Behind the White House Curtain w/ Steven L. Herman

[00:00:00] So years ago, we used to register voters. I mean, people still do. But years ago, I used to register voters. I grew up with my friends and I used to register voters. And we would come up with various ways to try to motivate people.

[00:00:28] And how would we approach a phone call? How would we approach a doorknock? How would we approach visiting a school? We're trying to engage someone in democracy. We did a number of silly things. We did trick or vote, which was a Halloween canvas.

[00:00:41] Halloween is always a few days for election day. You might be too old to trick or treat. You're never too old to trick or vote. We made shirts that just said vote F star C K E R.

[00:00:51] You can spell it out yourself and it ended up making the news. We had any number of silly things. We had a vote bot. One time we were on the bus and we were talking about. How we should do our phone calls.

[00:01:05] And I thought it'd be funny if we said my name was Jeff and anybody could use their own name if we called people up and said, hi. This is Jefferson Smith from the United States of America. And it's very important that you get out the vote.

[00:01:20] And I just thought it'd be funny to say United States of America. Is anybody can say that? Well, now and today we're going to be talking to the United States of America. We're going to be talking to the actual voice of America.

[00:01:31] Today's subject is a free and independent press and shined in the first amendment. The Sedition Act 1798 made it a crime to criticize President John Adams. Eugene Debs ran as president of Canada 1920 for a federal prison cell sentenced under the Espionage Act 1917 for speaking out against military draft.

[00:01:55] Our guest today has found himself squarely a target of an effort politicizing or arguing against the risk of politicization of a free and independent press were joined by Steve Herman, chief national correspondent of Voice of America, an author of the new book behind the White House Curtin,

[00:02:16] a senior journalist story of covering the president and why it matters. Mr. Herman, thanks for joining us and thanks for being a democracy nerd. It is a pleasure to be here. All right. For people who aren't already aware, what got you into this mess?

[00:02:31] How did you become the chief national correspondent of the Voice of America? Well, I've had an association with VOA for a number of decades and I started out working in Asia for VOA as a contract reporter,

[00:02:47] went on to be a bureau chief in several different regions of Asia. And then after spending an entire generation away from the United States, I decided maybe it's time to come back home. So 2016, I came back home and was VOA's senior diplomatic correspondent for about eight months

[00:03:10] at the end of the Obama administration, basically flying around the world with Secretary of State John Kerry. And then after the election, me and another veteran foreign correspondent, Peter Heinlein, were sent by our bosses over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The joke was we both had a lot of experience

[00:03:38] covering autocrats and fragile democracies. So we I spent the entire four years covering the White House and eight months of the Biden administration as well. And subsequent to that, I did a couple other things before going back out in the field

[00:03:58] and now with this sort of fancy title as chief national correspondent. How many people work for the Voice of America? How big a shop is it? More than a thousand and depends how you count them to. We've got most everybody who's a full time employee

[00:04:13] is either a civil servant or a contractor. There are a few foreign service officers who are not under the State Department, I must emphasize, but under our parent agency, which is the US Agency for Global Media. And then we have freelance reporters, stringers, as they're called

[00:04:32] all around the world. So on any given day, there's, I would say a couple thousand people in one form or another putting together the content for our 48 language services. And who's the audience for Voice of America? Well, according to the law, everybody who's outside the United States,

[00:04:54] who's not a US citizen. Now, obviously, we're not really targeting Canada or England, as you can imagine. A lot of it is focused on countries or regions or languages where there's not a developed media infrastructure or places where there's not a free press.

[00:05:16] So much of that is in Africa, as well as parts of Asia, China, North Korea, Burma, being very specific examples of we're intensively focused. And of course, Eastern Europe, we have Russian, Ukrainian. We do joint ventures with Radio Free Europe on television

[00:05:39] called Current Time 24-7 of video feed for television channels and satellite TV, things like that. It's we started out on shortwave radio and there's still a little bit of that to places like North Korea. But almost all of it these days is video, online, some radio,

[00:06:00] multimedia, we're depending on the country. You'll you'll find us on whatever is the particular social media platform that happens to be popular popular there. Right. But let me dig into that a little bit. So let's take Africa first, just because you said it first.

[00:06:16] So for Africa, do you have radio towers in Africa? Do you least time on radio towers? Are there are there television towers that you least time on or that you own? How do you actually mechanically broadcast in Africa? Yeah, it's a great question, Jeff.

[00:06:30] It's by any means feasible, really. So Africa, obviously we have for some language services, daily TV news programs, those will be being via satellite will put them on affiliate stations in those countries. Some countries will not permit foreign broadcasting material on their air.

[00:06:53] In that case, it's better to rely on satellite TV or in super restrictive countries. We can get it in by shortwave radio. And then in some countries in Africa, we have our full time FM stations in the capitals of the large cities.

[00:07:11] And there's some high powered AM radio as well. So it's unique for every of the language services and a lot of streaming now online. People have access in a lot of places to broadband now, and there's all sorts of things you can do online,

[00:07:31] whether it's getting to somebody's laptop computer or their cell phone. As I think about access, they break it into two buckets. There might be other buckets, but just how my brain is doing it at this moment. One is kind of the technology, right?

[00:07:44] And there might be a place like a certain place in Africa, for instance, we're just getting I spent a little time in Liberia and did not have the same telecommunications infrastructure that we might be used to in the United States, for instance.

[00:07:56] In another country, I think of China and I think of Russia. It might not be a challenge primarily of technological access. So they're not being enough radio towers, not being a broadcast tower, not being enough their Wi-Fi connections or whatever,

[00:08:09] but might be more about regulatory or diplomatic access. How does that first of all feel free to disrupt how I'm thinking about it? But if I'm on to something, how do you then navigate? How is it different? How do you navigate in China and Russia?

[00:08:24] Yes, it's can get quite complicated. And so China is a perfect example of a country where we do not have and cannot have television affiliates or radio affiliates. We can beam some stuff in via shortwave radio. How does that work? How does that how does that work?

