Why VOA leaders should take allegations of bias seriously
VOA Amharic has a deep-rooted, systemic issue that goes beyond isolated allegations of biased coverage of Oromo stories. CEO Michael Pack has an opportunity to fix it.
Earlier this year, President Trump criticized the Voice of America (VOA) and cited a pattern of editorial bias at the federally funded outlet. VOA has struggled to cover the Trump administration. But it’s the broadcaster’s coverage of COVID-19 that heightened the mutual distrust.
The president and his allies have called VOA’s reporting of the pandemic “disgusting” and a “disgrace.” The White House went even further, accusing the broadcaster of spending taxpayers money “to promote foreign propaganda.” It noted examples where VOA allegedly highlighted anti-American propaganda by Russian and Iranian leaders.
That’s why when Michael Pack, Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees the VOA, was confirmed by the Senate on June 4, the President gloated over the news, noting, “this has been a big battle in Congress for 25 years.”
The reasons and motivations for the Trump administration’s qualms with the VOA are obvious. That is not the purpose of this article. However, one thing is certain: VOA has a deep-rooted, systemic issue that goes beyond isolated allegations of bias or favoritism. It starts with the network’s structure.
VOA is a collection of fiefdoms, each under the control of a division director or managing editor, usually with his or her own political agenda. Sadly, this agenda is not always aligned with the outlet’s charter or the lofty goals of telling “America’s story” to the world. And the managerial biases often creates “editorial warfare” within the fiefdoms where different language services routinely fight over story angles, narratives, perspectives, and facts.
VOA broadcasts in more than 40 languages. Owing to the language barrier of the senior leadership, the middle managers wield enormous influence over the services they control. Each division or language service is run like a separate entity, often not in sync with the direction of the mothership.
On any given day, two language services in the same division could be heard presenting contradictory and conflicting reports about the same news event.
According to insiders, unfair hiring practice is one of the many ways the middle management reinforces editorial control and influence, i.e., by hiring reporters who subscribe to the political views of the editors. Even those who disagree with the culture of biased reporting typically fall in line because the bosses’ proteges get preferential treatments or opportunities for advancement, according to current and former VOA reporters.
VOA’s new chief is likely to try to check, among other things, the network’s “liberal bias.” But, to truly steady the ship, he should heed the chorus of growing calls for accountability and take a hard look at the deeper structural issues that are eroding trust in America’s voice to the rest of the world. He should start with the Horn of Africa service.
VOA Horn Service
The Horn of Africa Service is part of the Africa division, which broadcasts to nearly all 55 African countries in 15 languages.
VOA broadcasts in 45 languages to more than 280 million audiences worldwide across digital, television, and radio platforms. It is also available via satellite, cable, FM, and MW, and is distributed to more than 2,500 affiliate stations.
The Horn division is made up of Afaan Oromo, Amharic, and Tigrinya language services, with a target audience in Ethiopia. Tigrinya programming is also intended for neighboring Eritrea. The Amharic language service went on the air in September 1982 while Ethiopia is still under the grip of the communist Derg. Afaan Oromo and Tigrinya were added on July 15, 1996, after years of resistance from the Amharic service and its supporters in the diaspora who argued that broadcasting in those languages “risked balkanizing Ethiopia.”
Biased and racist reporting
In the Horn of Africa, where, sadly, the broadcaster is one of only a few independent sources of news, the VOA Amharic’s editorial bias and censorship are legendary. This week, hundreds of Oromo Americans, who had had enough of the service’s biased reporting and ‘racism,’ took to the streets in protest in front of the VOA headquarters in Washington, DC.
“VOA Amharic, stop your biased reporting,” the protesters chanted. “VOA Amharic is not a voice for the people of Ethiopia, it is the voice of the Prosperity Party.”
Oromo Americans have been protesting across the U.S. and around the world following the shooting death in Ethiopia of prominent singer Haacaaluu Hundessa on June 29. The protesters are further angered by the decision of the ruling Prosperity Party (PP) to jail prominent Oromo opposition leaders.
The protesters at the VOA headquarters accused Tizita Belachew, the managing editor of the Horn Service, of being a PP member. “VOA Amharic, stop using taxpayers’ money to do biased reporting,” the protesters demanded. “VOA, stop being a PP mouthpiece. Be objective. Our stories matter. We deserve unbiased reporting.”
The demonstrators called on VOA Amharic to extricate itself from “racism” and to “stop inciting hate” against Oromo people. They urged VOA’s new leadership to ensure that the taxpayer-funded outlet is not used to advance the agenda of individual reporters or managers.
The mostly youthful protesters who came from at least 10 states also expressed concern that the managing editor controls and even censors the Afaan Oromo service. “Afaan Oromo radio must be free,” those assembled chanted, adding, “stop harassing Oromo journalists.”
