TRANSCRIPT:
The Voice of America provided not only the voice of America to the world, it provided a voice that people could believe in. It provided an objective reality, a fact-checked basis for news that listeners around the world knew they could rely on to get the truth.
That narrative is important to the United States and to the American people, I believe, because the values that we stand for are universal values. They’re values that people we believe everywhere embrace. And for the United States to be seen as promoting those values, standing for what it believes in by telling the truth is, I think, critically important in a world that’s becoming more complex, more dangerous and more fragmented.
I think that this is just one very troubling aspect of a greater global pressure to try and silence the free press, to silence the voices of independent journalists, who after all are professionals and who have built their careers around going after the truth and telling the truth to the best of their ability. The danger of silencing VOA is it creates a vacuum and creates space for other voices to make themselves heard.
And in this era of the internet where everybody can go to the news source of their choice, where alternative facts are propagated, promulgated by people with very undemocratic, anti- agendas, non-freedom-loving agendas, I think it’s extremely dangerous to silence the Voice of America. It’s basically, simply throwing away the soft power and the credibility the United States had created for itself over almost 80 years. And it’s creating a space for non-truth-telling voices to try and dominate public discourse and global discourse.
Published
Dell served as U.S. ambassador to Angola, Zimbabwe and Kosovo during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. He spent much of his diplomatic career focused on conflict and governance issues in Africa and the Balkans.