[00:08:44] Like, well, you have a transmitter in a in a nearby country and I'm a ham radio guy, so I could talk about this all day. But you bounce a signal off the ionosphere on certain high frequencies

[00:08:55] and depending on the time of day and the propagation, the time of the year, you can effectively put a strong signal into your target country. Now, there's a lower percentage of people with shortwave radios these days. More people have, you know, cell phones and internet computers

[00:09:13] and satellite TV receivers. So places like China, we can use satellite TV. You beam the signal up to a satellite. People have the dish, you know, on their roof and they can get maybe a dozen different satellites. And they know that the voice of America's

[00:09:33] Mandarin language service will be free to air. It's not encrypted, scrambled or anything like that. You point the dish, hook it up to your TV and away you go. Even though it may be technically illegal to receive that content. Some countries are much more stricter than others.

[00:09:49] North Korea used to be if you got caught listening to VOA or Radio Free Asia. You could go off to the gulag. Maybe these days you just have to, you know, pay off a police officer if you get caught. So it changes all the time.

[00:10:03] Countries will kick us out. There's some situations in Africa now where certain governments have banned foreign broadcasting and they'll also try to cut off the Internet too. So you've heard, I think, of the great firewall of China. So we have a division of our parent agency,

[00:10:22] which has a technology fund that creates things like signal or VPNs so that people can access the material, even though the government's trying to cut them off and it becomes a bit of a cat and mouse game as you can imagine sometimes.

[00:10:37] Which is why I need a thousand people. You know, the thousand broadcasters, you know, the thousand radio hosts, you know, the thousand writers. You have a lot of people who presumably are managing the technology and also managing the diplomatic regulatory legal restrictions to be able to navigate them.

[00:10:52] And of course, those things get linked. Those people, to a great degree, are in our parent agency, which used to be called the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Before that it was the US Information Agency and now it's called USAGM, US Agency for Global Media.

[00:11:07] Headed up we have a CEO, Amanda Bennett, who used to be the director of The Voice of America. Ah, success is The Voice of America. If people are thinking why it matters, you could speak in terms of its mission or you could speak in terms

[00:11:26] of its track record and results. Some of those might be classified. Some of the reasons people might like The Voice of America events that might not want to claim credit for. But there might be some things that when people do get around together

[00:11:38] for the company picnic that you do like to celebrate. What are some of the things you like to celebrate? Why should people care about The Voice of America? Because we end up talking to our viewers and listeners

[00:11:50] over a course of many decades and they will tell you what it was like to be behind the iron curtain or be in a repressive African country or to have been in Tiananmen Square. We're celebrating the anniversary of that right now.

[00:12:07] And what a difference VOA made in their lives. I've met so many people, for example, we have something called VOA Learning English. It used to be called Special English. The announcers speak like this. And it's about a thousand word vocabulary.

[00:12:25] And I've met so many people who have told me they learned English by listening to those broadcasts on VOA. So it does continue to make a difference. It has made a difference. Some people credit the jazz program that was on VOA

[00:12:43] for many, many years as being responsible for bringing down the Berlin Wall as as anything that the United States government did. So I think the American people are the stakeholders in VOA. They're not the intended audience. And I would definitely say I think they're getting their money's worth.

[00:13:02] How many people listen? How many who watch? Do you have estimates and hundreds of millions? Yes. Yes. So weekly on a weekly basis, I think it's it's in my email signature. I've got to look it up. I think it's three hundred and thirty million weekly estimated audience total.

[00:13:20] So that's a bunch on the what? Excuse me, that's a bunch on the how. Let's ask someone about the what and related to the how. How do you maintain what you broadcast and how do you maintain editorial independence? To what degree could it be characterized as United States

[00:13:35] anti-enemy propaganda? And to what degree is going to be characterized in another way? Now, anybody who works for VOA these days would bristle if you said it was propaganda. I like to say, Jeff, that we are the probably the only news

[00:13:50] organization in the world that is mandated by law to be objective, to be balanced. It's in our charter. This was passed by Congress in the Gerald Ford administration. And I can tell you everybody I know at VOA takes this very, very seriously. We write a story.

[00:14:14] It goes through a set of editors. And then if it involves anything of a political nature, it goes through a third editor called a balance editor. OK, we're really bending over backwards to be fair in our content.

[00:14:29] And our mission is to tell America's story to the rest of the world. And there have been instances in certain administrations over the decades that have thought, well, really, the voice of America should be the voice of a particular administration.

[00:14:49] And when that has happened, we have my colleagues and my predecessors have fought back against that. And we have been very fortunate to have had bipartisan congressional support. And when push comes to shove, judicial support as well.

[00:15:09] It's it's it's not it's not just a bunch of words, that mission that we have in that charter. It is something we take very, very seriously. Anything more about how is anything more about how you maintain editorial independence? Well, we have a big compendium of

[00:15:33] regulations and rules in the sense of standards and practices that if something is brought to our attention from the outside or internally, somebody has a question that something may be going out. That's not objective. We have standards and practices editors that would review it.

[00:15:51] But before that materials even going to get on the air be posted on the website, it has gone through at least a couple of rounds of editors. And then after the for the reporter, after it's been edited, they'll send the script back to us

[00:16:06] and we voice it or if it's a web copy, we'll take a look at it and say, OK, I'm OK with that change or whatever. You know, I can tell you, Jeff, I've been involved with VOA for more than 20 years in one capacity or another.

[00:16:21] And I have never had anybody say to me, we have to run this story or we can't run this story. We've got to spin it a certain way or no, that's that's definitely out of bounds. I worked for the Associated Press previously.

[00:16:35] OK, I find the standards very, very similar to what they are at a good wire service. How do you compare or how might the viewer or listener compare the voice of America to another service out there in the world? So you just use Associated Press.

[00:16:52] There's similar journalistic standards. I also mean things in other countries, right? How it would be similar, different to RT. I would RT does not have, for instance, a commitment to to not opining, does not have a commitment to not being propaganda.

[00:17:06] How might it be similar, different to the BBC? Of course, BBC is a domestic service. I get it, but very the core of the target includes London. Well, yes, we're radio for Europe. You mentioned similar similarities and differences from other services people might be aware of.

