White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

VOA Pure Because it Wasn’t Beholden, Despite Its U.S. Funding

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It was a quiet voice in the night in Southern Rhodesia, a radio broadcast. But it let in the world: a world beyond the horizons of my family, and even the demanding British public school-inspired academy I attended. 

The broadcast was the BBC Transcription Service. I had to keep the radio on low because it was carried after midnight by the local radio network, which itself was based on the BBC model.

There was only one channel and no television in  Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s, so the BBC Transcription Service was very important, especially to me in my teens.

To this day, I recall a scientific program on the frontal lobes of the brain and a dramatization of John Galsworthy’s novel “The Man of Property.”

I didn’t need to listen to those broadcasts to get information left out by an oppressive government’s censorship. There was none then; it was long before Ian Smith’s premiership. I didn’t have to be afraid of the police at the door because I was listening to the radio.

Behind the Iron Curtain, or in any other oppressed country, say Salazar’s Portugal, listening to the unbridled BBC and its spiritual sister, the Voice of America, required courage as you risked arrest. 

But listen they did. First to the BBC in Nazi Germany and its occupied countries, and to VOA, later during World War II and in the countries under Soviet influence or control, and in Mao’s China.

Now this great voice, the Voice of America (so appropriately named in reality and metaphor) has been silenced after 83 years by the Trump administration for no discernible reason. What Stalin and Mao couldn’t silence — with jamming, long prison sentences and ubiquitous policing — President Trump has done with a pen stroke.

What VOA and its services — including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio Marti and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks — did was to offer high-quality journalism and entertainment uncontaminated by propaganda. 

Paradoxically, VOA was free of government messaging because it was financed by the government. An act of law guaranteed that, and its highly professional staff of 900, broadcasting in more than 40 languages, were on guard against propaganda. 

Yes, the government paid for it to be free. Consequently, it was practicing a pure broadcasting that might have reached the apex of achievable objectivity.

Commercial broadcasting is not free in that way and is often biased for commercial reasons. Think Fox and MSNBC or the pinnacle from which CNN has fallen.

The BBC, like VOA, is government-funded with a special tax called the “licensing fee.” But because the bulk of its output is domestic, it is constantly berated by politicians, frequently in the House of Commons. 

The BBC World Service is financed separately through the UK Foreign Office, but is wholly owned and operated by the BBC, thus keeping the government at arm’s length; another paradox in which pure journalism is taxpayer financed.

I have personal knowledge of both the BBC and VOA. I worked for the BBC television news in London and did occasional radio broadcasts for its overseas service in the early 1960s.

At VOA in Washington, I was sometimes interviewed by Branko Mikasinovich for the Serbian and Russian services. I found the experience as professional and questions as objective as any I have experienced from any news outlet anywhere. (It was also fun.)

For two decades, my weekly news and public affairs television program, “White House Chronicle,” was carried by VOA globally in English — and at one time was translated into Chinese. It was dropped during the first Trump administration, but VOA started distributing it again in the Biden years. Mostly it deals with the nexus of science and society, such as AI’s anticipated impact on jobs.

I have simply given the program to VOA as a public service and no money has ever changed hands.

Apart from the hard news, VOA gave the world a window into democratic America: our struggles and triumphs, our values, our of freedom, our luxury of choice, and those aspects of American life that make us the nation we are —  at best aspiring to be Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”

The Trump administration hasn’t only denied 70 percent of the world that lives under authoritarian rule the opportunity to hear the truth, but they have also robbed America of the second of its two great soft power tools; the first was USAID, the helping agency.

We aren’t only telling the world that we don’t care about it, but we are also retreating from it into inconsequence.

America, for So Long a State of Mind, Is Losing Its Sense of Mission

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America isn’t just a piece of remarkably fertile real estate between two great oceans. It is also a state of mind.

Even when America has done wrong things (think racism) or stupid things (think Prohibition), it has still shone brightly to the world as the citadel of free expression, abundant opportunity, and a place where laws are obeyed.

When I was a teen in a British colony in Africa, long before I imagined I would spend most of my life in America, I met a man who had seen the promised land. He wasn’t a native-born American or even a citizen, but he had lived in “the States.”

I badgered this man with questions about everything, but mostly things derived from books and movies: Could ordinary people really drive Cadillacs?  As a British writer later said, were taxis in New York “great yellow projectiles”? Did they really have universities where you could study anything, like ice cream manufacturing? Did American policemen actually carry guns?

Our adulation of America was fed by its products. They were everywhere the best. American pickup trucks were the gold standard of light trucks, and American cars — so big — fascinated, although they weren’t ubiquitous like the trucks. Brands such as Frigidaire and General Electric meant reliability, quality and evidence that Americans did things better.

No one thought the streets in the United States were paved with gold, but they did believe they were paved with possibility.

There was criticism, like that of the alleged American hold on the price of gold or the fear of nuclear war. The “shining city upon a hill” idea was paramount long before President Ronald Reagan said it.

And it has been so for the world since the end of World War II. For 80 years, the United States has led the world; even when it spread its mistakes, like the Vietnam War, it led.

America was the bulwark of the liberal democracies — a grouping of European nations, Canada, Australia and much of Asia — that shared many values and outlooks. Call it what it is, or was, Western Civilization, based on decency, informed by Christianity, and shaped by tradition and common expectation.

