Steven Herman is an educator, author and executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation at the University of Mississippi.
He is also a longtime journalist, having worked for Voice of America including as senior White House correspondent and subsequently White House bureau chief and chief national correspondent. He left the organization earlier this year when the Trump Administration shut it down.
Herman talked with Community Voice about the loss of the news operation that targeted an audience in other countries, often where the only other source of information was government propaganda. He also discusses the current status of journalism in the U.S.
Herman will speak at the World Affairs Council of Central Illinois event Nov. 12 at the Illini Country Club in Springfield. The program is free and open to all. A dinner will be served and registration is required for that part of the evening. Find out more details here.
Transcribed by AI with human review.
Sean Crawford:
This is Community Voices. I'm Sean Crawford. Today we have a conversation with Steve Herman, a longtime journalist who spent about 20 years with Voice of America, including as White House Bureau Chief and Chief National Correspondent. Voice of America was in the spotlight this year as the Trump administration effectively shut it down. Herman will be speaking in Springfield Wednesday, November 12, part of the World Affairs Council of Central Illinois program. It's held at the Illini Country Club. Details about that event can be found at nprillinois.org. We talked to Steve Herman about his career and journalism.
Steve, let me just start by having you explain a little bit about Voice of America. What is it or what, I guess maybe a better term, what was it?
Steve Herman:
Yeah, Sean, it's a great question because the state of the Voice of America, which was on the air uninterrupted for 83 years until the middle of March this year, is really in limbo at best. I would say it's in a deep coma, if not dead, because of the actions the current administration has taken against this U.S. government-funded broadcaster. The Voice of America, when it went off the air in mid-March, was broadcasting in 49 languages to several 100 million people. people on television, radio, online. There was also distribution via social media apps. And if you've not heard of the Voice of America inside the United States, That's not really surprising. The Voice of America was and always was intended to be an external broadcasting service. What that meant is we told the world what was going on in the United States, but the broadcasts were not targeted at nor intended for the American public. It was a part of America's public diplomacy.
Sean Crawford:
A lot of the broadcasting that was done, a lot of the news that was generated and produced and then sent out, it was part of America's larger foreign policy. Wouldn't that be a way to say it?
Steve Herman:
Oh, absolutely. But it was unique in the sense that it was not a propaganda service from the day that the Voice of America went on the air in 1942 in German. That was the first language. The announcer said, whether the news is good or bad, we're going to tell you the truth, which was a bit of a novelty at the time for international broadcasters. You could be in Illinois, turn on your radio in the late 1930s, and hear broadcasts from Nazi Germany, coming into your living room. And it was propaganda. They were telling you how great the German socialist system was, and when the war started, how they were winning every battle. And VOA was unique in the sense that we would be a projection of American values including freedom of the press and objectivity in our reporting. And that was mandated by law in latter decades during the Ford administration. Congress passed laws which ensured the autonomy of the Voice of America, even though it was government funded, that it would reflect American thought in institution, which meant if there was a particular issue we were reporting about, say abortion or flag burning, it wasn't the projection of whatever the administration stance was on that particular issue at that particular time. We were objective. We would go out just as you would and interview people on both sides of the story and also explain to people who were in Zimbabwe or Burma or North Korea the background, the context of what this issue was about.
Sean Crawford:
From the World War II era all the way till today, different presidents, of course, different administrations, some more progressive, some more right-leaning. Voice of America has continued and continued to thrive during that period. What has happened more recently?
Steve Herman:
In the middle of March, a combination of Kari Lake, who proclaimed that she was now in charge of the parent agency of the Voice of America, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, even though she was not put into that role by Congress, as is mandated. She, along with the forces of DOGE, which for a time was headed by billionaire Elon Musk, shut it down. And the president literally said, shut it down, alleging that the Voice of America was woke and liberal and all that sort of stuff with absolutely no evidence. obviously, because they wanted to turn the Voice of America into a propaganda instrument, which it is not allowed to be. And the journalists at Voice of America, such as myself, I was there for about 20 years. We could not do that, even if we were ordered to by the president or the secretary of state to twist or spin our journalism, because of these laws, a statutory firewall, which mandated that there would be free and fair coverage. And it's very unfortunate, obviously, what has happened. Hundreds of millions of people have lost access to free information in places where there's really no alternative, like in North Korea. VOA was a primary source, if not the source, of outside and factual objective information for these people.
