Christopher Hill

TRANSCRIPT:

First of all, the Voice of America has been around for a long time. When people listen to it, they feel that they’re listening to serious news — news that has been well researched and really a place where you can understand the world. So, I think it’s been of great use, and I’ve known about it, you know, all my career, especially in Poland, but also elsewhere.

VOA is the official source of news and information from the United States. There are other official sources not coming from the U.S. The Chinese have a number of platforms; the Russians do; other countries do. And it seems to me to be very self-defeating if we choose not to.

I was in Poland during martial law in the early 1980s. I was in Albania in the early 1990s, and it was very, very clear that people cared about what VOA had to say. And they certainly cared about it in places like Albania, where [former VOA Eurasia Division Director] Elez Biberaj was really the voice of America. And I think it made a real impact. But I think it’s also made an impact in other parts of the Balkans.

We live in a pretty big world with 190-something countries. And I think it’s important to get our message to the world. And I think American citizens should see this as a strength, the fact that we have this platform that we’re able to use to get our message out. And so I think anything you can do to get your message out to all over the world and in a timely way is something very important to our citizens who have to think about a lot of issues coming to the U.S. and affecting the U.S.

Published February 9, 2026

Hill currently serves as the executive director of the Edward R. Murrow Center for Global Diplomacy at Tufts University. As a U.S. diplomat for more than three decades, he served as U.S. ambassador to Serbia, Iraq, South Korea, Poland and North Macedonia. He also served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.