One of my commentaries on media censorship in Vladimir Putin’s Russia was first published in Digital Journal on September 16, 2009 as “Op-Ed: From Russia with Censorship.” Since then, both the Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Liberty (known in Russia as Radio Svoboda) have improved their Russian coverage, but Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is now facing a defining…
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.
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…
Russian President Vladimir Putin is again increasing pressure on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), where I served briefly as president in December 2020-January 2021. I had worked also indirectly for RFE/RL from 1993 to 2003 in Munich Germany and at their current headquarters in Prague as International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB)-Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) regional Eurasia marketing director. Toward the…
Dear Friends: Some of you may have learned that I had a brief tenure as President of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. Some of you may be also interested to know that just a few hours before the new Acting U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) CEO, Ms. Kelu Chao, had an e-mail sent to me by an administrative…
Russian propaganda influence in the United States is not new. “I established contact at the Soviet embassy with people who spoke English and were willing to feed me important bits and pieces from their side of the wire”* *Howard Fast. Being Red (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990), p. 18. Howard Fast was Voice of America (VOA) chief radio news writer…
By Ted Lipien for Cold War Radio Museum The Argonaut Building in New York City at 224 West 57 and Broadway, where first Voice of America (VOA) radio programs were produced in 1942, is now the headquarters of Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, originally created and funded by billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros to help countries move…
By Ted Lipien Published May 8, 2016 by Digital Journal Arguing that the United States has so far failed to invest seriously in understanding or pushing back against the problem of Russian propaganda and disinformation, Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Washington Post columnist, and Edward Lucas, a senior editor at the Economist, are launching this week a counter-disinformation initiative at the Center for European Policy…
By Ted Lipien Published March 28, 2016 by Digital Journal Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is overseen by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the independent federal agency in Washington, DC, wrote in an introduction to its Facebook post on March 25, 2016 that there is “wholesale racism” in Israel. [Emphasis added.] This stunning and, in my view, false and irresponsible message from a…
By Ted Lipien
Aggressive propaganda in support of territorial claims against other, almost always smaller and weaker nations, has been a constant feature in Soviet history. There are many similarities between Soviet propaganda and propaganda currently employed by the Kremlin against Ukraine and the West. Soviet propaganda portrayed Russia as a victim or a potential victim of aggression, made Soviet aggression appear as self-defense, and labeled all those who opposed the Kremlin in any way as Fascists. The Communist regime in Russia also fabricated and promoted false evidence to cover up Soviet crimes. The very same themes are being used and constantly repeated today by President Putin’s propaganda and disinformation machine to justify his military aggression in Ukraine and other aggressive foreign policy moves. President Putin and his media are also engaged in a propaganda campaign to distort World War II history and to whitewash some of Stalin’s most hideous crimes.