Housecleaning at the Voice of America

Tom Tradup over at Townhall.com has an article of particular interest to me entitled Housecleaning at the Voice of America.

I have been interested in radio since I was a kid, and our Boy Scout troop visited a neighbor who was a Ham. A "Ham," as you may know, is the affectionate name for an Amateur Radio operator. I remember looking at all the QSL (conversation acknowledgement) cards on his wall commemorating various QSOs (two way conversations over radio) he had had, and the wonderful equipment and gadgets surrounded the operating position in his "radio shack." In time, I became an Amateur Radio operator, and I have visited the VOA transmitter site in Washington, NC. So, it disappoints me to discover that one of the iconic institutions from my youth has been brought to such a sad state as this:

The present day VOA—once the bastion of America’s Cold War efforts to battle Communism through broadcast arms Radio Free Europe and, more recently, Radio Marti—bears little resemblance to the pro-USA agency taxpayers came to expect. For example, few taxpayers I know would approve of articles VOA distributed this Fall in Russian, Urkranian and other languages calling Donald J. Trump “a dog,” “a pig,” and other derogatory terms. And lavish waste and mismanagement continues to be of concern by those charged with Congressional oversight.

I can only hope that VOA again becomes the strong Voice of America, and not the Voice of American Losers.