump administration’s effort to eviscerate U.S. international broadcasting before it leaves office is escalating, despite court rulings and a bipartisan congressional effort to prevent it. On Tuesday, Michael Pack, the chief executive of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, reassigned the top editor of Voice of America, Elez Biberaj, a 40-year veteran of the radio network who had been trying to defend it against what he described as “attempts to trample VOA’s journalistic independence.” In his place, Pack installed a right-wing militant who has written books assailing Muslims and gays and has advocated changing VOA’s mission from independent news reporting for foreign audiences to advancing “the justice of the American cause” while “undermining our opponents.”
The reassignment culminates a series of moves by Pack since his arrival earlier this year at the agency that have been found to be improper or unconstitutional by a federal judge and the Office of Special Counsel. Among them were the firing of the heads of other broadcast networks overseen by the agency, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; the dismissal of their boards and replacement with unqualified political appointees from other agencies; the improper sidelining of senior agency officials; and politicized investigations of several VOA journalists, including veteran White House correspondent Steve Herman.
Last month, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ordered Pack not to further involve himself in the news reporting and personnel decisions of VOA and the other media organizations. The Office of Special Counsel, saying it “found a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” at the agency, ordered it to investigate itself.
The incoming Biden administration made clear that one of the president’s early acts would be to dismiss Pack. Congress, meanwhile, inserted reforms into the annual defense spending bill intended to prevent future agency executives from abusing their authority.
Pack, who has flouted congressional oversight and withheld cooperation from the Biden transition team, is now essentially seeking to use the pending reform measure for his own purposes. One of its provisions requires that a seven-member advisory board, whose members must be Senate-confirmed, approve the removal of the heads of any of the media organizations. Just as that would have stopped Pack’s coup against the qualified journalists who previously served as top editors, it could make it difficult for the Biden administration to quickly remove the ideological warrior Pack just installed at VOA.
The agenda of that new director, Robert Reilly, might be intuited from his recent books, which include a tirade against the
LGBTQ community that asks “why Americans [are] being forced to consider homosexual acts as morally acceptable,” and another that posits that “the Muslim mind has closed … a whole civilization has mentally shut down and abandoned reason and philosophy.” It’s worth considering what could happen to VOA’s global influence if the new editor’s philosophy is translated into news coverage and commentaries. Biberaj spelled out the stakes in a memo to the staff: “our hard-won credibility at a time of global democratic backsliding and increased international threats to America’s values and moral leadership.”
President-elect Joe Biden appears to understand those equities: He had appointed a distinguished former State Department official and journalist, Richard Stengel, to oversee his transition team at the agency. But the new administration will have to act quickly, with help from Congress, if it is to save U.S. broadcasting from lasting damage.