[00:17:22] Right, I would say the standards for broadcast and online are very similar to what you would see and hear on BBC. BBC, as you mentioned, is it has a domestic infrastructure to it. They do a lot more broad based programming, all sorts of feature shows

[00:17:40] and things like that. We don't we don't do any mystery dramas and things like that. But the editorial standards, I think, are very similar on broadcasters out of Russia or China, Iran, those sort of countries are, we know, trafficking in misinformation, disinformation.

[00:18:02] And also sometimes it's not guilt by commission. It's guilt by omission. There are certain stories that you are never going to hear CGTN do or, you know, the Beijing radio like the Tiananmen anniversary. It's not going to be mentioned this June on their airwaves

[00:18:25] or, you know, put out by, you know, Shinhua, the news agency or any other organ in China because it is taboo. You will hear about that on the voice of America in Chinese. You'll hear about it on Radio Free Asia in Chinese and Cantonese, Mandarin and Cantonese.

[00:18:44] So and Tibetan is a language that we also broadcast in. And let's dig in to transitions to the subject matter of your book. But let's dig into how the voice of America got into the news, not just for being the news, but for challenges,

[00:19:02] arguable attacks on its editorial independence, on its personnel, et cetera. So I'll say things that I think I know and you correct me and add things that I miss. Established in the 1940s, presumably in the wake of World War Two,

[00:19:19] probably with the Cold War in mind a little bit. Started during the early days of World War Two. I always give a quiz when I speak to audiences. I say, what was the first language? Do you think that VOA broadcast in? German? Yes. What was the second one?

[00:19:35] Japanese? Yes. There you go. You're two for two. So yeah, we started early days, World War Two to counter essentially what was coming out of Berlin in Tokyo, which was, you know, they were winning every battle in the war. Right. And we said in German, you know,

[00:19:52] we're going to tell you the news whether it's good or bad. And that was a really novel concept at the time for international broadcasting. So yeah, that was the start of it. And then, of course, we went into the Cold War. And so 80 years later, give or take,

[00:20:11] Donald Trump is elected to the White House and installs Michael Pack, a conservative documentary filmmaker to serve as the head of, I think you already named it, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, your parent organization. I think that was the phrase you've used that Sebastian Gorka,

[00:20:29] former White House aide, was considered for a leadership role at VOA, At Voice of America. How did the actual and potential leadership changes impact VOA in terms of content, in terms of industrial independence, et cetera? Well, we were left alone for a long time

[00:20:46] because it did not appear to be a priority of the Trump administration to put its leadership into USAGM and VOA. So I think it was well into three years in the administration before the new leadership was confirmed by Congress and came into the building.

[00:21:07] And they, as is outlined in public news articles and court cases and whistleblower filings, tempted to breach the firewall, essentially, this firewall that we take very, very seriously. And this is the firewall between the administration, between the U.S. between sort of U.S. policymaking government

[00:21:32] and the editorial decisions of the Voice of America. Even our parent agency cannot make editorial decisions for the Voice of America. OK, and this has been upheld by judges and it's an issue of continuing scrutiny. But the bottom line is we are not a propaganda agency.

[00:22:00] And in my case, you know, I don't want to be the news. I want to report the news. Yeah, I was specifically targeted. I think just because I was sort of high profile within VOA, I was the White House bureau chief after all,

[00:22:20] although I don't think there was anything that they really found in any of my reporting, although I was accused of having anti-Trump bias or something like that. And I think what they were looking for when they came in because Michael Pack had promised

[00:22:38] to drain the swamp at VOA and they wanted a head on a pike, so to speak. And so my head was pretty convenient to. Let's get into that. So Michael Pack, this is the. This is the person put installed by the administration that person put in charge

[00:23:02] by the administration of the parent organization. As I understand, you were targeted in investigation by by Pack walk us through. Well, I have to be careful about certain things. There are the extent you can say. But they compiled a dossier on me

[00:23:23] and I think it was 30 something pages long. And some of it was pretty ridiculous. They had comments that people had posted on my Facebook page. And those comments, actually, some of them were from my brother and my sister that were on opposite sides of the political spectrum.

[00:23:43] So they're fighting on my Facebook page about domestic politics. And I'm not sure how that, you know, I'm not even sure they were aware of who the people were that were commenting on my Facebook page. But I may not be a brother's keeper,

[00:23:56] but you're almost certainly not your brother and your sister's keeper. Yes. So they thought that the comments that I was posting on social media, Facebook or Twitter because of the way that they were headlined or whatever were were politically biased, which I would.

[00:24:19] You know, and I think it was upheld by the courts and also people on Capitol Hill who thought this was ridiculous as well on both sides of the aisle. It's not just me, but my colleagues. And there was a lot of things going on with the top executives

[00:24:34] at USAGM who were removed by the new people that came in. So it just wasn't me that was targeted. I happened to be one of the few journalists that was targeted and all of this. And I considered it a distraction.

[00:24:52] I did end up becoming a whistleblower for protection of myself and to stand up to make sure that this wasn't going to to also affect more of my colleagues. And that was really it in a nutshell. It did not change the way that I reported

[00:25:13] or the way that we edit our stories in the newsroom at all. But we were very fortunate that we had a tremendous amount of backup on Capitol Hill and in the federal judiciary as well. And along with some very brave editors and managers

[00:25:35] in the V.O.A. newsroom, if I aptly remember the teaching is of the big Lebowski, believe the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint, PAC was found to have violated the First Amendment rights of you and your colleagues. That accurate?

[00:25:52] There it's, you know, as you know, any sort of ruling by a judge is has a lot of nuance in it. But they very much upheld based on the interference issue that this this firewall should not be breached.

[00:26:11] And, you know, look, I don't have total First Amendment rights as a V.O.A. journalist, just as somebody could be fired from the Washington Post for going off on some obviously, you know, very tinged politically biased tirade on social media and would be reprimanded or fired.

[00:26:33] So we have our own standards and practices internally. And if there's an issue that someone is alleging that a reporter's his content is biased in his stories or he's putting stuff on social media, there is an internal review process that that goes sort of from the bottom up.

[00:26:54] The head of the agency can't say, I don't like what that guy, you know, put on put on Twitter, get rid of them, take them off the White House beat. My colleague, Patsy Weedakuswara, had a run in with a secretary of state late in the administration.

