"Amid a Pandemic, Voice of America Spends Your Money to Promote Foreign Propaganda."

A statement from the White House. Excerpt:

This week, VOA called China’s Wuhan lockdown a successful “model” copied by much of the world—and then tweeted out video of the Communist government’s celebratory light show marking the quarantine’s alleged end.

Even worse, while much of the U.S. media takes its lead from China, VOA went one step further: It created graphics with Communist government statistics to compare China’s Coronavirus death toll to America’s. As intelligence experts point out, there is simply no way to verify the accuracy of China’s numbers.

The Coronavirus story is just one example of this pattern. Last year, VOA helped highlight the Twitter feed of Iran Foreign Minister Javad Zarif while he was issuing threats against the U.S. and sharing Russian anti-U.S. propaganda videos.

“VOA will represent America,” its guiding Charter reads. And for years after its founding during World War II, VOA served that mission by promoting freedom and democracy across the world for audiences who longed for both.

Here's the WaPo article about it: "White House attacks Voice of America, claiming it promoted Chinese propaganda."

Like several western news organizations, including The Washington Post, VOA has been imploring the Chinese government to allow its journalists to report from within China. The government hasn’t renewed the visas of VOA reporters, forcing its journalists to report from neighboring Taiwan and from Hong Kong.

Although funded by Congress, VOA is screened from political influence by an independent board, called the U.S. Agency for Global Media....

VOA is one of the largest newsgathering operations in the world, with some 1,500 employees. [Amanda Bennett, VOA’s director] is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer.... Bennett defended VOA’s independence and categorically denied any favoritism.

“We have never promoted propaganda for anyone,” she said. “We cover stories from all different sides. That’s part of the reason we are so trusted by people around the world.”

And here's the defense directly from Bennett, complete with many links to VOA articles supporting this assertion:

We are thoroughly covering China's dis-information and misinformation in English and Mandarin and at the same time reporting factually – as we always do in all 47 of our broadcast languages - on other events in China.

Unlike China, VOA has stuck to verifiable facts, including publishing numerous articles in Mandarin, English and other languages that outed China’s initial secrecy keeping information of the initial outbreak from the world. VOA has thoroughly debunked much of the information coming from the Chinese government and government-controlled media.

VOA News depends on factual unbiased reporting. For example, VOA sources the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths both inside individual nations and globally from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Data from the graphic cited in the White House press release was drawn from Johns Hopkins, which is used throughout the world.

Our coverage includes this week’s fact-check of the Chinese government’s false timeline of its COVID-19 response, its misleading count that excluded asymptomatic cases, China’s underestimate of the number of deaths in Wuhan and its use of Twitter to further its narrative internationally -- a platform the Chinese government has banned domestically. VOA has literally carried hundreds of stories on China’s response and narrative....