Sean Crawford:
So now that VOA is not producing the way it did, what is happening as far as in these other countries? Are they getting information from other places? Has somebody stepped into that void?
Steve Herman:
Yeah, Sean, in some cases, we know that as far as the radio frequencies and the satellite transponders and our affiliate relationships with television and radio stations around the world, that the Chinese and Russians are trying to fill that void. But in most cases, there's just no way taking North Korea, for example, because the South Koreans have also cut off their external broadcasts in North Korea. All they have now is the state propaganda. And in a totalitarian country, you can imagine what that is like. So we've shot ourselves in the foot because the Voice of America over the decades was extremely valuable for giving people a positive image about the United States. I'd like to say that the Berlin Wall did not come down because NATO tanks rolled through it, but because jazz music on the Voice of America wafted over the Berlin Wall.
Sean Crawford:
I hosted a panel discussion just recently here on our campus. It was titled The First Amendment Under Stress. Is the First Amendment under stress?
Steve Herman:
I don't think there's any doubt about it because of the overt and otherwise not so subtle intimations made by people like the President of the United States, the Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission. And I think we can say what has happened to the Voice of America and the cutting of funding to the other U.S. government-backed broadcasters such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia. They effectively have been shut down because their funding has been cut off, although Congress mandated that money be spent. This is a kind of canary in the coal mine. You combine that with the killing of the funds for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, which of course benefited NPR and PBS. These are a low-hanging fruit for the administration. They have direct or indirect control over part or all of the budgets for these particular broadcasters. And that has a chilling effect. It sends a warning to others, and we have seen that happening with the big owners of commercial networks by putting in different staff to run news operations or temporarily pulling particular talk show hosts off the air or currying favor with the administration because they want to have their mergers approved, those sorts of things. This all leads definitely, Sean, to the First Amendment being under threat.
Sean Crawford:
We're talking with Steve Herman, an educator, journalist, and author. He also spent a long time with Voice of America and was their White House bureau chief and chief national correspondent. He's going to be speaking in Springfield. When I think of Voice of America or the CPB, we mentioned that, maybe these are done for good. There could be a change of heart at some point. There could be some funding that's put in place, but CPB is one thing, Voice of America, completely different one. It seems as though the longer this is not producing what it has in the past, the more you risk losing that audience overseas.
Steve Herman:
Oh, Sean, I think those audiences are gone. You know, they're not tuning back in every day on the radio or on TV, looking to see, oh, is the Voice of America back today, because it's been off the air now for about 8 months. They quickly changed their habits. We do know, for example, that people were very concerned about what happened because there was no explanation. Some of our viewers and listeners in places like West Africa, we know we're trying to get a hold of some of our reporters wondering what had happened because the TV had gone to static or the radio was playing music loops with no programming. Some of them actually thought perhaps there had been a coup in the United States.
Sean Crawford:
You're also the author of a book called Behind the White House Curtain, A Senior Journalist's Story of Covering the Presidents and Why It Matters. So I wanted to talk about that for a moment.
