'Not How A Newsroom Should Be Run': Kari Lake Makes Shock Claim About VOA To Christopher Smith

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At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ) questioned Kari Lake about editorial oversight at VOA.

Transcript

00:00Smith, for five minutes of question. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and welcome to the

00:04committee. Ms. Lake, I chair the Congressional Executive Commission on China. We've held many,

00:12many hearings. We've worked on legislation. One of my bills that passed just a few weeks ago

00:16was to combat the heinous practice of forced organ harvesting, where 50,000, 70,000 young people,

00:25average age 28, get their organs taken. Their Uyghurs, their Falun Gong practitioners,

00:30it passed 406 to one. Second time it passed, it passed last year as well. I've had four hearings

00:34on it. Xi Jinping is committing atrocities like almost no one else in the world, and whether it be

00:41what he's done to Hong Kong, the pervasive use of torture, religious persecution, everywhere you

00:47look, genocide against the Uyghurs, and then in your testimony, and I would ask you if you could

00:54maybe elaborate on this, you point out that the past leadership of VOA Mandarin Language Services

00:58conducted annual meetings with the Chinese Embassy in Washington. Well, I go to the Chinese Embassy

01:03myself, outside picketing. We try to meet, I've invited Chinese leaders here from the embassy and

01:09from the government many times to testify, every time they turn us down. But if you could elaborate

01:15on those meetings, whatever you could tell us. You also pointed out that VOA's Mandarin Language Service

01:21personalities have hosted events at the Chinese Embassy. And one of VOA's television editors even

01:27publicly pledged his allegiance to the PRC at a Chinese Embassy event. And finally, you said VOA allowed the

01:33Communist Vietnamese and Chinese embassies in DC to pressure them into removing videos, cutting short,

01:41live interviews, or changing story angles so that coverage was more supportive of the Chinese governments

01:47of Hanoi and Beijing. If you could elaborate on that, I deeply appreciate it. I'd be happy to. And I just

01:52actually read an article that was very interesting. It's called Chinese Influence at Voice of America.

01:58And I mentioned that there's a firewall, an editorial firewall, that members of the management at USAGM and

02:06Voice of America cannot tell the reporters what to report. They can't talk about what should be in the newscast.

02:15And so if a reporter decides to go rogue and do pro-CCP coverage, I can't do anything about it. That's

02:23not how a newsroom should be run. I've worked in newsrooms my whole life. There's always some

02:27editorial control that management has so that you're making sure that what goes out of the airway

02:32is accurate. And frankly, in an agency such as this, it should be telling America's story. That's our

02:38charter, telling America's story, being authoritative, not telling China's story. But I want to talk to you a

02:44little bit about what you just mentioned. If I may read this, because it was really shocking when I

02:49read this. And sorry, I've got to put my reading glasses on for this one, guys.

02:54Starting in the first decade of the 2000s, the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., and the

02:58leadership of VOA's Mandarin service began an annual meeting to allow embassy officials to voice their

03:04opinions about VOA's content. So management at USAGM has no say in what content it goes on, but the folks

03:13over the CCP and the Chinese embassy do have say about what goes on our air. CCP embassy officials

03:20have also reached out to VOA hosts to convince them to be more supportive of the regime. VOA

03:25personalities have hosted events at the embassy. VOA TV editor, one of them, publicly pledged his

03:31allegiance to China at a Chinese embassy event. This is absurd. This is insane. And the American taxpayers are

03:40footing the bill for this. You know, they also ran a two-minute CCP propaganda. They produced it at VOA.

03:48And the management agreed that it was CCP propaganda. Frankly, two seconds of CCP propaganda is too much.

03:55The American people are footing the bill. And so things have to change there. We need to make sure

04:00that firewall is gone. We should be able to have control over what kind of content goes out. It should

04:05be in alignment with our foreign policy. And unfortunately, the only people that seem to have

04:11any influence are our adversaries on what is going out on VOA's airwaves. It's outrageous and it has to

04:18stop. And thankfully, President Trump issued that executive order to bring this agency down to its

04:24statutory minimum. And he has called for this agency to be eliminated starting in the fiscal year 2026.

04:31Well, thank you for your testimony. Thank you for highlighting that important complicity with

04:38the brutality of the Chinese Communist Party. You know, I'm barred from going to China. I used to lead

04:42human rights missions there frequently. The Global Times put me on their so-called hit list. And I can

04:48tell you, you know, I can't go to China. And yet we had people collaborating with their top leadership

04:54here in DC and elsewhere. And that is outrageous. We need to reform this. And I agree. You can judge a man by

05:00his enemies and you've got good enemies. Thank you very much. Yield back.

05:04Representative yields back. Representative Keating is now recognized.

05:07Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for being here. I think if we look at

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Transcript

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