Voice of America hushed up mistakes by former CNN employees

BBG Watch Commentary

We have reported earlier that former CNN employees, who lack experience in international broadcasting, speak no foreign languages and have poor management skills, have been making embarrassing decisions and undermining employee morale at the media entities managed by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG).

We are not referring here to BBG Chairman Walter Isaacson, a talented writer, or Voice of America Director David Ensor, an accomplished reporter with extensive experience in covering international affairs. Both were formerly with CNN.

The problem started with other former CNN employees who are taking over key positions within the BBG bureaucracy. One former CNN employee, Steven Korn, hired as President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, replaced at least one highly experienced journalist with a manager without journalistic experience, tried to change titles of other experienced journalists, and made inappropriate references to “old white guys” and to hiring a “cute high school intern.”

Critics are also pointing to a VOA video report from North Korea, which a former CNN manager now working at VOA promoted in a press release, but which critics described as heavy on North Korean propaganda claims but skipping over horrendous human rights abuses by the regime.

Link to the video on YouTube.

The video report can be seen on the VOA website.
The incident described below happened last August at the Voice of America, which is also managed by the BBG, before David Ensor came on board as VOA director, but other former CNN employees who were involved are still occupying various managerial positions and hiring other former CNN employees who are unqualified to work as full time government officials or contractors at an agency specializing in highly-targeted broadcasting to foreign countries.

This description of events was sent to BBG Watch by several sources:

Last  August, a former CNN staffer hired as a Voice of America contract booker by a VOA manager who also came from CNN, set up an interview with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  The interview was to be part of the tenth anniversary coverage of 9/11.

One of the former CNN managers decided that a foreign language service VOA contract employee at the New York bureau would do the interview. Three shooters went with the reporter. Someone sent Bloomberg’s staff the questions in advance (even though sending questions in advance is in violation of VOA journalism rules) and didn’t tell the reporter.

As a reporter, she had prepared her own questions and was able to ask Bloomberg the first three. They were about the controversy over the “Ground Zero” mosque, NYPD relations with the Muslim community, and Islamophobia. After that, however, Bloomberg objected that these weren’t the questions that he had been told would be asked. He said that he found the situation extremely “unprofessional.” The reporter tried to get him to stay, apologizing that she hadn’t known about any other questions, but Bloomberg walked out.

The reporter asked a Bloomberg staff member to show her what the mayor was talking about, and was shown a paper with the questions sent to the mayor’s office by VOA. She described them later as softball questions. The first asked where Bloomberg was on 9/11. We don’t know who sent the questions but it does not appear that they came from any longtime VOA employees.

VOA reporters and editors point out that any other news organization would have used what was usable from the first three questions which Mayor Bloomberg had answered and also reported that he walked out. According to our sources, the incident was hushed up as an embarrassment to the CNN team at VOA.

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