In nationally televised hearings, Senate Republicans denounce Voice of America. They accuse the government’s international broadcasting arm of harboring saboteurs, misspending taxpayer funds, condoning anti-Semitism, compromising security by relying on foreign-born workers, and denigrating the country it is supposed to serve. The committee chairman grills VOA executives, middle managers, and even copy editors, zeroing in on their alleged left-wing associations and on scripts and word choices that he deems un-American. “We intend…to detect duplications, waste, incompetence, subversion, in other words laying the entire picture on the table,” he proclaims.
These hearings that gripped the country were not part of the Trump administration’s recent campaign against VOA. They took place in 1953, and the committee chair running them was none other than Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, then at the peak of his power. Although his allegations were largely unsubstantiated, dread of his wrath was so pervasive that leaders of VOA’s parent agency resigned, numerous employees were fired, and an engineer killed himself.
Almost forgotten today, McCarthy’s VOA hearings—which lasted five weeks and included the testimony of sixty witnesses—represent an early and disruptive chapter in the eighty-three-year history of Voice of America. Despite VOA’s success, signified by its audience size—361 million people weekly worldwide as of February—and the efforts by past and present adversaries such as the Soviet Union, China, Iran, and North Korea to jam its signal, it has been a perennial lightning rod for domestic critics who preferred a more explicitly patriotic message. President Ronald Reagan purged key managers, and Trump tried to control its coverage in his first term before moving this year to silence what he has called “The Voice of Radical America” and reduce its staff by 85 percent. (Two federal lawsuits by VOA journalists are challenging the cuts.) The more than twelve hundred pages of transcripts of the McCarthy hearings reviewed by CJR have a remarkably contemporary feel, showing just how little the rhetoric surrounding Voice of America has changed.
At a June 25 congressional hearing titled “Spies, Lies, and Mismanagement,” Kari Lake, the Trump administration figure tasked with dismantling VOA, complained that it had strayed from its “glory days” during the Cold War, before it became “anti-American.” (Lake did not reply to emailed questions from CJR.) In reality, as early as 1947, a Republican congressman was already vilifying the network as the “voice of radical left-wingers,” according to The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945–1953, by David F. Krugler. To McCarthy, it was the “Voice of Moscow.” “It was clear in McCarthy’s day, anything that was anti-Communist, true or not, he would applaud,” said McCarthy biographer Larry Tye. “That wasn’t true with one of the most effective of anti-Communist and truth-telling outlets, the Voice of America.”