Troubled by Lapses, Government’s Voice to the World Braces for New Trump Management

By Elizabeth Williamson
Dec. 12, 2018

WASHINGTON — The American government’s broadcast service to the world has a problem: It is becoming the news itself.

TV Martí, which aims broadcasts at Cuba, aired a segment in May that called the financier and Democratic donor George Soros, a longtime opponent of authoritarianism, “a nonbelieving Jew of flexible morals.”

Voice of America, the flagship of American government efforts to promote its values abroad, was rocked in October when 15 of its journalists were fired or disciplined after an internal investigation found they accepted “brown envelopes,” or bribes passed to them by a Nigerian official.

And only weeks later, Voice of America fired the chief of its Mandarin-language section after a billionaire Chinese exile who is championed by some on the American right and is known for making unsubstantiated charges against Beijing was promised a three-hour live broadcast.

The debacles are the latest problems that for years have plagued the government’s efforts to meld journalism and political messaging across its array of radio and television channels around the world.

And they suggested that under President Trump, the broadcasts are at risk of greater ideological tilt as more political appointees eventually join the organization, the United States Agency for Global Media, formerly known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

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