TRANSCRIPT:
VOA is an important force multiplier for the United States to actually get the facts out into the world. It’s not propaganda. It’s countering the truth decay we see in this world, where there’s so much disinformation and misinformation.
And VOA’s brand, for decades, has been to actually cut through a lot of the propaganda from regimes that are adversarial to the United States. And it’s an essential tool to help millions of people around the world understand the facts of what’s going on in complicated situations and how they fit within the context of what’s going on in the world today.
When VOA was dismantled last year, or there was an attempt to dismantle it, it was a big mistake, as the Trump administration, I think, recognized, to dismantle the Persian Service, particularly during the June 12-day war. Tens of millions of Iranian people crave the sort of unbiased information, the information that’s not propaganda but the basic facts of what’s going on, because they’ve lived for decades in Iran under a regime that has actually spewed propaganda and tried to twist the facts, and twist and change the narratives that are out there. So, it’s an essential tool for years.
Trying to dismantle that last year was, in essence, unilateral disarmament by the United States. We were disarming ourselves of the tools that are essential in fighting disinformation and misinformation wars.
And now that we’re in the middle of another conflict in Iran, and America is directly involved, including U.S. troops in harm’s way, having some connectivity to ordinary Iranian people who actually want something different than what they have right now in this regime, and want to understand what’s basically going on, from a truth-based reporting outlet like VOA, I think is an essential tool to help Iranians forge a better future.
China, Russia, Iran, some Arab states — they all engage in their own form of propaganda, and we simply should not try to replicate that; we should go back to the tried-and-tested model, that is, VOA’s model, which is fact-based reporting.
Published
Katulis is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute specializing in U.S. foreign policy and Middle East affairs. He previously worked at the Center for American Progress, the National Security Council, the Department of State and the Department of Defense.