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Three sisters, ages 7, 8, and 9, Polish evacuees from Russia, August 1942. Photo by Lt. Col. Szymanski, U.S. Army.
Children, Cold War, Cuba, Ethiopia, Featured, Glos Ameryki, Highlights, History, International Broadcasting, OWI, Photo, Poland, Public Diplomacy, RFE, RL, VOA, VOA80, Women

At Voice of America, history repeats itself — Part Two: Hidden History

November 18, 2021

By Ted Lipien As more and more questions are being asked by members of Congress and scandals reported by liberal and conservative press about the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) — the tax-funded, U.S. government-managed international broadcaster — I would strongly recommend that Voice of America (VOA)  USAGM federally-employed managers and journalists read The Katyn Diaries, a book about one of World War II major genocide murders. I…

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Children, History, RFE, Russia, Women

Planned assassination of a journalist linked to Polish children prisoners in Soviet Russia

February 16, 2021

Having served briefly (Dec. 2020-Jan. 2021) as Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) President and having been before Voice of America (VOA) Polish Service chief in the 1980s and VOA acting associate director in 2005/2006 in charge of central programs, I wanted to repost my 2019 Silent Refugees website’s article on how early VOA managers, editors and journalists lied about Stalin’s crimes and repeated Soviet propaganda. Fortunately, VOA no longer repeated such Soviet disinformation during the Cold War, and dropped all restrictions during the presidency of Ronald Reagan on reporting on communist human rights abuses. To their great credit, neither Radio Free Europe (RFE) nor Radio Liberty (RL) ever censored news about the Soviet Gulag, which the Voice of America occasionally did even as late as the 1970s.

A Soviet-instigated plan to kill an anti-communist woman journalist in the early years of the Cold War was linked to her attempts to tell the story of thousands of Polish children who in 1940-1941 had been deported with their families from eastern Poland to Siberia and Central Asia where many died from brutal treatment. The assassination plan was revealed in 1953-1954 by a defector to the West from communist-ruled Poland and was never carried out.

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Children, Iran, OWI, Photo, Photos, Russia, VOA, Women

Polish children refugees from Russia – silenced by Soviet and U.S. propaganda

February 16, 2021

U.S. Government Propaganda Photo (1943) By Ted Lipien U.S. government propaganda pictures taken in 1943 by the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) photographer in Iran showed Polish children and women several months after they had come out of Soviet Russia in a mass exodus of former Gulag prisoners and their families. The OWI photographs were carefully staged and their…

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Children, Cold War, Featured, Glos Ameryki, History, International Broadcasting, Media, Poland, Radio, RFE, VOA, Women

Radio was a ‘childhood companion’ of Polish Nobel Prize author Olga Tokarczuk

December 15, 2019

I learned something today by reading on the Internet the Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture delivered on December 7, 2019 at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. As a young girl growing up in Poland in the 1960s and the 1970s, a country at that time still under communist rule until 1989, she was often listening…

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Children

Polish children refugees from Russia – silenced by Soviet and U.S. propaganda

January 19, 2019

U.S. Government Propaganda Photo (1943) By Ted Lipien U.S. government propaganda pictures taken in 1943 by the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) photographer in Iran showed Polish children and women several months after they had come out of Soviet Russia in a mass exodus of former Gulag prisoners and their families. The OWI photographs were carefully staged and their…

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Children

Polish children refugees – Time and OWI/VOA propaganda

January 9, 2019

U.S. Government Propaganda Photo By Ted Lipien Time Magazine Story In addition to misleading foreign audiences through Voice of America (VOA) shortwave radio broadcasts and domestic “news” outreach by the wartime Office of War Information (OWI), U.S. government propagandists had a definite impact on independent U.S. media. A short Time magazine entry on November 15, 1943 described a group of…

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