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C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. to across the country. | |
| Coming up Friday morning. | ||
| We'll talk about the controversy over the Epstein files and the Trump administration's claims about the 2016 Russia investigation with investigative journalist Catherine Herridge. | ||
| And Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Ashik Sadiq discusses the group's growing influence in the wake of Zuran Mamdani's New York City mayoral primary win. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Friday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| And joining us to discuss the impact of cuts to Voice of America is the former Voice of America national correspondent Steve Herman. | ||
| Thanks for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
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My pleasure, Mimi. | |
| You worked for The Voice of America for 20 years. | ||
| Tell us what you did there. | ||
|
unidentified
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I was hired when I was a contract reporter in Tokyo, Japan, around 2007. | |
| And for three and a half years, I went to New Delhi, India. | ||
| I was South Asia Bureau Chief, then three years based in Seoul as Northeast Asia Bureau Chief, including coverage of the Fukushima disaster. | ||
| And then three years in Bangkok as Southeast Asia Bureau Chief. | ||
| Before coming back in 2016 to the United States, I covered the State Department, traveled with Secretary of State John Kerry, and then after Donald Trump was elected president, I went over to the White House for The Voice of America. | ||
| And then you got laid off? | ||
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unidentified
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It's a little complicated. | |
| I was put on paid administrative leave a couple of weeks before everybody else at The Voice of America was. | ||
| Essentially, everybody, almost everybody at VOA since mid-March has been on leave. | ||
| And this all happened on what we call Bloody Saturday, when essentially the Voice of America was doged and broadcasts were immediately stopped. | ||
| Imagine if people tuned in tomorrow and there was just static on the air for your program. | ||
| There would be no explanation to the viewers as to what happened. | ||
| And that happened with our 49 language services, an audience of about 340 million people. | ||
| When you say almost everybody was put on leave, what's happening right now? | ||
| Is Voice of America on the air? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, it's a great question. | |
| There is a skeleton, a Potemkin village of the Voice of America right now, broadcasting a few minutes a day over shortwave radio in Dari and Pashtu to Afghanistan. | ||
| There is a little bit of Chinese material and Mandarin language online. | ||
| And there's an attempt to program one hour per day in Farzi for Iran. | ||
| That was a 24-7 operation previously. | ||
| Now it's one hour a day? | ||
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unidentified
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I'm told that they're trying to do one hour a day. | |
| When you say 340 million viewers across the world, what was the mission of Voice of America? | ||
| And does that mission still hold today? | ||
| Or is it outdated? | ||
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unidentified
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I don't believe it's outdated. | |
| We have a firewall and a charter, which are laws passed by Congress that say that the Voice of America must tell America's story in a fair and balanced manner. | ||
| And we have to reflect American institution and thought. | ||
| The Voice of America, no matter who is in power at the White House, cannot be the voice of the Democrats or the voice of the Republicans. | ||
| It is the voice of America. | ||
| And it had been doing this mission for decades. | ||
| There's also an aspect like when I was overseas, I was covering disasters on the front lines, civil wars, civil insurrection, and we were reporting from the scene back to the Voice of America. | ||
| And then the different dozens of language services would take my material and translate it into their language and tell their audiences what was happening. | ||
| We were literally covering the world for the world. | ||
| Now, the White House accuses The Voice of America of being a radical leftist organization. | ||
| This is thewitehouse.gov, and the headline is The Voice of Radical America. | ||
| It says that here are some examples. | ||
| It says the Voice of America's management told staff not to call Hamas and its members terrorists, except when quoting statements. | ||
| According to the Daily Caller, multiple Voice of America reporters have posted anti-Trump content on social media. | ||
| And it says that Representative Scott Perry wrote in a 2022 letter that Voice of America has grown exceedingly partisan over the past several years. | ||
| There is more, you know, there's a Voice of America headline, quote, what is white privilege and whom does it help? | ||
| White privilege in quotations. | ||
| What's your response to that? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, first of all, as I said, we reflect American thought in institution. | |
| We talk about things that are going on and we interview people from the left and from the right. | ||
| The Heritage Foundation's experts were frequent guests on the Voice of America, as were those at probably every other think tank in this town. | ||
