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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You're not hearing any programming. And most, I think, people in Iran watch VOA. It comes to them via satellite television. A lot of people in Tehran have satellite dishes up to watch it. So there's just a video loop running. There's no programming. It's just a promo.
Explaining what the Voice of America is, which is kind of ironic because we're voiceless at the moment.
Oh, they're astounded. I can tell you, I've been a foreign correspondent, Sean, in a number of countries. And when state media, all of a sudden, that the programming would stop and maybe music would come on, that was indicative that there was a coup being carried out, right? It was something really dire.
And so a lot of people who are in these countries that don't have a free press or are autocratic are wondering – What is really going on in the United States? There's been no broadcast explaining to them why VOA is suddenly off the air. And the American people are not our audience, but they are stakeholders. Your taxpayers pay for this.
And a lot of people will tell you in the realm of public diplomacy, this is probably the biggest bang for our buck in terms of the hard edge of soft power.
They did not shut it down, but we're seeing actually some of the language that I've seen in recent days coming out of the administration echoed what we had seen during that time, which was accusations that there were – You know, subversives in the voice of America. In other words, that there were somehow there were some foreign spies.
And so what they did is they canceled all the people on the J-1 visas and sent some of them back home. And that appears to be happening again. Some of these people will be going back possibly to end up in prison or worse.
Well, I think anytime you're getting a new politically appointed leader, you're anxious at least. But there was some hope based on public statements that she had made that she didn't want to destroy. Right. the voice of America. She wanted to reform it.
And we've seen this with past people who've come into the VOA with all sorts of politically motivated intentions, and they come in and see what the place is really about, and they go, aha, this isn't what I thought it was. Of course, everyone at VOA would acknowledge there's room for improvement, right?
There definitely can be reform and sometimes it's frustrating to us when you're using government money how slow it can be. But when I write a story, Sean, it goes through a couple of editors and then if there's anything remotely political in it, it would go through a balance editor, a third editor. I've even had stories that go through four editors.
And again, the stuff that gets out there is going to be shorn, hopefully, of being inaccurate, incomplete, or biased in any way.
You raise an excellent point. It makes it much more of a challenge to make this relevant to the American people because it's an external entity. And these sort of... exercises, activities will have geopolitical ramifications. The war in World War II was as much a battle for hearts and minds
keeping morale up or trying to destroy morale of the troops, of the people who were having their family members die in combat. That's a really, really important part. Now, we're not engaging in psychological operations or overt propaganda, but we believe that by basically telling the truth, reporting accurately, that that is something really, really powerful. And
And when we're talking about a kind of asymmetrical warfare, which is what's going on between the West and Russia and China, talking about human rights, talking about what's happening in Ukraine, talking about the intimidation that China is carrying out against its neighbors. These are really, really powerful messages.
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