BBG Watch Commentary
Voice of America (VOA) correspondents who are at odds with top executives over news handling and management practices pointed out that Chinese state international broadcasters, China Radio International and CCTV, were among many world media outlets who reported that Tokyo will host the 2020 Olympics while the VOA English website was still showing an outdated story.
Al Jazeera, BBC, and Russia Today English websites all had breaking news on the Tokyo 2020 Olympics prominently featured on their websites for well over an hour before VOA updated its news story.
In recent days, the VOA English website altogether ignored or was sometimes days late in reporting on such news stories as State Department’s response to President Putin calling Secretary Kerry a liar, letter from U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson to an Egyptian newspaper protesting against false anti-American reporting, and Pope Francis’s opposition to a military strike on Syria.
Even though the agency in charge of VOA, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), proclaims that its mission is to support freedom and democracy, the VOA English website failed to report on President Obama’s meeting Friday in St. Petersburg with Russian human rights activists.
VOA reporters have been complaining for years about the VOA website, news handling policies and low employee morale, but top executives at VOA and the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) have ignored these concerns and launched attack on critics.
Two top managers at VOA, Director David Ensor and Executive Editor Steve Redisch, are former CNN staffers. VOA insiders describe their tenure at VOA as a managerial disaster that produced the lowest employee morale in the federal government as measured by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS).
VOA reporters have been known to call top VOA managers at home to get their news reports posted in a timely manner by the web team but often fail to succeed. Voice of America journalists have become desperate in the face of indifference and hostility from the senior management, which also includes top executives at the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB).
For more on this story and to see complaints from more than a dozen senior Voice of America foreign correspondents and domestic reporters, READ:
Voice of America executives and correspondents at odds over news reporting and management issues
- Al Jazeera reported almost immediately that Tokyo was chosen to host the 2020 Olympics.
- Voice of America was still showing an old report on the 2020 Olympics.
- BBC also reported almost immediately that Tokyo was chosen to host the 2020 Olympics. More than an hour later, Voice of America was still showing an outdated news story on its homepage.
- Voice of America homepage, Sat., 5PM, shows no news story on Pope Francis and Syria. It has an outdated story on the 2020 Olympics Most of these VOA stories had between zero and 10 Facebook Likes while similar stories on Al Jazeera, BBC, and Russia Today had hundreds and thousands Likes.