| What I would urge people to do is to make their own decisions about the Voice of America. | ||
| The Americans are not the target audience. | ||
| We're broadcasting to the rest of the world. | ||
| But you can go to VOANews.com. | ||
| The stories are frozen in amber from the middle of March. | ||
| And you can read all these stories. | ||
| If you want to see my material, it goes back more than a dozen years, I believe, online. | ||
| And people can watch the TV pieces. | ||
| They can read the scripts, listen to the radio stories, and decide for themselves whether they think that there's some bias or a tilt. | ||
| As somebody who's pretty active on social media, I can tell you over the years, Mimi, people look at a headline and then without even watching the piece or reading the story, make their own conclusions. | ||
| And we've been hit from the left, we've been hit from the right. | ||
| And I think when you're getting it from both sides, maybe you're doing a pretty good job. | ||
| You wrote a piece for the fulcrum, and you wrote this, even before any of the Trump appointees returned to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, incumbent management at VOA sought to appease the White House. | ||
| Stories were spiked and headlines massaged. | ||
| Those were subtle changes unnoticed externally. | ||
| Can you elaborate more and give us some examples? | ||
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unidentified
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Yes, unfortunately, from the powers that be, who were not political appointees, there was what we interpreted as anticipatory obedience, that maybe if things are softened up a little bit, then when the political appointees come in, they won't be so rough on the place, so to speak. | |
| We warned that that wasn't going to happen because we had been there for the political turmoil at the end of the first Trump administration when there were similar attempts to turn us into what we thought would be a propaganda organization. | ||
| What happened is I was put on paid administrative leave with the excuse that my social media was going to be investigated. | ||
| And my successor is White House Bureau Chief Patsy Weedakuswara, who was doing an excellent job supervising about 10 White House correspondents from the various language services, was also removed involuntarily from that position. | ||
| Coincidentally, Patsy and I had been prominent figures at the end of the first Trump administration, becoming whistleblowers and fighting against what we saw were breaches of that firewall and not adhering to the VOA charter. | ||
| It's a law. | ||
| We have to follow the law. | ||
| Patsy was civil service. | ||
| I was foreign service. | ||
| We do not take a pledge to any particular administration. | ||
| We take a pledge to the Constitution of the United States. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And if you'd like to call in and ask a question about the Voice of America to Steve Herman, you can do so. | ||
| Democrats, 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans, 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents, 202-748-8002. | ||
| Steve, I want to show you Kerry Lake, who runs the agency overseeing The Voice of America. | ||
| She testified before Congress. | ||
| Again, this is last month, about what she said were problems. | ||
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unidentified
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I was there. | |
| All right. | ||
| We also sidestepped the charter to be reliable authoritative news instead, being riddled with political bias and outright anti-American sentiment. | ||
| Examples, you mentioned it, Chairman, refusing to call Hamas terrorists, glamorizing Che Guevara, airing campaign-style videos favoring President Biden, even broadcasting a graphic depicting President Trump with a swastika over his face on their news. | ||
| I wouldn't want that, by the way, even if it was President Biden. | ||
| That's totally inappropriate. | ||
| And a ridiculous editorial firewall prevents agency leadership like myself from correcting any of the bias or having any say in the editorial content that goes on the air. | ||
| Steve, you said you were there. | ||
| What's your reaction to that? | ||
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unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Well, she said, quote, ridiculous editorial firewall. | ||
| It's a law, and it's a firewall for a reason to prevent exactly this, from turning the Voice of America into a propaganda agency. | ||
| There is a mechanism to investigate any perceived errors or wrongdoing. | ||
| The OA had its own self-correcting mechanism. | ||
| I was actually working in standards and practices on a detail for a period of months. | ||
| There was an international broadcasting advisory board, which was conveniently fired by the president before Kerry Lake was put in as a special advisor, which a lot of people maintain was an illegal action. | ||
| There were also investigations after the first Trump administration when we had the incidents of the breach of the firewall and we went to federal court. | ||
| And the Office of Inspector General and Office of Special Counsel investigated and deemed that the journalists at the Voice of America were doing their jobs. | ||
| Congress also has a role to play here. | ||
| They're the ones who allocate the money for the Voice of America. | ||
| They can dictate changes at the Voice of America. | ||
| But to have one person come in and essentially ransack the place, throw 1,400 people out of week, out of work, and flip a switch of silencing all of the Voice of America radio and television transmissions in dozens of languages does not appear to be very prudent management of something that a lot of people regard as an 83-year-old American institution. | ||
| I want to ask you about this Reuters article from May, and the headline is right-wing One America News to provide news feed to Voice of America. | ||
| We haven't heard anything since that. | ||
| What's happening with that? | ||
| Is that, in fact, what's happening? | ||
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unidentified
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As far as I know, none of this material has been used on the air. | |
| When you go into the lobby of The Voice of America, one of the TV sets is tuned to One America News. | ||
| But as Kerry Lake herself said in that congressional testimony, she cannot dictate legally what goes on the air. | ||
| So she's decided just to basically shut everything down. | ||
| Putting One America News or MSNBC content on The Voice of America, besides the legal and copyright issues, would not be very balanced programming, obviously. | ||
| Voice of America was originating most of its content. | ||
| It subscribed to the Associated Press television service, Reuters TV, AFP television as well, to get those video clips of events happening around the world to put in the newscasts. | ||
| Well, Kerry Lake also canceled those contracts just before she essentially got rid of everybody. | ||
| Now, once Voice of America largely went off the air, where are those people getting their news now about the United States? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, that's a great question, Mimi. | |
| Well, that void is being filled, unfortunately, to some degree by voices coming out of the People's Republic of China because shortwave radio, which a lot of people considered to be anachronistic, it is still being used heavily by the Chinese and others. | ||
| The satellite TV feeds have gone silence. | ||
| We've lost our hundreds and hundreds of affiliated TV and radio stations around the world. | ||
| We had 24-7 FM transmitters in major capitals in Africa all silent. | ||
| And some of that material will be filled, that airtime, empty airtime, by the Chinese and others. | ||
| There are others, including the Iranians, Press TV, which is a 24-7 English language news operation. | ||
| It does not say very good things about the United States. | ||
| They're also not very accurate. | ||
| And that's the case with CGTN as well. | ||
| And you've heard about, I'm sure, the infamous RT, which used to be called Russia Today. | ||
| These are slick outfits, and they're going on cable systems around the world where the Voice of America used to be. | ||
| And what's the fear of people getting their news that way about the U.S. and Voice of America not being there? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, The Voice of America was mandated by law to reflect the United States, what was happening here, warts and all, which builds credibility. | |
| When people saw that the U.S. broadcaster was not only talking about all the great things that are happening in this country, but the debates that we have in this country about issues such as abortion, gun rights, transgender rights, and all of that. | ||
| It doesn't mean we're taking a side by doing these stories. | ||
| It shows you that there are debates in this country about these contentious issues. | ||
| So now that Voice of America is essentially not operating except very limited, what is Carrie Lake doing? | ||
| I mean, is this still a full-time job to lead the organization that runs Voice of America? | ||
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unidentified
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You'd have to ask her what is her intention because it keeps changing. | |
| She has gone on a few very conservative podcasts and news programs. | ||
| I think all of us at the Voice of America would love to see her come on your program, for example, and explain and have you ask some tough questions. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, she is definitely invited to come on and hear from our viewers. | ||
| And this is Judy in Baltimore, Maryland. | ||
| Democrat, good morning. | ||
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unidentified
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Hi. | |
| It seems to me that so many things that Trump is doing is just like driving us towards an isolationist point of view. | ||
| And this is a question I don't know. | ||
| When has Bang Isolationist ever served us well? | ||
| You know, in 30 years, you know, it's probably going to take time for the ill effects of a lot of what he's doing to sort of surface. | ||
| But, you know, 30 years from now, as China takes the lead in the world and Russia maybe somehow rebounds, I don't know if it ever can really. | ||
| You know, I hope people who support Trump and everything he's doing, a lot of them won't be here, but I hope the ones that are here recognize what they've done to our country. | ||
| Sorry, Judy. | ||
| Go ahead, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, well, the Voice of America was a hard edge of America's soft power, an instrument of public diplomacy. | |
| And we've seen what's happened with USAID, which also to some degree is a part of America's soft power and diplomacy and the massive cuts that are happening with the diplomats and the civil servants at the Department of State. | ||
| There's no doubt that this administration wants to scale all of that back. | ||
