TRANSCRIPT:
Latin Americans and societies in the Global South that used to listen to the Voice of America, and unfortunately, now, have nothing to go up against Russian and Chinese state propaganda that gets put out on the airwaves — they’re not stupid.
I think sometimes we Americans believe that they’re gullible. They have the ability to judge if there’s a disconnect between what the Chinese state television is saying and how the Chinese people are living. They understand that when Russian state television talks about human rights or national sovereignty, and they look at the Ukraine or they look at how the Russians act, they get that there’s a disconnect.
One of the great things about the Voice of America and the fact that it was genuine journalism and not propaganda was that societies could judge what was said, especially in the editorial content and the way we lived here in the United States, and they saw that there was a confluence, a congruence, if you will, of what was said and what was done, as we say in Spanish: “Entre el dicho y el hecho.”
The function of VOA was to give those societies the warts-and-all view of American foreign policy. I found that it was, although frustrating on occasions, an enormously valuable tool. Because going back to what we spoke about earlier, the soft power, people knew that I couldn’t instruct a VOA journalist what to say. The VOA journalist was not only considered a peer, a colleague by those other journalists, and not a state plant, but they were also considered generally some of the most well-informed and respected journalists in the crowd.
I have described what happened to Voice of America in March 2025 as unilateral disarmament. Quite frankly, that is exactly what it was. We had one of the most potent and powerful tools of diplomacy, and we literally threw it away. What’s been lost is a respected voice. The United States government in this administration doesn’t want to tell the truth; that it prefers propaganda.
Published
Feeley is the executive director of the Center for Media Integrity of the Americas. He served as the U.S. ambassador to Panama from 2015–2018 during the Obama and Trump administrations. During a 28-year career at the State Department, he also served as deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires in Mexico City and as principal deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs.