The resignation of Amanda Bennett as director of the Voice of America began a slew of developments that have captured news headlines. Bennett resigned as Michael Pack, a film-maker, was confirmed as the new Chief Executive Officer of VOA’s parent organization, the United States Agency for Global Media. Pack has since fired the directors of…
After four years and two months of innovative leadership at the Voice of America, Ms. Bennett and her deputy Sandy Sugawara issued a statement on June 15 saying: “It’s time for us to leave. This morning, we sent our resignations to Michael Pack, the newly-arrived CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). In…
By pure coincidence, two new senior executives of the London-based BBC World Service and the Washington-based Voice of America and four other U.S. overseas networks were named on May 4 and 5. Together, those networks reach more than two-thirds of a billion users a week — the largest ever in both the BBC’s and the…
Mohammed Ghuneim, former director of the VOA Arabic Service and frontline Middle East correspondent during the last half of the 20th century, died May 16 in West Palm Beach, Florida. He had just celebrated his 90th birthday last December. A funeral service and burial were held on May 18 in West Palm Beach. Born in…
As the pandemic enters its sixth month, it has cost nearly 240 thousand lives — by far an unprecedented death toll in the 21st century. The battle to tame the deadly disease seems far from over, even as western countries are easing home confinements, and some businesses are re-opening. Coronavirus cases now exceed 3.3 million…
My esteemed colleague and friend Gene Pell was well known in his primary profession, international broadcasting, to a world often denied high quality, objective news and information. Gene died on April 7 after a three-year battle with cancer at his home near Syria, Virginia. He was 83. Gene is the only leader to have occupied…
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…
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…
“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…
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…