| There were just some amicus briefs filed in federal court this week from dozens of flag officers retired from the U.S. military, former U.S. ambassadors, national security experts, who all told the court that VOA's mission is vital to America's national security because it is an instrument of soft power and public diplomacy, because they realize that putting out this information, | ||
| showing what a free press is about, and reporting accurately and fairly can prevent some really bad things from happening in different parts of the world. | ||
| And Chris is in Silver Spring, Maryland, Independent Line. | ||
| Chris used to work for the Voice of America. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
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unidentified
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Good morning, and thanks for taking my call. | |
| I was a technician at VOA. | ||
| Before that, I actually interviewed at C-SPAN and got a tour of the place during my interview, and it was wonderful. | ||
| But I spent a few decades at VOA. | ||
| And I know Mr. Herman, and I know Mrs. Pettywascara. | ||
| They're good people. | ||
| They're very professional. | ||
| And what has happened to my former coworkers is disgusting. | ||
| And I just wanted to say that. | ||
| Yeah, there's a huge human toll to all of this as well. | ||
| On the Republican line in Statham, Georgia, Jack, you're on with Steve Herman. | ||
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unidentified
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Yes, good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call and thank you for doing what C-SPAN does. | ||
| I am a total Trump supporter, but you cannot take Voice of America and defund them, as you would want to say. | ||
| I don't agree with that. | ||
| I mean, I am an avid deer hunter, but, and I mean, I'm Second Amendment, but the transgender debate needs to be brought out. | ||
| You've got to see both sides of it, either you agree with it or not. | ||
| And like I said, I am a total Trump supporter, but some things should not be limited to people. | ||
| You got to hear both sides. | ||
| So, Jack, tell us why you think Voice of America should stay on the air. | ||
| Why do you disagree with President Trump's decision on that? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, free press, ma'am. | |
| I mean, even though I might not agree with something, you can't silence somebody, other people who might feel that way. | ||
| I mean, that's why the men and women of this nation have died and fought for this country, regardless if it's like this, ma'am. | ||
| I am not an AR type person. | ||
| I am a deer hunter. | ||
| And I might not necessarily like an AR-15 that doesn't do me no good because I hunt deer and wild hogs. | ||
| But it doesn't mean somebody doesn't have a right. | ||
| I shouldn't be against them having one if that's what they choose to own. | ||
| It's like the transgender. | ||
| I do not think that kids should be trained and given steroids and stuff. | ||
| When they grow up to be 18 years old, then let them make their own decision. | ||
| But let's hear from Steve Herman. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, yeah, it's exactly what Jack is talking about. | |
| We have a problem in this country with media literacy, people not realizing what is a well-articulated news story versus some slop that is disinformation coming out of Russia that somebody sent you on Facebook. | ||
| And that's something that I'm working on advocating about in my new role at the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation at the University of Mississippi. | ||
| But there's also, with the algorithms and everything, a strong desire for what's called confirmation bias. | ||
| People just want to hear their views reinforced. | ||
| And, you know, in the old days, you got the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal sitting on your desk here. | ||
| You would read these, and you could have different newspapers that would have different political views. | ||
| But you read them, even if you didn't agree with them, because you wanted to be well-informed. | ||
| Let's talk to Nancy in Albany, Georgia, Independent Line. | ||
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unidentified
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I want to know why they want to stop this guy and the other woman with that kind of news. | |
| And then why would President Trump want to do that? | ||
| I would prefer the truth to come out on everything. | ||
| Just like he always stirring up stuff, just breaking the people up, just destroying the other nation. | ||
| Talking about left and right. | ||
| It's no such thing as left wing or right wing. | ||
| We are all of God's children. | ||
| We should be turban together. | ||
| And by the undocking immigrants, ain't no such thing as aliens. | ||
| Aliens is somebody that you can identify. | ||
| These people are human beings. | ||
| I don't agree with a lot of things that Democrats say. | ||
| Not a Republican. | ||
| Because we all are God's children. | ||
| And we shouldn't be identified as aliens. | ||
| Aliens, aliens, everybody would be an alien. | ||
| All right, Nancy, getting a little bit off the subject, but go ahead, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I was covering the first term of Donald Trump as a White House reporter. | |
| I was on more than 100 Air Force One flights, the trips overseas in the Oval Office frequently. | ||
| And my primary job was to relay accurately what he was saying. | ||
| Then would come the analysis. | ||