[00:27:15] Mike Pompeo, who came to V.O.A. and gave a speech and did not take any questions, sort of an insult. You have a newsmaker coming into your own building and there's an audience of reporters and he walks out.

[00:27:27] So Patsy, my colleague at the time on the White House beat, sort of ran after him and fired some questions as she would do to the president every single day. And she was immediately within hours taken off the White House beat for essentially doing her job.

[00:27:43] So those were the sort of things we were running into in the latter days of the previous administration. What point did you decide you needed to write a book? Yeah, it's a great question. And I vowed I was not going to write a book

[00:28:00] like there were dozens of reporters sitting in the White House press briefing room during the last year of the Trump administration working on their books. And I said, no, I'm not going to add to the stack of books there.

[00:28:15] But Jeff, what occurred to me was when I was going out and speaking to college students or community organizations and I would talk about V.O.A. and everybody who always the questions were what's it like to fly on Air Force One?

[00:28:32] You know, what's it like to go into the Oval Office and how do you know, are you allowed to ask questions of the president and things like that? So I had never seen a book that went into the granular detail of the role that I played very frequently,

[00:28:49] which is called a pool reporter. P-O-O-L has nothing to do with swimming, although some of our offices. Billiards, it just has you in billiards. Yeah, a pool, that kind of pool. Yeah, it's a pool of reporters, a group of reporters

[00:29:03] that because there's limited space on Air Force One or in the Oval Office that represent all of the other media organizations, whether it's radio or television or the newspapers or the photographers. And they share that material with the other members of the pool and it's rotational.

[00:29:21] One, you know, for one month, the TV pool might be CNN, the next month Fox, NBC, etc. Radio Pool, BBC, AP Radio, CBS Radio, V.O.A., American Urban Radio Network, etc. So we take turns and that material, you're there, you're in the Oval Office.

[00:29:40] You're not just you're representing first and foremost when I'm in there all of the radio networks, right? And I have an opportunity to fire questions. I'm going to ask questions that are going to be, I think, relevant to all of the media that hadn't already been asked, perhaps.

[00:29:57] And, you know, at press conferences, though, when we're sitting in the seat raising our hands, we're in that seat representing our own organization. That's different. OK. But when I'm on Air Force One or in the Oval Office, I'm a pool reporter and of course,

[00:30:12] I can use my own material, but before I can do my report, I have to send out that audio, that raw audio. Yes, everybody can use it. Everybody else first, right? So you decide at one point that you're going to

[00:30:29] you're going to become the news a little bit. If once you put your name on the on a book, right, you become the news a little bit. What were you hoping? What was really essence of what you wanted people to come to grips with when you started writing

[00:30:44] or maybe when you reached an epiphanic moment while you are writing behind the White House curtain? Yeah, I thought in this era of, you know, confirmation bias, everybody just believing whatever, you know, what following the news sources that they want to follow

[00:31:02] because they're parroting what they want to believe, etc. The high level of mistrust in the news media. I wanted to show what it's like if you went in to fly this plane, right? Put you in that pilot seat or

[00:31:19] explain to use another euphemism how the sausage gets made. Right? That was the purpose of writing this book. The other thing I wanted to demonstrate was although we had some issues that were fairly unprecedented in recent administrations and I started doing research.

[00:31:38] OK, what was it like, you know, during the, you know, remember the Dan Rather and Richard Nixon confrontations? OK, and Nixon had his enemies list. There were a lot of reporters on that. And, you know, Lyndon Johnson had his issues with journalists.

[00:31:53] I went all the way back to George Washington's second term when we had members of the media calling Washington senile, a trader, incompetent. You know, this is nothing new, right? And and and Washington, of course, was totally fed up with this.

[00:32:13] Perhaps the reason he decided, OK, I'm just going to be a two term president and go back to, you know, the farm Mount Vernon. So in that regard, this this there's a symbiotic relationship between the press and the presidency.

[00:32:30] But there's also that tension and that tension, of course, is very important and necessary and healthy for our democracy. So I wanted to demonstrate that. And then part of the book is a part of a memoir about how I started out as a reporter and learned early on

[00:32:47] not to believe everything that public officials and people in the government are telling you, right? I started out as a reporter when I was 16, 17 years old. I had, you know, I did take some journalism classes in school, but it's much different going out and covering local politics

[00:33:04] or homicides than it is reporting on the, you know, high school, you know, tennis tournaments. So, you know, I got an early education and all this. And then I, you know, talk about some of the major stories I covered, you know, like the Fukushima meltdown in Japan,

[00:33:19] which had some issues with governments withholding information and those sort of things. And again, this is all really consequential, right? Nuclear meltdowns are consequential. Things being covered up in the West Wing of a White House are very consequential.

[00:33:36] And so hopefully people will will get a little bit of an insight out of this book into what it's like to be a White House reporter. And as I say, a White House reporter who's not necessarily, you know,

[00:33:50] a household name or is sitting in the front row of the press briefing room. Not not a celebrity reporter, but yeah. And when you're on, you're supposed to be on outside the United States, right? The hundreds of millions of people, but not in the US.

[00:34:03] Let me ask, can with a VPN or other route, can and do Americans listen to and watch the voice of America would seem now there is a growing desire for unvarnished news, right? For not feeling that you're picking betwixt Fox News and something else,

[00:34:19] but that you're trying to get truth as straight as you can get it. I could imagine the editorial standards, the voice of America being attractive to some people in America, but also there might be regulatory matters that suggest no, no, you're not supposed to compete.

[00:34:33] And A, we're not writing it for a domestic US audience. B, there's something called the Smith-Moon Act, which was passed after World War Two, because members of Congress thought if well, OK, if the government's going to be in the broadcasting business,

[00:34:48] we don't want it competing with commercial private stations. And we don't want the government, quote unquote, propagandizing to American citizens. So there is also that sort of firewall that is there as well. So yes, you can go to voanews.com and you can read the stories,

[00:35:08] see the video, the streaming, the radio programs, whatever. And I encourage people to do that because you're not the intended audience, but you are a stakeholder. So if people think that my content is or my colleagues' content

[00:35:24] is biased one way or the other, go read it, go listen to it, go watch it. But it's not it's not intended for you. Everything that I write or report for radio, television, the web is intended to be translated into all these different languages

[00:35:40] for an explaining what's happening to someone who's in you know, Nigeria or Pakistan. Right. And so there's going to be a different approach to the story than it is if if you're writing for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times or Seattle.

