VOA Archives - Cold War Radio Museum

Farewell to Stefan Korboński in Washington (1989) — Recording and Memory

Curator — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 16:52:34 +0000

An archival audio cassette preserving a fragment of the funeral service for Stefan Korboński in Washington, D.C., in 1989, forms part of the documentary record of the Polish émigré community and its media institutions in the West. The recording presented here is one of the few surviving audio traces of the memorial Mass held on April 27, 1989, […]

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April 22, 1954: Howard Fast Accepts the Stalin Peace Prize in New York

Curator — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:05:17 +0000

by Ted Lipien for Cold War Radio Museum April 22 is not a date usually remembered in the history of the Voice of America (VOA). Yet it deserves to be. On this day in 1954, at the Hotel McAlpin in New York, Howard Fast — a former chief news writer and editor for Voice of […]

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Voice of America and Soviet “Democracy”: How VOA Journalists Helped Establish Communist Regimes

Curator — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:26:35 +0000

Voice of America, OWI, and the Polish Desk: A Reconsideration The history of the wartime Voice of America (VOA) is most often presented as a story of broadcasting truthful news in defense of freedom and democracy. That description, while not entirely false, is incomplete. In the case of the Polish-language sections of the Office of […]

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Walter Lippmann, the Voice of America, and the Limits of Liberal and Conservative Thought

Curator — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:32:34 +0000

A reexamination of Walter Lippmann’s critique of the Voice of America (VOA) in light of wartime propaganda, Soviet influence operations, and the practical realities of Cold War broadcasting—revealing both the insight and the limits of his analysis. Lippmann’s Prestige—and the Context He Carried With Him A Celebrated Journalist in a Contested Information Environment In August […]

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The Breakfast Show: From Institutional Voice to Pat Gates — Voice of America, 1961–1978

Curator — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 20:18:28 +0000

An early preserved recording documenting the program’s beginnings — and the later rise of Pat Gates as one of the Voice of America’s rare internationally recognized broadcasting personalities. The Breakfast Show was a worldwide English-language morning program inaugurated by the Voice of America (VOA) in 1961. Produced in Washington, D.C., it combined international news reporting, […]

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A Free Voice at Christmas: RIAS Berlin, Edward R. Murrow, and the Sound of the Cold War (1961)

Curator — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 01:26:09 +0000

Recovering a forgotten Voice of America / RIAS relay preserved on magnetic tape At a glance Jump to a section I. Introduction – Why This Tape Matters In December 1961 — just months after the Berlin Wall divided Berlin and reshaped Cold War realities — the Voice of America (VOA) presented a special World-Wide English […]

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John Houseman, Howard Fast, and the Pro-Soviet Voice of America

Curator — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 07:11:05 +0000

Houseman’s Role in VOA Propaganda John Houseman, long mythologized as the “first director” of the Voice of America (VOA), was in reality its first chief producer — a man of the theater rather than a journalist. Editorial policy was shaped by Joseph F. Barnes, a pro-Soviet fellow-traveler newspaper reporter and close associate of Walter Duranty, […]

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Communist secret police in Poland spied on Voice of America’s Willis Conover to shut down Radio Free Europe

Curator — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 23:24:31 +0000

One of the secret police informants spying on the Voice of America’s (VOA’s) famous jazz DJ Willis Conover during his visit to communist-ruled Poland in 1959 was the mother of Rafał Trzaskowski, the unsuccessful candidate for Poland’s presidency in 2020 and 2025. Trzaskowski’s late mother’s cooperation with the communist secret police, which also involved spying […]

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Did Radio and TV Pioneer David Sarnoff Coin the Voice of America name?

Curator — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 16:50:47 +0000

Summary David Sarnoff, the pioneer of the radio and television industry in the United States and the founder of the NBC network, was most likely the first American with access to the White House to present a comprehensive plan for U.S. government-funded international radio broadcasting and one of the first to suggest for it the […]

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A Voice of America Journal for Promoting Transatlantic Dialogue

Curator — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 04:41:25 +0000

As of March 20, 2025, it is unclear if and when the Voice of America (VOA) radio and television broadcasts and online publications will resume following the implementation of President Trump’s Executive Order, Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, which affected the agency’s workforce at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) federal entities, the […]

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