Turning in my Badge

Decades of analog folios retrieved from a silenced newsroom, but not the digital chronicles of years of research and reporting

WASHINGTON — Four and half months after the bosses severed my VOA email and phone communication as they immediately placed me on “paid administrative leave” — an action seen as political appeasement in concert with the demotion of my successor as White House bureau chief — I finally was able to turn in my credentials (two weeks after I retired).

Apologies to those who, since Feb. 28, emailed or texted my work account or phone. I wasn’t able to retrieve those messages. There were about 5,000 email addresses and phone numbers on my VOA iPhone and Outlook contact lists and 20 years of digital correspondence — all of it categorized, now lost.

During my off-boarding, USAGM’s director of security escorted me to the newsroom where I boxed Rolodexes and the alphabetized business card holders. I was nothing if not organized. The last 16 years of most of my radio, television and digital reporting, for now, remain online and searchable. (That is plenty of material from across five U.S. presidential administrations for those claiming our reporting contained a political bias to peruse.)

The Cohen Federal Building is mostly devoid of staff, eviscerated by Kari Lake’s “reform,” and a DOGE purge.

Lake, the failed Arizona politician and election denier, whose leadership of the U.S. Agency for Global Media skirts a Congressional confirmation process, no longer speaks of reform, rather telling lawmakers and sympathetic right-wing program hosts that the Voice of America is unsalvageable rot and she alleges — without a shred of evidence — that VOA’s newsrooms have been riddled with spies and our Chinese colleagues were directed by Beijing’s embassy in Washington. That begs the obvious question: Why did China’s Communist government cheer VOA’s demise if it was supposedly calling the shots?

The political change is also evident on the VOA lobby TV sets tuned to WTTG Fox5 DC and the far-right One American News Network, the latter infamous for peddling conspiracy theories.

I departed the Cohen Building for a final time content I upheld the oath to defend the Constitution of the United States, abided by Voice of America’s legally-mandated charter of balance and impartiality and blew the whistle on the attempted destruction of the firewall barring political interference in VOA’s journalism.

The Government Accountability Project and AFSA - the American Foreign Service Association - on whose board I served for eight years — both deserve commendation (and your donations) for devoting considerable resources to the fight to try to #SaveVOA.

Unfortunately, over the years, we were undermined from within by some USAGM political appointees and VOA senior civil servants who acquiesced or deliberately acted to subvert our journalists.

To those colleagues in the central newsroom, among VOA’s four dozen language services and the brave few at USAGM who risked their careers to uphold our principles, I salute you.

History, I am confident, will judge our actions as aligned with America’s principles and moral conscience.