Ted Lipien is Voice of America’s fiercest defender and toughest critic. Born in Poland during the Cold War, he fled the communist country at the age of 16, determined to become a journalist so that others wouldn’t have to live under lies. While a college student, he became a translator for VOA’s Polish Service. Spending nearly 40 years with the U.S.-funded news broadcasting service, he rose to Polish Service chief during the Solidarity trade union’s struggle for workers’ rights, interviewed future President George H.W. Bush and future Pope John Paul II, and brought live satellite TV newscasts to Russia and Ukraine. Lipien retired as acting VOA associate director in 2006.
Since then, he has turned to The Hill, The Washington Times, and the Washington Examiner to expose waste and corruption within VOA’s bureaucracy—and liberal bias in VOA English-language news programs. That included instructions to call Hamas members who invaded Israel and murdered 1,200 civilians on October 7, 2023, militants or fighters—but not terrorists. Still, he thinks President Trump has made a grave mistake by shutting down VOA, firing its more than 1,300 journalists and staff, and leaving 360 million listeners around the world in the dark. Lipien says the decision amounts to collective punishment, and a gift to authoritarian regimes and America’s enemies.
VOA director Michael Abramowitz is fighting in court, as are a group of VOA journalists, to reverse Trump’s executive order that effectively gutted the agency overseeing media outlets including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. A judge last week issued a preliminary injunction halting part of the order, but an appeal is likely.
Lipien is working behind the scenes to do what he can to save VOA, such as co-founding a nonpartisan committee, the Committee for U.S. Media Strategy, to help Congress and the White House reform the 83-year-old news service. Here, he discusses how VOA helped end the Cold War, how it got screwed up, and the true meaning of the free press.
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Author: Ethan Dodd
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