The Voice of America is the nation’s largest publicly-funded international broadcaster, reaching 280,000,000 multimedia users in 47 languages each week, many of whom access it daily for honest, balanced and accurate world news. To most senior VOA officials, past and present, including this writer, an unsigned White House blog on April 9, 1600 Daily, omitted…
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Imagine, for a moment, if you were responsible for covering a worldwide threat now regularly compared with World War II in its devastation and future deadly impact? As The Hill correspondent Reid Wilson reports: “The pandemic spreading across the globe has been slow to spread throughout Africa, a continent of 49 countries. But public health…
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Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian has promoted at least two blame-the-U.S. conspiracy theories about the outbreak of the coronavirus. Secretary of State Pompeo’s reaction to these allegations may have been sharp because the Chinese accusations so echo an infamous 1980s Soviet disinformation campaign – that the AIDS virus had originated at a U.S. Army…
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The March 29 edition of the Washington Post carried the sad news of the passing of one of our country’s foremost cultural diplomats: Yale Richmond. Yale’s geographic area specialization was Russia and Central Europe. When he began working in the region, Russia was still the Soviet Union and the United States referred to anything west…
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Nearly three months after the first reports of the disease in China, more than 40 countries have reported at least a thousand cases of COVID-19, with the United States, Italy, China, Spain and Germany, France, and Iran registering at least 30,000 each. Altogether, 200 countries and territories have reported coronavirus outbreaks. American media registered at…
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Around the globe, citizens and netizens are focused on the coronavirus – how not to be infected, how to prevent the virus’s spread, how it is stressing systems of medical care, and how long preventive measures must continue. The crisis has more than medical and economic dimensions, however. It has given rise to what some…
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“CRACKS APPEARING IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY…AS CORONAVIRUS TERRORIZES THE WORLD” That grim headline is the opening of a program March 25 moderated by the Voice of America’s Greta van Susteren. That half hour weekly Wednesday panel is entitled Plugged In. Ms. van Susteren samples experts’ up-to-the minute assessments of global health crisis endangering millions of…
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“Churchillian.” That’s a word being used to describe the St. Patrick’s Day Ministerial Broadcast – what Americans would call an address to the nation – by Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland Leo Varadkar on the coronavirus. “This is the calm before the storm – before the surge,” he told Ireland’s people. The speech is worth…
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The death toll in the COVID-19 global outbreak has now passed 10,000. That’s even with the nonstop, heroic efforts of tens of thousands of physicians and nurses worldwide. As VOA correspondent Jamie Dettmer put it: “Parisians marked dusk on the first day of their coronavirus lockdown this week by stepping out on their balconies and…
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“In the [information environment], we are being challenged every single day. Our competitors are contesting us daily, seeking to sow disinformation, probing cyber defenses, stealing intellectual property, conducting reconnaissance in places we wouldn’t even consider part of the battlefield – like our universities, industry and online applications like games. They’re challenging norms of behavior in…
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