Comments by new Chief Executive Officer of the US State broadcaster, Mr. Michael Pack has sparked a protest in the organisation, the Columbia Journalism Review has reported. Its detailed account of the rebellion, Voice of America staff rebel over new CEO’s comments, is contained in this report authored for it by Mathew Ingram
A group of journalists who work for Voice of America, the US state-backed broadcaster, sent management a letter of protest Monday denouncing the new chief executive of the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA and a number of other similar media outlets. In the letter, the staffers allege that comments made by Michael Pack, a Trump appointee who took office in June, “endanger the personal security of VOA reporters at home and abroad, as well as threatening to harm U.S. national security objectives.” As NPR’s David Folkenflik reported, the comments in question came during a podcast produced by the conservative website The Federalist, and included Pack saying the agency was “a great place to put a foreign spy,” as well as joking about deporting his own employees and turning off the air conditioning or banning masks at VOA headquarters in order to help him “drain the swamp.” Pack also questioned whether the agency’s broadcasters were adhering to standards of balance. “Whatever CNN or any other network does is one thing,” he said on the podcast, suggesting that at VOA he “found egregious examples of flouting of those standards.”
In the Federalist interview, Pack also suggested that he has had to take strong action since he was appointed because of security lapses that occurred at the agency prior to his arrival. But his predecessor in the role of USAGM chief executive, John Lansing—now the CEO of National Public Radio—said that this is untrue. “Pack’s insistence that there were issues related to security in hiring at VOA is merely a smokescreen to avert attention from his blatant attempt to interfere with the legislatively mandated independence, or ‘firewall’, protecting the journalists of VOA from government interference,” Lansing told Folkenflik. (A note on the NPR story said that because of Lansing’s previous job, neither he nor any other senior NPR executive reviewed the Pack story prior to publication). The letter from VOA staffers—including two White House correspondents, foreign correspondents based in Africa and Islamabad, and national security reporters—said that Pack’s allegations about security lapses at the agency were as baseless as the “Red Scare” conspiracy theories that targeted Voice of America and other entities during the 1950s.
Since Pack took over the agency, he has made a series of dramatic restructuring moves, including, in mid-August, forcing out the USAGM’s chief financial officer and general counsel, both of whom were placed on administrative leave and had their security clearances revoked. A statement from the agency that was sent to Politico and the New York Post at the time said these removals were meant to “restore respect for the rule of law in our work” after a review found lax vetting of journalists. But both of the executives said Pack’s actions were in retaliation for their whistle-blowing about what has happened at the agency since he took over. Chief financial officer Grant Turner told a reporter for Voice of America that his removal was punishment for speaking up about “patterns of gross mismanagement” under Pack, as well as violations of the legal firewall that is supposed to protect USAGM journalists from political interference, and general counsel David Kligerman said he was sidelined “in retaliation for attempting to do my job in an apolitical manner and to speak truth to power.”
Since he took over, Pack has removed the heads of each of the five media outlets he is in charge of (Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks), and refused to sign visa renewals for a number of foreign journalists working for those networks. He has also repeatedly criticized some of the agency’s reporters for favoring the Democratic party in their journalism, echoing some of the same accusations made by Donald Trump before Pack was appointed to his role. (Among other things, Trump said Voice of America was too soft on China in the wake of the COVID pandemic). In their letter, the VOA journalists said that Pack’s actions “risk crippling programs and projects for some countries that are considered national security priorities. He has ordered the firing of contract journalists, with no valid reason, by cancelling their visas, forcing them back to home countries where the lives of some of them may be in jeopardy. Now the purge appears to be expanding to include U.S. permanent residents and even U.S. citizens.”
As CJR’s Jon Allsop noted shortly after Pack’s appointment, what makes the accusations of interference by the Trump administration more complicated is that the Voice of America has always had a dual nature. While it does independent journalism and its leaders have often tried to make it a normal news organization, it’s also true it was created to be a vehicle for American “soft power,” one that would do things like promoting Western values in Iran during the Cold War. Dan Robinson, a longtime former VOA correspondent who wrote for CJR about the agency in 2017, told Allsop that while Trump’s criticisms and attacks have been unusually public, government officials have always communicated criticisms to the staff of the VOA, and the president has always had the power to pick agency leaders. All of which gives the letter writers a high bar to clear: can they show that Pack’s meddling, mismanagement, or other malfeasance goes beyond what the agency’s chief executive is allowed to do?