Steve Herman:
What I wanted to do with this book, I realized that there had been a lot of books written by White House correspondents who gave you some insight, information on big stories that probably they should have revealed as reporters, not held it to write a book. But I saw that there were very few books who took you through in granular detail about what it's like to cover the White House. When I would go out and make public appearances like the one I'm going to be doing in Springfield, whatever I talked about, people would always come up and ask me, "What was it like to ask the president questions every day. What is he really like?" In recent years, they would say, "Is Trump crazy or is Biden senile?" Those sort of questions. "What is it like to write on Air Force One? What do you actually do?" As a Voice of America reporter at the White House, I was part of what's called the press pool system. This rotational group of reporters that actually goes into the Oval Office or travels with the president on Air Force One on behalf of the rest of the media, because you can't fit 150 reporters on Air Force One or you can't get that many people into the Oval Office. We take turns and then relay that information to all the other reporters.
But also what I wanted to do was to put it in historical context. You know, we're very fortunate in the United States, Sean, where we get to ask our leaders or those of us who are covering the leader of the country to ask them questions directly or to travel with them on overseas trips. And by the way, the reporters, news organizations pay for those seats on Air Force One. They're not freebies. This is rare, even in some of the world's leading democracies. I don't think Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, since he's been in power, has done one interview with an Indian news organization. So it is a real luxury. I wanted to explain it, but it is a relatively modern evolution. For many, most of American history, when reporters were allowed to speak to the president, this all kind of started with Abe Lincoln answering questions. They weren't usually allowed to quote the president directly on the record, so to speak. It was off the record or on background. The type of thing that we take for granted now — live news conferences by the president. That is a relatively recent innovation.
Sean Crawford:
Having that access to the president, I know there will be people who say, well, then, how did we not see or hear more, at least, about what was happening with Joe Biden, that he may have been declining? The media, we didn't see a whole lot about that in daily reporting. Can you address that?
Steve Herman:
Yeah, I did talk a little bit about this in my book, which was obviously written very early on in the Biden administration. I was only dealing with Joe Biden on a day-to-day basis for the first year of his presidency. After that, I was only occasionally in the room with him. What I observed with Biden is he did seem to get tired at the end of the day, and then his language became a little bit disjointed, perhaps nothing too unusual for somebody his age. And I also sort of detected that Biden, who had a very serious stuttering problem when he was a child and had really overcome that, when he would get tired, I think he had a difficulty articulating very well.
The same situation with Donald Trump, because I was always asked, about Trump's mental faculties. We can observe and report and relay and inquire, but we are not medical professionals. it would be kind of derelict of duty for us to make, some sort of statement about the president's health. But we do know throughout American history, and I detail this in the book with especially some egregious cases with some of the presidents, that medical conditions of the presidents were covered up. That's one of the reasons that we want to see the president almost every day and talk to him. To help demonstrate what kind of condition that the president is in. You've seen it recently, if Donald Trump is not seen in public or doesn't talk to the press for a few days, all sorts of rumors start to swirl.
Sean Crawford:
Well, just about a minute left here, Steve, but I did want to ask you, as somebody who's seen these attacks on journalism firsthand, Your thoughts on the future of journalism. It seems as though a lot of younger folks may be questioning if this is an industry they want to go into, but what's your thoughts about it?
Steve Herman:
I think journalism's always been a tough job. It's always been a demanding job. It's not a popularity contest. If you are asking tough questions and you're reporting objectively, people are not going to like it, especially in this age where everything seems to be what we call confirmation bias. People just want to have their own preset views validated from their information sources, which is dangerous. We should be hearing from other voices, at least to know what other people are saying. and thinking.
I would encourage young people to pursue this very noble and important profession, especially at times where it is under assault. We need to be brave. We need to stand up to authority and call into question authority. Again, this is not a partisan position. When I would do a lot of my stories, people both on the left and the right would get upset with the same story because I wasn't adhering to what they thought should be their particular point of view. But good journalism is not opinion writing. It is factual, and hopefully it is thoughtful.
Sean Crawford:
Steve Herman, a longtime journalist, formerly with Voice of America. He'll be speaking in Springfield Wednesday, November 12 at the Illini Country Club, part of the World Affairs Council of Central Illinois program. It is free to attend. You'll need to register if you plan to go to the dinner that night. And you can find more details at nprillinois.org. This is Community Voices.
