« Schadenfreude overload: Progressive, BLM-supporting mayor of Olympia, WA calls riots 'domestic terrorism' after her home is vandalized | CHAZ devolves into a Fyre festival, a really bad band camp that didn't quite get the Porta-Potties up »
June 17, 2020

Obama holdouts finally dislodged at Voice of America

By Monica Showalter

After probably the longest battle the Trump administration has fought to dislodge deep state operatives, the miracle has finally happened: Obama holdouts Amanda Bennett, currently the director of Voice of America, and Sandy Sugawara, her deputy, are finally out at the agency. The two Obama political appointees managed to hold on to their posts in an unprecedented squatter's stayover, something that should have never happened. Even Ben Rhodes left his national security sinecure when President Trump took office and his time was up. But not this pair. They had a lot more people covering for them, and as a result, the Voice of America became an anti-Trump propaganda organ, run by Obamatons.

The clues as to why they were able to stay so long might just be found in the amazingly slanted media coverage of their exit, coming from the mainstream press.

Get a load of this one from longtime Washington Post fixture Paul Farhi, emphasis mine:

The top two editors at Voice of America resigned Monday amid White House criticism of the government-funded but editorially independent news agency and as a new overseer loyal to President Trump was about to take office.

It wasn’t immediately clear why VOA Director Amanda Bennett and Deputy Director Sandy Sugawara submitted their resignations. In a memo to staff on Monday, they jointly wrote, “It is time for us to leave,” but cited no specific reason other than the arrival of Michael Pack, a Trump appointee who will head the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA. Pack is an ally of Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist.
Oh, I think Farhi, a very connected guy at the Post, inside and out, knows what was clear. He knows nothing? Funny that, because Bennett just happens to be married to Washington Post CEO Donald Graham, something he gets around to mentioning waay, waay at the bottom of his piece. Why wouldn't he have been in contact with her?
 
What he should have said is that the two Obama appointees had overstayed their welcome and were due out a long time ago.
 
And why they got such good coverage instead, touting all their achievements instead of the scandal of their staying might just be connected to their connections to the top of the Post hierarchy and along with all its deep-state adjuncts. That's likely what enabled the pair to stay in power longer than they should have. They were able to control the press narrative of themselves as these pure untainted guardians of press probity, instead of political hacks who needed to go. They were so connected to the rest of the press and controlled the narrative so well that no one could get rid of them, and Congress went along with the narrative.
 
In reality, they were Obama political hacks and they turned the Voice of America into a scandal-plagued agency that left people in third world hellholes who had to listen to its output screaming with fury. On their watch, VOA became a propaganda organ for the very tyrannies they were supposed to expose. The VOA became a zombie agency, filled with anti-American propaganda and quite possibly Chinese and Iranian operatives, where the criticism from dissidents was most severe. That's far from good guardianship of fair and impartial news reporting.
 
But there the Obama hacks stayed, and the press covered for them. Farhi claims he knows nothing about why Bennett had to go.
 
Maybe this Washington Post news item, dated June 30, 2012, will refresh his memory:

Washington Post Chief Executive and Chairman Donald Graham was married Saturday evening to fellow news executive Amanda Bennett in a small family ceremony. The couple slipped off to Philadelphia for the private, family-only wedding: Son Will Graham was best man; Bennett’s daughter, Georgia Foley, served as maid-of-honor.

The longtime friends and colleagues — who served together on the Pulitzer Prize board from 2002 to 2008 — have been dating for three years.

Graham, 67, a former reporter, editor and publisher of The Post, is the grandson of Eugene Meyer, who bought the newspaper in 1933. His 40-year marriage to Mary Graham, with whom he has four children, ended in divorce five years ago.

Bennett, 59, is a former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Lexington Herald-Leader who now oversees investigative projects as an executive editor at Bloomberg News.

Now let's look to some even more disingenuous reporting from ABC News, starting with the headline:
 

2 top Voice of America executives resign as controversial Trump pick takes over

The Trump pick was the controversial one? This is garbage. Bennett and Sugawara were the controversial ones, they're the ones who refused to leave when they were supposed to leave. They were ensconced in their positions like boll weevils, burrowing and burrowing and refusing to get out. Now their exit is being billed as some big controversy but it took moving heaven and earth to get this pair out, even as they were clearly in there when they shouldn't have been. 

Pack, by contrast, is squeaky clean, a talented maker of documentaries who drives a beat-up old car to work (he did an impressive Clarence Thomas documentary), falsely accused of self-dealing in a manufactured corruption scandal that will come to nothing, the victim of a deep state plot. Apparently word of this got to President Trump and someone in the White House got Congress to snap to its senses. Despite charges, he was pushed though, and now he's cleaning house.

He's going to find oodles of waste, fraud, mismanagement, plus an anti-Trump agenda, along with quite possibly the presence of foreign spies. He's already cracking down on crony contractors, a story that should make its way into the news more fully at some point. Now he's gotten rid of the Obama holdouts.

Had the press not covered for these women based on apparent conflicts of interest, this quite likely never would have happened. But they were sooo, soo connected, look at these biographies of these women, you think they didn't have contacts? They had so many contacts. And because of that, they were able to portray themselves in the press as guardians of good journalism instead of incompetent and malevolent political hacks. That they're gone is a great thing for this beleaguered agency. Now the VOA can become pro-American again, instead of an anti-Trump, anti-American propaganda organ of no use to anyone.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of VOA logo from PNGguru and images from PublicDomainPictures.net // public domain

 

If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com