The Afaan Oromo service itself is not free from criticism. Listeners have for years criticized the service for being a mouthpiece for Dawud Ibsa’s wing of the Oromo Liberation Front. Its reporters are experienced, but the service hasn’t kept up with the largely young Oromo audience. It’s also been censured for ignoring or being slow to cover events in some parts of Oromia.
A pattern of silencing Oromo voices
Over the past three decades, VOA had a stormy relationship with the Ethiopian government. Authorities often accused VOA reporters of being political operatives. The EPRDF regime, which ruled Ethiopia since 1991, has tried VOA journalists in absentia and even jammed the service.
But it wasn’t just the repressive regime in Addis Ababa that questioned VOA Amharic’s biased reporting. Among its listeners, charges of systemic political bias are as old as the service itself. Activists from Oromo, Tigrayan, Somali, Gumuz and other ethnic groups have routinely decried the misreporting of the Amharic service.
The Oromo protest in front of the VOA headquarters followed months of email campaigns that urged the network to correct course. (Accustomed to such routine accusations, VOA simply ignored their calls.)
Consider these examples. In November 2019, Ethiopia’s current Defense Minister Lemma Magarsa and a former key ally of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed gave a rare interview to the Afaan Oromo service. He expressed serious reservations over Abiy’s rush to dissolve the EPRDF coalition. VOA held the interview ostensibly because the editors did not like Lemma’s criticism of the Prime Minister. But they couldn’t kill the story because the news of the interview leaked on social media.
Tizita, the managing editor, told Kello Media at the time, VOA held the interview to seek “balance” from the government. Many saw her response as an oxymoron because Lemma was part of the same government. The public uproar was relentless. VOA reportedly received thousands of emails every minute for a couple of hours. The interview eventually aired with comments from the PP spokesperson. Lemma’s interview came days after VOA censored another exclusive interview by the Afaan Oromo service with prominent activist Jawar Mohammed. Tizita told Kello Media that Jawar’s interview will eventually air but it never did.
Many listeners had for years shrugged off VOA Amharic’s biased reporting of Oromo stories. But the incident over Lemma’s interview put the Amharic service under a renewed spotlight. The protest emails to VOA leadership and staff returned this month over the Amharic service’s biased coverage of the unrest in Ethiopia that followed the killing of Haacaaluu.
On July 6, Tsion Girma, Tizita’s mentee, aired a long ‘exposé’ about violence against ethnic minorities in Oromia state. The report was peculiar for several reasons. First, it was unprecedented for its length, at 24-minutes on an hour-long daily program. In recent memory, the Amharic service has not dedicated so much airtime to a single story so badly sourced. Second, the report featured interviews with three victims from the same family. Third, the story painted a misleading picture of a communal violence whereby only one ethnic group, the Amhara, was targeted for killing. To subtly demonstrate this, Tsion spoke mainly to victims who self-identified as Amharas.
In the interview, the zone’s administrator, Jemal Aliyu, made clear that Oromos were disproportionately affected in the attacks. He pushed back strongly, with evidence, against her insinuations that Amharas were selectively targeted. Furthermore, Tsion mentioned Oromia police commissioner Ararsa Mardasa only in passing but ignored the ethnic breakdown of the victims that he provided to reporters in order to illustrate the fact that the violence did not affect just one community.
Moreover, Tsion’s report glossed over reports of ethnic Oromos killed by non-Oromo mobs in Addis Ababa. Typically, that level of violence in which at least 8 civilians were killed in the capital would be a leading story for VOA Amharic. But clearly not when the victims are Oromo.
To be absolutely clear, the violence in Dhera and other parts of the Arsi zone was gruesome and reprehensible. But what happened was much more complex than the single-story presented by Tsion’s “bombshell.” Locals have said that they did not know the rioters. And that they were very well-organized, suggesting the presence of a hidden hand behind the attacks. More importantly, in town after town, security forces did little to contain the situation as civilians were attacked randomly and properties were ransacked and razed.
A tale of two protests
In the latest email complaints to Mr. Pack, listeners decried the existence of a systemic bias and the silencing of Oromo stories by VOA Amharic. Activists on social media noted that the service ignores Oromo stories and deliberately silences critics of Abiy’s government. For example, on July 12, Dereje Desta covered a candle vigil for “victims of ethnic violence” in Ethiopia that was organized by pro-government groups in Minnesota.
The issue here is not why the event received media coverage. But it’s the selective nature of the report and the validation of the vigil-goers cause that is problematic. For one, Dereje erroneously reported that the organizers waved the “Ethiopian flag” although in reality they carried the banned imperial flag, which he considers is Ethiopia’s flag. Secondly, VOA Amharic ignored the widespread protests by members of the Oromo Community of Minnesota, including two instances where hundreds of protesters shut down major highways. (Dereje is a former activist journalist with ESAT, a network renowned for spewing racist vitriol, as well as anti-Oromo and anti-Tigrayan bias. He was recently hired by the Amharic service where Tizita most likely had the final say.)
