White House: VOA has become the voice of America’s adversaries
In a statement on Friday, the White House criticized the Voice of America for becoming the voice of America’s adversaries despite being funded $200 million a year by American taxpayers.
The White House statement says: The Coronavirus pandemic is no exception. Secrecy from the Communist Party of China allowed the deadly virus to spread across the world. Journalists should report the facts, but VOA has instead amplified Beijing’s propaganda. This week, VOA called China’s Wuhan lockdown a successful “model” copied by much of the world—and then tweeted out the video of the Communist government’s celebratory light show marking the quarantine’s alleged end.
“Even worse, while much of the U.S. media takes its lead from China, VOA went one step further: It created graphics with communist government statistics to compare China’s Coronavirus death toll to America’s. As intelligence experts point out, there is simply no way to verify the accuracy of China’s numbers,” the statement continues.
The White House goes on to say that last year “VOA helped highlight the Twitter feed of Iran Foreign Minister Javad Zarif while he was issuing threats against the U.S. and sharing Russian anti-U.S. propaganda videos.”
The statement concluded: “VOA will represent America,” its guiding Charter reads. And for years after its founding during World War II, VOA served that mission by promoting freedom and democracy across the world for audiences who longed for both. Today, VOA is promoting propaganda instead—and your tax dollars are paying for it.