(Dobbs) You'd Think We'd Want The World To Hear America's Voice

Wasn't the president's birthday parade "wasteful?" Aren't his taxpayer-paid golf outings to Florida "wasteful?"

The tension in the Middle East easily eclipses every other story right now, but that doesn’t mean other important things that affect our lives and our security aren’t happening. They are. This is one of them.

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“My position at the Voice of America was officially terminated.”

That’s how the Voice of America’s Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb began her Facebook post early last Saturday morning. “Kari Lake,” she went on, referring to the president’s senior advisor to the United States Agency for Global Media, which oversees the VOA, “fired 1,400 people— 639 of us today. This included some in the Persian service who were called back last week in response to the crisis in the Middle East.”

Just for good measure, Babb got word she was fired— which the administration euphemistically calls a "Reduction in Force Termination Notice”— the afternoon before while driving out of Washington. Maybe she was luckier than some. Another employee who was let go said that some of them left their offices for a break that day and when they came back, guards took their badges and they couldn’t get back in. As if they’re the ones who pose a danger to our nation.

You’d think that if Trump and his executioners wanted anything to reach people in war-torn nations, it would be America’s perspective from the Pentagon. You’d also think, despite their indiscriminate cutbacks, that if they wanted anyone to hear America’s take on the war between Israel and Iran as a counter to what they’re getting from their country’s own muzzled media, it would be the people of Iran. As one VOA journalist told The Washington Post, “The biggest purpose of the Persian division is to report America’s story for Iranian audiences where there’s censorship or filtering of the internet there.”

In a sense, the VOA has been America’s only presence in Iran.

That’s why, when Israel and Iran started exchanging fire, most of the VOA’s Persian-language service journalists, having been given their walking papers back in March, were summoned from their “administrative leave” to be America’s broadcast face during the crisis in the Middle East. “You are expected,” Lake’s representative said in an email, “to report to your duty station immediately.” That didn’t last a week.

Nobody is safe. Not those who have long given the Voice of America its face, and not those around the world— as many as 425 million listeners and viewers— who have long leaned on the Voice of America as their most reliable— sometimes their only reliable— source of information.

Lake indifferently ignored all of that last Friday in a news release. “For decades,” she declared, “American taxpayers have been forced to bankroll an agency that's been riddled with dysfunction, bias, and waste. That ends now.” What she recklessly fails to recognize is, for decades the world has been riddled with wars and terrorism and anarchy and poverty and it has been the VOA that offered a dose of sanity to people who, through no fault of their own, were born into societies that oppressed or neglected them. They have long depended on us.

I know firsthand how important the VOA is to people around the world. I couldn’t count the number of citizens in Third World nations and Communist regimes who used to tell me how much they appreciated the straight talk, which they considered comparatively uncolored, that they heard on the VOA. And for me and colleagues covering stories in remote and sometimes dangerous parts of the world, it was an indispensable source of news we couldn’t get anywhere else.

Sometimes, to be sure, the VOA had a undertone of “Rah Rah America,” but why not? That’s the prerogative of the country that pays for it. It’s also one of the endless enigmas about Trump and his administration. Although almost every day they do what they can to tear America apart, no one puts on a more public face, however obscured by pancake makeup, of “Rah Rah America.”

Now, they are silencing that voice. Now, where America’s voice truly used to reach the “man-on-the-street,” people will be left with a void. Or even worse, they’ll hear China or Russia rushing to fill it.

Carla Babb told more of the story in her post on Facebook. “The Office of Cuba Broadcasting survived the slaughter,” she revealed. “Ask yourself why. Perhaps it's because the head of the State Department, Marco Rubio, has championed its broadcasts. His Cuban American family knows the good that service has done in Cuba. So Mr. Rubio, how can you not see that Russians and Somalis and Indonesians and Venezuelans also benefit from the Voice of America broadcasts?”

There’s an answer to that one: he has lost his ability to see through the fraudulent fog of Donald J. Trump.

Then there’s the VOA’s Mandarin service, which suffered even bigger cuts than the Persian service. Again, from Babb: “So what happens if, God forbid, a major conflict breaks out with China in the Indo-Pacific? Does Lake think that four Mandarin reporters will be able to get the truth to the Chinese people in a crisis? That number certainly proved insufficient to broadcast to Iran last week. And now that Lake's fired everyone else, there won't be a reserve of reporters to call back, as she did when missiles from Israel and Iran started flying.”

After years of writing about Donald Trump, I’ve run out of synonyms for heartless, because he has taken heartlessness to a whole new level. For the same reason, I’ve run out of synonyms for hypocritical. Which brings us back to Kari Lake’s assertion that taxpayers “have been forced to bankroll an agency that's been riddled with dysfunction, bias, and waste.”

Did she, or anyone else in the president’s orbit, ever step in to say, “Mr. President, the military predicts that the cost of your birthday parade, with dozens of tanks and fighting vehicles and 6,600 troops and some 50 aircraft, will run between 25 and 45 million dollars? Isn’t that wasteful?”

Has anyone stepped up to tell him that every trip he takes on Air Force One— including his eleven trips to his golf clubs in Florida so far this year and six more to his golf club in New Jersey— wastes something in the neighborhood of two to three million dollars apiece? And that’s all just for Trump’s personal pleasure.

Only last year, Carla Babb was honored by the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation for her Distinguished Reporting on National Defense. Now, despite the quality and reach of her work, she’s another casualty of Trump’s hypocrisy and heartlessness. As are the hundreds of millions of followers, not to mention the 1,400 staffers, who are suffering the death knell of the VOA.

Babb ended her post with this hashtag: “#SaveVOA.” It’s a good thought, but maybe a lost cause if Trump and Lake and their heartless squad of executioners have anything to say about it.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net