[00:35:58] How different in what ways would you say it's different? With that different audiences, it assumes less background knowledge. It uses less idiom. It's correct. What are the things that are different? Yes, all those things. And we're trying to be as contextual as possible.

[00:36:15] So for example, you may have heard we have, you know, a presidential race going on in the United States. Yeah, more. So a lot of the reporting that you'll see from the domestic press will be what's called the horse race, right?

[00:36:29] This, you know, this candidate's ahead two percent in the polls. And, you know, and what we will do is we'll try to explain what are the differences between these candidates? What are what are the issues involved here? And if we're going to talk about polls,

[00:36:47] we might talk about how the polls are taken, how polls can be wrong, how two percent might not mean anything because it's within the margin of error and a national poll in a race where we know that it's a handful

[00:37:01] of swing states that's going to decide the election. If somebody is ahead or behind two percent, you know, really might not mean anything this far in advance ahead of election day. So it's a lot of getting out there, talking to voters, talking to analysts,

[00:37:18] talking to just, you know, surrogates of the campaign and when possible talking to the candidates themselves. But but not just doing that sort of daily horse race reporting. Yeah. Adding context and background and not just daily horse race reporting, that sounds good stuff.

[00:37:36] I'm saying this is good advertisement. You're making a good plug for people to want to watch and listen to Voice of America. We at some point was it you at some point? The O.A.

[00:37:53] Is it fair for me to say that Trump singled out or at least targeted the O.A. And and at some point there was a claim that it was supporting Moscow's and Beijing's interests. Walk us through that. Yeah, so I actually, you know, I for those four years,

[00:38:10] I was either in the room with the president or I was listening from my booth in the basement of the West Wing to what the president was saying in real time. I probably heard almost every single word spoken in public by Donald Trump during those four years.

[00:38:33] And one day he's down at, I think it was that retirement community in Florida, the villages, I think it's called. And all of a sudden he makes a reference. I'm paraphrasing here that, you know, in the middle of the speech out of the blue.

[00:38:47] And by the way, the Voice of America is like the voice of the Soviet Union. And I'm like, what the heck is this all about? And there were also Dan Scavino online and in a daily newsletter, they started to attack via way because we had run some video

[00:39:07] that had come from AP television actually about something out of Wuhan, China, where they were celebrating the end of 100 days of, I don't know, COVID free or something like that. And somehow that was parroting Chinese propaganda. This was all utterly ridiculous, I think, to any objective observer.

[00:39:27] But what it was about, it had nothing really to do, you know, as far as we could tell with our news content. It was about pressuring members of the Senate to bring Michael Pack up for confirmation because it had been held for so long.

[00:39:43] And you can go talk to people on Capitol Hill about why he wasn't being brought up for confirmation. And so it was really about putting focus on the VOA to get some changes at the VOA by getting this nominee of the president confirmed.

[00:40:01] And that, you know, that's I think any objective analysis of that situation would reveal that to be the case rather than some inherent political bias. And, you know, and it was, you know, obviously it's offensive if, you know, somebody, anybody in the administration,

[00:40:22] let alone the president of the United States is saying that a government funded broadcaster in the United States is is a voice of Moscow or a voice of Beijing. So yes, we took on bridge at that. We had a conversation recently with David Gilbert from Wired.

[00:40:40] And yes, I listened to that. It was an excellent show. Thank you. And talk with the difference between misinformation and disinformation and paraphrasing him misinformation coming from the desire to share information quickly before confirming accuracy. Disinformation is taking a kernel of truth

[00:40:57] and then altering that to serve an agenda. There's overlap, but they can be distinct concepts. And it seems to me that this desire to be first, the one piece of good news again, as I just tried to,

[00:41:10] I guess become the PR, a PR person for the Voice of America, that the that the not editorial independence statutes that have been passed regulatory standards, professional standards within the organization. It sounds like you probably don't have a necessity to be first.

[00:41:26] You do have a necessity to get it right. Is that fair? That is very fair. We are not trying to be first. We are trying to be accurate. So accuracy comes over speed, sometimes much to my frustration that I have something that nobody else has.

[00:41:43] And I want that story to be out on our on our website and out on our broadcasts as quickly as possible. Sometimes it gets out while it is still first and sometimes not. But the accuracy is much more important for in our reporting and editing process.

[00:42:01] And I've got some if I have something really, you know, that I'm just dying to get out. I can post some little excerpt of it on social media to say, you know, the president's going to appoint so and so tomorrow as, you know, the new whatever.

[00:42:18] So, you know, we have those avenues as well. But for the stories that go out on our air or on our website, it is more important to be accurate and objective than it is to be first. Now, there's some valid criticism that when I'm in the White House

[00:42:40] of the Oval Office and I'm a pool reporter and I'm putting stuff out to the pool in real time and maybe sending out something on social media that I'm, you know, quoting the president, right? And people will say, oh, you're just a stenographer.

[00:42:54] You're not putting this into context. Well, you know, we say journalism is the first draft of history. And, you know, you could argue that tweets back in the day when, you know, we had Twitter now X that, you know, tweets were the first draft of journalism.

[00:43:11] It is not a comprehensive story to say, you know, the president just, you know, suggested that, you know, the moon is made out of blue cheese or something. But we're not stenographers. We're in there and we're able to shout questions

[00:43:28] at the president and we're able to get to to prod him in real time and ask follow up questions. And, you know, one thing I say, you know, you can talk a lot about Donald Trump and his approach towards the media.

[00:43:40] But he may have been as far as time spent on the record talking to reporters. He may hold the record for any president in U.S. history. OK. And if you're, you know, a frontline White House reporter accesses golden, right?