True to form, in her report about dueling protests in Washington, DC on July 17, Tsion downplayed the Grand Human Rights Rally by Oromo protesters in front of VOA headquarters portraying it as a rally by “a group of youngsters who said they came from different U.S. states.”
Tsion’s line of questioning while interviewing the organizers was also notable. “What’s your group’s position on the ethnic and religious based killing in Oromia?” Then she tried to coax the organizers to denounce the killings of ethnic and religious minorities in Oromia. When the interviewer noted that little is known about the true story of the killings beyond official claims, Tsion insisted that the government’s version of events have been corroborated by media reports (a reference to her July 6 report).
By contrast, VOA Amharic presented the pro-government protest on the same day, which was allegedly organized by the Ethiopian Embassy in DC, as a peaceful demonstration of Ethiopians “to support the actions of the Ethiopian government to restore law and order.”
Unlike Tsion’s repeated questions challenging the #OromoProtests organizer, the reporter who covered the pro-government rally simply provided a platform to the organizers to rehash official storylines unchallenged and attack on air those whose views they disagree with.
Institutionalized bias
Systemic bias is defined as “the inherent tendency of a process to support particular outcomes.” VOA Amharic leaders and reporters loathe ethnic federalism and often subtly blame Ethiopian Constitution for the political crisis in the country. This is consciously and unconsciously reinforced through institutionalized practices such as the choice of analysts, interviewees, and story angles. To understand the systemic nature of VOA Amharic’s bias, look no further than VOA’s station ID for the three languages.
It says: “Amharic programming is meant for more than 100 million people living in Ethiopia and Eritrea, as well as diaspora communities throughout the world. Afan Oromo is directed at an estimated 37 percent of Ethiopians living in the Oromia region of Ethiopia, while Tigrinya is heard throughout the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia and in Eritrea.”
There are at least three major errors and misrepresentations in this quote. First, it assumes that everyone in Ethiopia and Eritrea speaks Amharic. That is not true. Second, it deliberately undercounts the Oromo population and it doesn’t say how many people speak Tigrinya. The Oromo population was 37 percent when Ethiopia’s population was estimated at 70 million. The 100 million projection does not account for the population explosion since the last census in 2007. Third, nothing is said of the vast Oromo and Tigrinya speakers in the diaspora, as well as in other parts of Ethiopia.
VOA’s description implicitly suggests that Afaan Oromo speakers live only in Oromia. And that Tigrinya speakers live only in Tigray and Eritrea. By contrast, Amharic is spoken not just all over Ethiopia but also in the diaspora. The same could not be said of the other two languages? It does not take a rocket scientist to imagine how this observational error is used to justify budgetary decisions and program expansions. Is it a coincidence that Afaan Oromo and Tigrinya are on air only for 2½ hours per week whereas the Amharic service has 9½ hours of programming per week?
Furthermore, VOA Amharic is now available on FM in Ethiopia via Ahadu Radio, a local affiliate of the American broadcaster. Why didn’t VOA seek out affiliates in Afaan Oromo and Tigrinya languages?
The list of VOA’s biased practices is long. The evidence is overwhelming. VOA leaders should hire an independent, external investigator to understand the magnitude of the systemic bias of the Amharic service. It would be a mistake to entrust the same biased actors with the task of internal (self) investigation into a problem of this magnitude.
Long-term U.S. interests
VOA Horn service, like nearly everyone inside the beltway, saw the arrival of Abiy as a unique opportunity for Ethiopia — and for America’s relations with the Horn of Africa country. In 2018, VOA Africa division leaders were invited to the national palace and met with Abiy. Since then the network’s coverage of his administration has been friendly and favorable so much so Abiy, who has so far avoided unscripted media interviews, has given an exclusive one-on-one interview to the Amharic service. His spokespersons are routinely featured in that service’s reports. Abiy’s man in Washington Fitsum Arega is also a regular.
This personal relationship may explain why VOA Amharic is so chummy with Abiy’s PP. But such unqualified support risks alienating listeners who otherwise value America’s perspective and the opportunity to access an outlet that’s not controlled by the Ethiopian government. More importantly, the partisan coverage and the very public allegations of censorship create an impression that the U.S. government is trying to influence internal political debates. That perception, real or imagined, is ultimately detrimental to America’s long term objectives and interests.
Still, the Oromo protesters who came from such diverse places as Seattle, Minneapolis, Houston, Denver, and San Francisco to voice their concerns over VOA’s biased coverage are American taxpayers. They are right when they say “our stories matter.”
VOA’s new leadership should take their complaints seriously and use the opportunity to straighten the Horn service. The good news is: the Horn Service currently doesn’t have a division chief. Mr. Pack can begin the much-needed restructuring by replacing Tizita Belachew and hiring an experienced, impartial journalist with a thorough knowledge of Horn politics to lead the badly run and overly politicized division.
*Yonas Tolera is a writer and activist. Follow me on Twitter @oromostreet.
