• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Kari Lake nominated to head Voice of America.

Correct. Special English news was as much an "English Lesson" as it was a newscast. It was only done briefly each day, and did not permeate the rest of VOA programming. However, they did have guidelines about minimizing colloquial terms and expressions that people who did not grow up speaking English would not have learned in a foreign nation.
I had to laugh when Harold Camping's WYFR would read the King James Bible in "special English".
 
VOA claims its mission is to be "the voice of American foreign policy". Everything on the service is/was not news and commentary. Willis Conover's jazz, the "New York New York" show with Garry Moore in the 70s are a couple of examples.
My first 5 years in radio were at an all-jazz station, so I knew a bit about the subject. But trying to listen to jazz on shortwave was agonizing, and having Garry Moore tell us what we should like was even worse.
Well, President Musk wants to cut my Social Security, so there's that.
One of the main planks in Trump's campaign was "no cuts in Social Security".
 
Do VOA announcers and anchors still speak s-l-o-w-l-y in English? So, those who speak English as a 2nd language can understand better.

The number of shortwave frequencies has dropped dramatically, replaced with mostly FM frequencies in various locations.
Local and domestic Shortwave began to disappear in the 1960's. When I bought an AM/SW station in 1967 to move from a small town to the capital city the first thing I did was throw away the SW transmitter and turn in the SW license. That was about 60 years ago.
 
Only certain VOA programs were in “Special English” which was limited to an approximately 850 word vocabulary and delivered at a slow pace. Most English language programming was and is in normal speech.
Yes Special English was quite interesting. VOA also had a dedicated Rock Music channel. They hired Larry London who I worked with in Hollywood at Transtar. The VOA had a couple other well known Rock announcers on the channel, one being a woman named Bernie. Used to tune it in on our Monotron, I think that is what it was called. The VOA seemed like a spooky place, looked like an old huge 4 level Bank of America with no ceiling panels on every floor, only visited there once. On my tour I was shown where the special bathrooms were for African Americans. They were blocked off and not in use anymore.

 
Last edited:
Uh huh. He was also going to lower our grocery prices and has backed away from that. You expect me to believe a word the lying orange felon has to say?
The President-ELECT is not yet able to do anything about the price of anything. It is still part of the agenda once he gets into office.
 
I was also the victim or considerable unwanted and inappropriate pressure by the same government agency when I owned a group of stations in Ecuador; I was accused of being "disloyal" and worse because I would not put the VOA taped talk shows on my 24/7 music stations that did not even have newscasts!

I could very easily see that happening again, where administration officials, including the president, will only speak with VOA, forcing other media outlets to use (with credit) VOA programming in order to get any administration comment on policy.

So back then, VOA offered something that few local stations could provide: immediate international news. Today, it offers nothing. And it should be closed, as has happened with so many other international broadcasting nations.

My take is that the challenge for the new head of USAGM will be to reinvent its media operations to serve the interests of the new administration. The president knows the power of the media, and based on what we saw in 2020, would love to have a government-funded media operation under his control.

A lot of VOA experiences you talk about were precisely why congress was very careful when it created CPB. They wanted to avoid a lot of the things they saw happening there, and prevent them from happening in public broadcasting. Unfortunately, its that independence that bothers the incoming administration.
 
Last edited:
I could very easily see that happening again, where administration officials, including the president, will only speak with VOA, forcing other media outlets to use (with credit) VOA programming in order to get any administration comment on policy.



My take is that the challenge for the new head of USAGM will be to reinvent its media operations to serve the interests of the new administration. The president knows the power of the media, and based on what we saw in 2020, would love to have a government-funded media operation under his control.

A lot of VOA experiences you talk about were precisely why congress was very careful when it created CPB. They wanted to avoid a lot of the things they saw happening there, and prevent them from happening in public broadcasting. Unfortunately, its that independence that bothers the current administration.
"This is the Voice of America. President Trump, who won the last 2 elections with 120% of the vote, achieved his first five year plan in 30 days, and the beet harvest is right on time"
 
"This is the Voice of America. President Trump, who won the last 2 elections with 120% of the vote, achieved his first five year plan in 30 days, and the beet harvest is right on time"
Echoes of Radio Berlin International, Radio Sofia and similar Soviet Bloc shortwavers. When I was a teenage SWL, the newscast on Radio Sofia more often than not would lead off with a similarly rosy economic update, or a report on a visit by an official from some other Communist nation to Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov.
 
I'm going to assume AFN (Armed Forces Network) will be left alone, even though Rush Limbaugh was one of the syndicated programs they would broadcast as AFRTS, and news was the 5 minute ABC News, and CBS World News Roundup. I haven't been able to find online the current slate of AFN programming, and what political talk is carried now.
 
Last edited:
I'm going to assume AFN (Armed Forces Network) will be left alone,

AFN is run by the Defense department. That's a whole different story. If you have a former Fox News guy running DOD, you can expect he'll want a say in AFN. But so far, that hasn't come up. He has bigger issues to deal with right now. AFN is more government funded media, just like VOA. Conservatives say they don't want government media, but that encompasses a lot of things. They may be more interested in keeping the government media they control.
 
I'm surprised John Lippman, the Acting Director didn't get the job. Read some great stuff about his time as the KCBS Los Angeles News Director. He reportedly had Michael Tuck, the head News Anchor by the throat during an altercation. That is hands on management~
 
Echoes of Radio Berlin International, Radio Sofia and similar Soviet Bloc shortwavers. When I was a teenage SWL, the newscast on Radio Sofia more often than not would lead off with a similarly rosy economic update, or a report on a visit by an official from some other Communist nation to Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov.
Yep. It seemed like Radio Habana Cuba always started off with "The U.S Imperialists are criminally oppressing the people of ____________-. They also ran The Voice of Vietnam, with scripts teletyped in from Hanoi.
 
Mind you, he's still acting director. The president doesn't appoint the head of VOA. But the writing is on the wall.
Well I read the President "generally" doesn't appoint the Director, but he just did with Kari Lake it seems? Lippman is/was known for his cost cutting ability, decimated Radio Marti and the KCBS stories are wild. I called Lippman @ the L.A. Times one late night in 1991 about KBLA going Korean and firing the entire Business Radio staff.. It was published 8 hours later
 
Last edited:
Well I read the President "generally" doesn't appoint the Director, but he just did with Kari Lake it seems?

Here's how he said it, from the article linked in the OP:

In a statement, Trump said Lake would be ultimately be appointed by and work closely with the head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media for his incoming administration, “who I will announce soon.”

BTW the position doesn't need senate confirmation. Which is good, because she'd get some hard questions about the circumstances under which she left Fox10 in Phoenix. All we really know is she said some strange things on the air, and then never appeared again.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.


Back
Top Bottom