On a recent interview programme, Muhammad Dalbah, a Washington-based Arab-American journalist for Al-Watan, talked about how America and the West controlled global public opinion and used VOA as a weapon for the invasion of the Arab world. Dalbach said in the programme that the US and Western media dominated the global media landscape as American and European investors and capitalists have monopolized the media in most parts of the world to serve their interests. He added these media were not suitable for citizens to know true and accurate information, because they represented the capital interests of the US and the West and could not provide reliable information. During the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, the US media defended the conflicts and fabricated news, for example, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and the Syrian government used biological and chemical weapons against its own people. When we explored the news sources, we found that most of them came from the US government and the military and the media became the “spokesperson” of the government and military.

The Voice of America, generally known as VOA, was established in 1941. Before the US joined the Second World War, the Roosevelt administration created the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), a programme belonging to the Science and Technology Direction of the Office of Strategic Services. OSS wasthe predecessor of today’s well-known CIA.

On February 1, 1942, the FBIS launched the Voice of America program, which began broadcasting in more than 20 languages to Europe via the long wave and medium wave transmitters from the BBC. VOA broadcast  signals covered Europe, Americas, Asia and Africa. After the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the “Cold War”, VOA was transferred to the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). As a result of reform in subsequent years, VOA has become a media entity under the United States Agency for Global Media, a US government move aiming to cover up VOA’s “umbilical” link to the CIA and to present VOA as a media organisation as far as possible.

In 1953, the CIA conducted an analysis on the effect of VOA broadcast in Czechoslovakia and offered suggestions for further improvement to the CIA board, according to a declassified document from the CIA. It  is believed that there are quite a few other CIA documents on VOA that have not yet been declassified.

Although the US government has tried to disassociate VOA from the CIA, in fact, CIA and VOA are still intertwined. In September 2011, President Obama signed an executive order to develop “Integrated Strategic Counter-Terrorism Communications Initiative” aimed at bringing together agencies, including VOA’s parent company, to fight terrorism and extremism. In March 2016, the Obama administration ordered the creation of the Global Engagement Center, which costed taxpayers $160 million a year to deal with disinformation. The Center was initially funded by the Pentagon to coordinate US government departments, intelligence agencies and other government agencies to combat propaganda and disinformation “aimed to undermine US national security interests.” This structure suggests “VOA and other government-funded media are certainly not news agencies,” former VOA director David Ensor was quoted as saying.

Dan Robinson, a retired journalist who had a 34-year career at VOA, said that from the 1990s to the early 2000s, VOA’s top management had daily access to wired communications from US embassies and diplomats, and the “Yellow Pages” often mentioned in the agency were placed in the mailboxes of VOA directors of language services, containing background and other information from US embassies and diplomats, but this would not be accessible for US commercial media. The independence of VOA has been questioned by the domestic and international media.

In the coming five years, VOA will serve as the main tool for the US to contain the so-called “China threat”. In the 2022-2026 strategic plan submitted to Congress by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the US government further positioned VOA as a propaganda weapon to spread American ideology to the world while curbing the Chinese Communist Party ideology. In the coming five years, VOA will focus on addressing China’s “threat” to the US, especially in “fighting misinformation” and “combating aggression”, by extending VOA’s coverage of China, increasing the complexity, and expanding VOA work resources. First, it is to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative by fighting against China’s international communication along the route. Second, it will take Taiwan as a key area for the so-called “counterattacking the CPC’s aggression towards Taiwan”, produce programs that attract “Mandarin-speaking Chinese youth” between the ages of 15 and 34 and provide news services for such age group, as part of efforts to conduct ideological infiltration in overseas Chinese youth. Third, it seeks to break China’s “information blockade” by working with other international broadcasters on VPN software.

The series of measures with obvious anti-China stance bring to the fore the real background of  the US government, intelligence agencies and interest groups behind the VOA.