Central to this was America; central with ideas, with wealth, with technological leadership and, above all, with decency. Now, all of this may be in the past.

This structure has been shaken in less than three months of President Trump’s second administration. It is near breaking point.

This may be the end of days for the Western Alliance, led by America in the ways of democracy and free trade.

Writing in the British monthly magazine Prospect, Andrew Adonis, a peer who sits in the House of Lords as Baron Adonis, states: “Trump doesn’t believe in democracy, just in winning at all costs. He doesn’t believe in an international order based on respect for human rights. He is an authoritarian, lawless plutocrat who admires similar characters at home and abroad.”

Additionally, Adonis says in his article that, unlike the first Trump term, the checks and balances have weakened: “The Republican Party has become a cipher. The Democrats are shell-shocked and demoralized. The courts, the military and Congress are browbeaten, packed with Trump supporters or otherwise compliant.”

I find it hard to argue with this assessment. Why would Trump persist with a tariff regime that was proven not to work with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which triggered the Great Depression? Why would he rile up Canada by threatening its independence? Why would he reopen, without a good reason, the issue of the control of the Panama Canal?

Why is he destroying the civil service in thought-free ways? Why is he going after the constitutional freedom of the press and the rights enshrined over millennia for lawyers to represent those who need them regardless of politics? Why is he leading us into a recession: the Trump Slump?

Either the president has no coherent plans, or those plans are devious and not to be shared with the people.

I believe that he enjoys power and testing its limits, that he has no knowledge base and so relies on hearsay to formulate policy. In the end, he may be listed along with Roman emperors who ran amok like Nero and Caligula.

The Western Alliance is at stake, and America is giving away its global leadership. When trust is lost, it is gone forever.

U.S. Is in Golden Age, Despite Brexit-Type Sentimentality

(CREDIT: Gage Skidmore, via Wikipedia)

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(Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore, via Wikipedia)

The social and cultural forces behind MAGA in the United States and those that led the British in 2016 to vote to leave the European Union — by a small margin of 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent — are closely linked. I know those forces, and I feel connected to them.

They reflect common yearning, shared frustration, and a vague but deep belief that once things were better. That once for their nation, there was a time of contentment, prosperity and certainty all wrapped up in patriotism or, more accurately, nationalism.

“Great” is a word with meaning for those who get caught up in this deep desire to find a kind of national fulfillment, which they feel, and feel deeply, is missing.

In Britain, all the years from Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) on Jan. 1, 1973, to the fateful vote, there was a feeling among many people, but especially men, that the nation had abandoned its hereditary path of greatness for domination by Europe. They wanted the term Great Britain (officially adopted after the Acts of Union with Scotland in 1707) to mean something.

Their romantic nostalgia was for some amalgam of history when they felt Britain was “great”: maybe the last days of the Empire in the 1950s, maybe the late Victorian era. It was a moveable feast of yearning for something other than multicultural, essentially woke, Britain.

In America, that yearning, as deeply felt and real, is centered on some romanticized appreciation of the 1950s.

The hard thing for people dreaming of an imaginary past of plenty and happiness is that they never existed for everyone and that the golden age for the ordinary people of Britain was the EU years and the present is a unique golden age for America.

With AI, in which we are the global leader (China has technical parity but is limited by its closed, top-down-controlled society), we are about to see history’s largest surge in knowledge, productivity and health. The giant killers like heart disease and cancer may fall, and life expectancy will increase.

The challenge isn’t to transmute this gold into lead, not to seek the future in a sentimental myth, not to relegate America to being just another striving country.

Britain left a dominant position in the councils of Europe for the status of an island nation with an awesome history but a shaky future.

Behind Britain’s prosperity through the years (a prosperity that is now faltering badly) and America’s massive economic muscle (currently, we have the best-performing economy in the world) lay democracy, open markets and free trade.

Those also were the bedrock values of conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic. In today’s political confusion, they have been forgotten or put on a back burner.

MAGA supporters and those who voted Britain out of the EU share a common sense that there was a better time. Brexiteers said Britain had lost its “sovereignty” without anyone defining the loss.

When I was 21 years old, I worked in London in the movement to keep Britain out of what was then the EEC, precursor of the EU, believing it would be a big economic mistake. Not long after its entry, I changed my mind: It was a bonanza for the financial markets, the farmers, and all those who had goods to sell.

The forces of Brexit and MAGA were always present, but it took two Pied Pipers to fire them up, to shape them as voting blocks, and to have them take over the conservative politics in both nations.

Britain’s Pied Piper was Boris Johnson, who kept up a steady and often dishonest flow of anti-European information when he was the Brussels correspondent of the conservative Daily Telegraph. These fabrications remained alive throughout the Brexit campaign. So, when David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister, offered Britain a referendum on EU membership, Johnson, then a member of parliament, was ready.

Donald Trump rode into the presidency on four words: Make America Great Again.

Besides being larger-than-life and often clownish figures, Johnson and Trump are quite different people. They both rose to corral the loyalty of those yearning for a different reality, one that would inadvertently damage those they sought to lead.

They would effectively seek to transmute gold into lead and tell everyone it was platinum.

I don’t ridicule MAGA supporters, but I fear the power of false narratives. The past is prologue; it isn’t the future.