[00:44:00] You may not like what he's saying, and we may disagree with it or push back on it. And he can choose whether he wants to answer follow up questions or not. You know, Lyndon Johnson would spend hours talking to reporters,

[00:44:11] especially on Air Force One, but it was off the record. OK. So it was very insightful, but you couldn't use it where with, you know, Donald Trump, it was all out there. And it was I would say more, more often than not,

[00:44:27] we were hearing it was very rare, actually, that something was totally off the record, like on Air Force One, you know, Trump would come back to the cabin and it was supposed to be off the record. And you'd have Sarah Huckabee Sanders or somebody standing by his side.

[00:44:40] And, you know, this is off the record. And then, you know, one of one of somebody would say, oh, Mr. President, that part you said about Iraq, can we put that on the record? And you'd see the press secretary just like, you know, turning red,

[00:44:56] eyes bulging and more often than not, Donald Trump would say, sure, that did not happen with Barack Obama. I can tell you that. So, you know, maybe he thought he was manipulating us to some degree. And that's, you know, presidents and the press secretaries, their job,

[00:45:13] they want to put spin on everything. But, you know, with with Trump, there was that give and take. You know, you could push back. So it was not stenography reporting. And then any sort of outrageous comment that a president makes

[00:45:27] after he makes it, reporters will go back, write their story. There'll be, you know, opinion pieces that'll come out and people can say whatever. But we're we're on the we're on the front lines. We're we're tactical. And that strategic part of it in journalism may come,

[00:45:43] you know, minutes, hours, days later. You know, and you got to be careful of hot takes is a phrase that's that's thrown out there a lot. So sometimes it's best just to step back, breathe, look at the material, talk to some other people.

[00:45:57] And when we have time, we definitely do that. And, you know, I I'm trying to do that more with this presidential campaign. I'm not, you know, putting out a story in five minutes. Maybe I want to get it out in an hour or two.

[00:46:09] Like, you know, the other day when we had the day after the Trump's conviction in New York City and Trump held that 33 minute monologue, didn't take any questions. And then President Biden came out and he was giving a speech about the Middle East.

[00:46:26] But the first minute of his remarks were about Donald Trump's conviction. So within a couple hours, I had a story out on that. OK, not just, you know, putting out the quotes for Betem, but hopefully trying to put it in a little bit of context.

[00:46:42] How is a pool reporter evaluated? What does it take to do a good job and who decides? The OK, this is sort of interesting. To get into the White House as a reporter, that's decided by the White House press shop, the press shop,

[00:46:59] meaning the West Wing under the press secretary. And I say it's probably easier to get a press pass for the White House. A day pass, an appointment passes is called. Then it is to get a press pass, say, from the Eugene, Oregon fire department. OK, it's pretty easy.

[00:47:19] And there are a lot of people that get White House press passes that, you know, have a particular agenda, Gad flies, that's been a long tradition. And I do talk about a little, a little bit about that in the book as well.

[00:47:33] But the pool reporters, the pooling agencies to enter the pool if you want, you know, CBS wants to be in the pool or BBC or VOA, Los Angeles Times, whatever, that's a vote by the board of the White House Correspondence Association. They do the dinner.

[00:47:55] They yes, they do the dinner, but they do a lot more than OK. They're not just about the dinner. Fund scholarship fundraising thing. The seats to get in to sit to stand in the room for a press briefing,

[00:48:06] the daily press briefing at the White House to get into that room. That's the White House deciding. But if you want to have a seat, an assigned seat, that's the White House Correspondence Association assigns those seats. OK, so there's that distinction.

[00:48:23] And you ask what is a good pool reporter? A good pool reporter is getting the job done, making sure if they're the TV pool, that the video is clear and the sound is good, the radio reporter. I want to have broadcast quality sound.

[00:48:38] A print reporter is going to want to have a very comprehensive transcript and to get it out as quickly as possible to all the news organizations so they can use it. That's the job of the pool.

[00:48:49] And then we're asking the questions, as I said, on behalf of all the other news organizations because press conferences are relatively rare. You know, for a president to stand in front of a large group of reporters, you know, 100 or so.

[00:49:04] And then, you know, what we have in recent administrations and democratic administrations, Republican administrations is sort of the same. They'll they'll have a bilateral press conference, right? Alongside the prime minister of Italy or something like that. And each side, meaning the Italians and the Americans will get,

[00:49:22] you know, they'll call on two people and that's it. So it's very frustrating. So these opportunities on the tarmacs, you know, when you're getting on Air Force One or coming off the plane or, you know, with the president

[00:49:35] at an event on the road or in the Oval Office for what was called a pool spray because like going back to the Obama administration, you know, as a grip and grin, you're in there to get the pictures. You might shout a couple of questions that Barack Obama.

[00:49:49] He was very disciplined, as I said, you know, he, you know, this is a photo opportunity as far as he's concerned, but he could. Any president can use that as an opportunity to say something.

[00:49:58] And so they have their prepared remarks, but they may or may not answer questions. And so to ask those questions and record them and get it out to the entire world as quickly as possible, that's the job of the pool reporters.

[00:50:13] You mentioned social media and you mentioned that in order to be granted a seat and become one, it's a somewhat rigorous process. And you have made it, you have cleared the hurdles to be a part of that process.

[00:50:28] But as I understand it, you may be banned from Twitter by free speech absolutist Elon Musk. Is that accurate? That is correct. Why? Well, you know, when I explain it as I am going to right now, it's going to sound really ridiculous.

[00:50:48] There was a young man who had a Twitter account called Elon Jet. I remember that. Yes, he was tracked. Well, Elon Musk flew around. Exactly. So one day Elon Musk decided he didn't like on Twitter, his own platform, somebody saying where his jet was.

[00:51:14] Or where he was, you know, he was in the air where he's flying. How many minutes he flew? I don't know how much, you know, carbon he burned or whatever. So Elon banned Elon Jet. OK, a few reporters found out about this in Tweet It that Elon

[00:51:33] Jet had been banned from Twitter. They were quickly kicked off of Twitter, the reporters. Then I went on Twitter and I said there's a bunch of reporters who have been banned from Twitter for tweeting about Elon Jet getting banned. So boom, I got banned too.

[00:51:51] There were like nine of us, I think, you know, you know, sort of this one evening massacre. And until certain tweets were removed and Elon Musk's argument was these reporters by disseminating this information were putting out assassination coordinates quote unquote on himself. OK, on him.

