Steve Herman
speaker
34 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 12 Feb
Steve Herman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Gallup has measured POTUS job approval since the Truman era and says the decision is based on its research goals and priorities.
Historically, John F. Kennedy holds the highest average approval rating at 71%, followed by Dwight D. Eisenhower and George H.W.
Bush.
But the timing is raising eyebrows.
Some observers have speculated Gallup may want to avoid political blowback.
Steve Herman, executive director at the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation, noted that President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to sue media and polling firms that portray him negatively.
And conservative commentator Bill Kristol pointed to Gallup's contracts with federal agencies.
I'm apparently still the chief national correspondent of the Voice of America and a former VOA White House bureau chief and author. of the nonfiction book Behind the White House Curtain, which goes into some of the stuff that we're going to talk about today, dealing with the challenges VOA faced in the first Trump administration.
That's the perception that there was a high-ranking U.S. government official who took umbrage with a particular post that I had quoted from a news release from an NGO which was upset with what was happening to the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID. And – That official reacted saying that because I'm with VOA, I should basically just be a mouthpiece of the US government.
And that what I had posted on social media, this innocuous quote from an NGO president was, I don't remember the exact language, but basically saying that I was probably a traitor, which if you look up the punishment for treason, it's relatively dire in the United States.
Yes, we broadcast radio, television, streaming, online, social media apps, all that sort of stuff in about 50 languages. Our original language was German, then Japanese. We do not broadcast in German or Japanese anymore. The languages change over time based on what is the geopolitical situation of the world.
And we are not only telling America's story to the world, but we're telling people what's happening in their regions of the world in their own languages. We are very integrated in the Washington, D.C., inside the Beltway press. And that's been the case for many decades. Of course, there are people that scoff and say, oh, you know, VOA, because it's funded by the U.S.
government, must just be propaganda. Well, I urge people to watch the newscast. There's still stuff up on the web at VOANews.com. I don't know how much longer it may be up there, but draw your own conclusion about what VOA is and is not.
Well, yes and no, I would say. We went on the air in the early days of World War II. And, of course, you could actually be in the United States, turn on your radio, and you could hear the broadcast from Berlin about how the Germans were winning every victory and they were the greatest people on the planet and they were going to liberate the world.
VOA came on the air saying, whether the news is good or bad, we're going to essentially tell you everything. what it is like it is, which was a radical concept at the time because most state-funded broadcasters around the world, possibly with the exception of BBC, were propaganda outlets. That's what they were designed to do. And so VOA was very unique and unusual in that regard.
It's like, we're going to build credibility by getting people to believe that what we're putting out on the airwaves has some credibility, that it's true. Now, VOA was under the Office of War Information, which was under wartime censorship conditions. So the VOA reporters weren't just free to put on the air anything that they wanted.
And then after World War II, there was what I call a struggle for the soul of Voice of America, which has continued, I think, since then, about whether there was any need for it, whether it should continue. And with the Iron Curtain descending across Eastern Europe,
There were lawmakers on Capitol Hill said, hey, you know, we may have some qualms about the government being in the broadcasting business, but as long as it's not targeting the United States, as long as it's not a commercial operation, we'll fund this. And there are historians out there who would say Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe,
contributed to the bringing down of the Berlin Wall, not only for the news and the information, giving hope to people, but also for putting on programs such as jazz music, which apparently was considered quite subversive if you were listening in communist countries at the time. And of course, it was assailed by those in Moscow, in Beijing, as American propaganda. And it still is.
In fact, the people who are celebrating the demise this week of VOA are those in the halls of power, in the autocratic regimes, in Moscow, in Beijing, in Naypyidaw, in Tehran.
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