[00:52:16] That was and which was utterly ridiculous saying where the jet is, you know, because by the time it got on Twitter, you know, Elon Musk probably left the airport anyway. They don't like somebody is going to, I guess, you know,

[00:52:29] the fact that he was in Austin or San Francisco or whatever. He didn't want people to know. I was a White House pool reporter flying on Air Force One for four years and on Air Force Two we in real time were authorized

[00:52:42] by the White House to say Air Force One has just landed in Tel Aviv. OK, no one ever accused us of tweeting assassination coordinates by saying where Air Force One had just landed. So it was utterly ridiculous. You I have almost no comment.

[00:53:05] I'll accept to say my wife is very disappointed with what's happened to Twitter. I have I'm less charged about it. I understand why she's charged about it. But back to the muscification of Twitter and back to David Gilbert from Wired, who pointed out that prior to Elon's purchase,

[00:53:23] Twitter was a reliable source of first hand breaking news for any event around the world you'd throw in the hashtag and a blue check confirmed reporter could provide news developing in real time. Now, as Gilbert pointed out, because the blue check is available for purchase

[00:53:41] and because now it's not validated, generally if you use Twitter for any developing news, you have to wade through the posts promoted to the top who might or might not have firsthand knowledge. The unverified blue checks sharing information that might not be as verified might not be verifiable.

[00:54:01] So from a journalist's perspective, does do you still find value from Twitter from X? And do you find just as much? Do you find a little bit less? Do you find heck even more? Significantly less because of the reasons that you just stated.

[00:54:18] There's there's so much a blue check disinformation, misinformation, you know, scrolling through all the ads. It's it's it's a real mess. But yes, you still have news breaking on Twitter because government agencies around the world are still using Twitter to put out that information first.

[00:54:46] So you I am still on Twitter. I don't really put any original content on Twitter. I'm not I was a, you know, for I don't know how many years, 15 years, almost a one man wire service. You know, I was putting so much stuff out on Twitter,

[00:55:03] you know, 18 to 20 hours a day, seven days a week. It was I'm, you know, maybe I'm happy I'm not doing that anymore. And so I, you know, I've spread it out over some other platforms to to a lesser degree. And I don't know.

[00:55:18] It's like, you know, Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall. I don't know that we're going to be able to put it back together again at any point. And even if it is, you know, tried, we try to reassemble it under future different ownership.

[00:55:33] I think some of that traction has been lost. But there's no single Twitter replacement out there. There are a number of alternatives. They all have their pluses and minuses, and I'm playing around with a number of them. And we'll see what happens.

[00:55:51] But probably this was a unique moment in communications history in the digital age, what we had with Twitter for so many years. I hadn't thought of it that way. I thought of something that existed that's been lost. And I thought of the potential emergence of alternatives.

[00:56:10] I hadn't thought of it the way you just put it. Well, maybe that was just an era. And there was a decade and a half where that was a neat thing that people had. Yeah, like Napster, right? Remember Napster? I remember Napster.

[00:56:21] So, you know, there are things that come out there and they have their run and there are innovations that occur. And now with, you know, we can use about how AI is going to change everything and whether that's going to make websites

[00:56:37] and, you know, social media feeds obsolete because you'll be able to wear some little device in your ear and you'll just be able to ask it questions all day long and it will feed you information that you've asked it to feed and it'll learn your likes and dislikes.

[00:56:53] I'm not a huge fan of algorithms, by the way. But that seems to be the way it's going because it works, I guess, for a substantial percentage of people that are on these platforms and most of these platforms, I think almost all of them

[00:57:10] with the exception of mastodon, part of the quote unquote Fediverse, are their companies. They're out to make money. So they're going to design it to keep you on there for the longest amount of time and feed you information. You know, TikTok is the perfect example of this, right?

[00:57:30] And that, you know, everybody wants to emulate that because that's how you get a, you know, multi-billion dollar company from, you know, setting up a social media platform. Yeah. And we talk about this topic somewhat frequently.

[00:57:46] It's hard for me to get off of it fully, but that if the objective ultimately, if the organizational objective is to be purchased by the next private equity firm that has a significant impact on the conduct throughout the organization, what it will prioritize,

[00:58:02] what it will do and how it will do it. And that. Not easy, but somewhat simple truth is at the root of what I wish were more of the conversation around media in this country. Back to you, though.

[00:58:18] Is there a kind of story and back to Voice of America? Is there a kind of story where you think that Voice of America adds the most value? Is there a category? Is there as there a topic?

[00:58:29] Is there a way that you think this is really where we're really adding value? Yes. I think a lot of that happens outside the United States. We have correspondence and freelance reporters on the ground in many, many countries. So they're on the front lines when there's, you know,

[00:58:50] civil war in Sudan or, you know, a terrible disaster that will happen in Bangladesh. We have people there. They can be the first to report this and hopefully the most accurate. And that is a very, very valuable role. And also they're very experienced reporters in being able

[00:59:11] to provide the nuance of something to put it into context that, you know, what I was to a great degree when I was based in these different countries, OK, I gained some knowledge by living in these countries.

[00:59:24] But then I would go and a flash to some other country. It's called parachute reporting, right? And so, yes, I can quickly craft a story and I would hire a freelancer. We would call them a fixer to help, you know, do the interpretation translation on the ground.

[00:59:43] Michael Cohen, I see. He'd guide me around. But and I could do that, you know, you know, masterfully put together quickly a story in English for an international audience. But I don't have I have to be a very quick study. I don't have the lifetime of experience

[01:00:00] that a local reporter would have covering these stories in real time. And it was ideal when I could work with somebody who was like that and we would combine our efforts. And depending on the situation, we might, you know,

[01:00:13] share the credit, the byline with them for putting together this that story. So that's one thing that, you know, VOA has is that that incredible reach, the approach to the stories. Now you're not going to see necessarily a commercial TV news channel these days,

[01:00:32] spend a lot of time covering some disaster in another country, unless it's a big plane crash or, you know, like the Fukushima disaster, something something of that scale. Then it will become the continuing. I hate the phrase breaking news, by the way. Try not to use it.

[01:00:50] But then it will take over because what they're saying is that people are staying glued to it. We're not chasing ratings. And, you know, it's sort of similar to the public radio approach and BBC. We want to inform our audiences

[01:01:09] to the best of our ability with the most accurate unbiased information as quickly as possible. The book has been released. How are you enjoying that process? Are you doing a book tour? How there's a response been? How do you feel being now not only a writer,

[01:01:23] not only a journalist, but also now an author on the on the sales beat? Yes. And, you know, it's it's tough for me as a journalist again, who wants to report the news, not make the news to have to turn into

[01:01:35] a salesman to some degree and and flog a book. But I'm very proud of the product where we are doing a bit of a book tour over the summer. I'm appearing on different podcasts like this one in radio programs and doing some in person appearances.

[01:01:54] We've we've gotten a tremendous amount of support. I'm very, very lucky to have a great publisher who took a risk on this. I kind of violated a lot of rules of what you're supposed to do to to get a book published.

[01:02:08] And I've learned a lot out of it. But Kent State University Press took a chance on this. They mainly focus on Ohio history and Civil War stuff and things like that. But they, you know, I do have some Ohio content.

[01:02:22] I'm from Ohio originally and a lot of presidents were from Ohio that are in the book. So that's in there too. So there is an Ohio hook on it. What were some of the rules you broke? I didn't get an agent.

[01:02:37] I had some of the couple of very high profile, very successful agents. Tell me unless I was writing an anti-Trump book or a pro-Trump book, they weren't interested in handling it. And I said, no, that's not what I'm doing.

[01:02:53] This book is different as Jim Acosta from CNN says in his blurb on the book. This is not just another Trump book. OK. I cold called publishers. OK. You know, I had some advice from a professional

[01:03:11] who wanted me to change the ending of the book, and I did not change it. So I was no longer die at the end. Yeah, we changed the book. We'll have two versions, you know, two different plot twists. You'll never know until the second edition is released,

[01:03:29] whether whether there's a twist ending America still exists. No, it doesn't. And it's not a it's not a thriller that ends on, you know, there's some cliffhanger or something like that. And, you know, the putting, you know, it's like, you know,

[01:03:44] I'm sure if you interview musicians that don't fit into any particular box, they could be considered a rock singer or a folk singer or a country singer. This book, it's nonfiction. It has history in it. It's about the media. It is a bit of a memoir.

[01:04:02] But it's not just one particular thing throughout the whole book. And at the end of the book, I get into some musings about, you know, what's going to happen in the in the years ahead with journalism. So hopefully a little bit of something for everyone.

[01:04:17] And I've had very good feedback, but, you know, maybe your friends just and family just like to, you know, say nice things to you. But we briefly got on the in the Amazon journalism category. We briefly got and this was in pre-release.

[01:04:37] June 4th was the release date in the first event, June 5th. We got to number one new release, number one hardback and number three overall in the journalism slash reference category. So hey, I was pretty proud of that. And let me flog for a moment.

[01:05:00] It's a good read. The chapter of you on the ground and Fukushima prefecture as a sort of breathless energy reminds one of high stakes drama like an espionage movie. Kyle wanted me to ask anything about that that prepared you for

[01:05:16] being a White House correspondent in either of the most recent administrations? Well, maybe subconsciously, I was very fortunate in that I had a background in covering nuclear because of starting out my career in Las Vegas,

[01:05:35] which had the Nevada test site where nuclear weapons are tested out in the desert. And sometimes things went wrong and I experienced that very early in my career. So I had I had some background about, you know, nuclear radiation

[01:05:52] and, you know, understood, you know, what to be fearful of and what not to worry about so much. So that came in handy. Also, the fact that I was getting information in Fukushima that was being put out by the local governments, but wasn't being broadcast nationally in Japan.

[01:06:11] So I didn't realize I was one of the few people in English, maybe the only one putting out on social media in real time, the radiation readings for the different towns. OK. And of course, it was a complicated tragedy

[01:06:24] because you also had a tsunami that had come in and that's what destroyed the nuclear plant. But it also washed out to see thousands of people, right? It was an enormous human tragedy. And we were getting aftershocks and new tsunami warnings and, you know,

[01:06:40] and, you know, things were happening at the nuclear plant. So it was very, very stressful. And I think once, you know, being being a White House reporter on Air Force One and, you know, dealing with equipment failures and deadlines and all that is very stressful, too.

[01:06:57] But I think any time you have those experiences, it helps build, you know, thicker skin and you have a mental memory. And the worst thing, of course, in any job that's high pressure is you don't want to lose your wits. You don't want to panic.

[01:07:15] You want to have a clear head. You want to be calm. And there were many, many experiences in my career like that. Going back to the early days of my career in Las Vegas. Dealing with hostile people who would point guns at you or,

[01:07:31] you know, asking questions of mobsters who were on trial and getting death threats and, you know, things like that. So, you know, it does make a difference if you've got decades of experience sometimes. Now, maybe some people are just cool, calm and collected

[01:07:46] right off the bat when they start out. You know, I imagine surgeons, you know, you can't have even at the beginning, you better not be doing surgery with shaky hands, right? So you but you're supposed to get proper training years of medical school.

[01:08:01] There is no license for journalism. There are journalism schools you can go to. But the real proof of whether you're going to be able to hack it is when you go out and do it. Well, thanks for being here and doing this.

[01:08:18] We've been talking today with Steve Herman, Stephen L. Herman, to be more precise, the chief national correspondent for the Voice of America and the author of his new book, Behind the White House Curtain. Thanks for joining us behind this curtain and thank you for being a democracy nerd.

[01:08:34] Jeff, I'm always a democracy nerd. Democracy nerds recorded in sunny Portland, Oregon, produced by Kyle Curtis. Thanks also to technical producer Sig Seliger, logo designed by Cat Buckley at KbucklyGraphics.com. I am Jefferson Smith. Thank you so much for listening. You can rate and review.

[01:08:53] Hope you will and follow Democracy Nerd on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Past episodes of the show, Democracy Nerd can be found online at democracynerd.us. Go America. Thank you. Thank you, democracy.