| We would go out, if the president said something that was controversial, we would go out and talk to people at think tanks, academics, other politicians to tell, to try to put it in context for people in the rest of the world. | ||
| And that's what is really important. | ||
| And we were doing at the Voice of America. | ||
| Stephen New York sent this on text. | ||
| He says, this is a simple true or false question. | ||
| Was there ever a memo or rule at VOA requiring that Hamas and similar organizations not be called terrorists? | ||
| The answer would be decisive. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, it's not a yes or no answer because it's the way that we referred to Hamas and terrorism. | |
| If people called Hamas terrorists, we quoted them saying that. | ||
| But there was a debate for a period of time looking at the style guide of the Associated Press and what to refer to these groups as. | ||
| And it was adjusted. | ||
| And like I said, we have an internal self-correcting mechanism, standards and practices. | ||
| When these issues come up, we debate them. | ||
| And this particular one did garner some outside criticism, and there was reflection on it, and changes were made. | ||
| Changes were made to them not being called terrorists or to going back to calling them terrorists. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, it depends who's calling them terrorists. | |
| But to refer to it. | ||
| Your reporters would not call them a terrorist organization. | ||
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unidentified
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It depended. | |
| And again, there was a lot of different things going on among the 49 language services. | ||
| So I can't tell you what was happening in every single language. | ||
| But just in English. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| James in Akron, Ohio, Democrat. | ||
| Good morning, James. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I have a couple statements and a question about public broadcasting. | |
| But the two statements I'll make real quick. | ||
| One was about the Trump administration saying that Retro Russia Russia was false, where there was seven individuals that pleaded guilty to the charges. | ||
| So you can't plead guilty to something you didn't do, but they keep saying it's a lie. | ||
| And the other thing is, why, here's my question, and I'll leave the other out. | ||
| The question is, why is it every time we get a Republican administration, they want to eliminate public broadcasting, anything that will benefit the poor or the smaller people around the world? | ||
| And I just don't understand it. | ||
| If they are so American and so First Amendment and Second Amendment rights, why do they want to eliminate public broadcasting? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm not a Republican member of Congress or someone who works in the White House, so you would have to ask them about it. | |
| I would just say, you know, there are a lot of people, Republican and Democrats, who believe that public broadcasting serves a very vital role in this country. | ||
| As the caller pointed out, it does serve. | ||
| I drive across the country, turn on the radio, and sometimes the only thing you can hear that is not, say, religious broadcasting is the public radio station. | ||
| These are vital parts of a culture in a small town. | ||
| And you should probably delineate the difference between public broadcasting, which is like PBS and NPR, and the Voice of America. | ||
|
unidentified
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The Voice of America is an external broadcasting service. | |
| So you can't really get it in the United States unless you get it on. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, you can go to VOANews.com and look at every story we're doing. | |
| You can go to the websites or could of the different language services. | ||
| You could pick it up on the shortwave radio for the few shortwave radio broadcasts that were still left. | ||
| It wasn't intended, and it's not written for Americans. | ||
| We're trying to explain in Swahili or in Korean for people in North Korea, for example, or in Ukrainian or Spanish about what's happening in this country. | ||
| We got a posting on X who's asking you, why can't you just get a TikTok account and broadcast there? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, first of all, U.S. government agencies using TikTok is currently problematic. | |
| But the Voice of America was using social media. | ||
| WhatsApp and Facebook and what the language services would look at. | ||
| What's the most effective social media platform to use to reach that particular country? | ||
| I remember sitting in Yangon in Burma looking at Facebook and watching the nightly Voice of America broadcast in the Burmese language. | ||
| And that was a major way that people in Myanmar were receiving those broadcasts was online on social media. | ||
| David in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Republican, good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Go right ahead, David. | ||
| I have a question for Steve Herman, who used to former Voice of America national correspondent. | ||
| Yes, go right ahead. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| I have a question for Mr. Herman. | ||
| Why were the cuts made to VOA? | ||
| It's a great question. | ||
| And again, I would hope Kerry Lake would come on the show and answer that. | ||
| I can only tell you what it was like to be on the receiving end of these cuts. | ||
| And we're puzzled, and we don't think it was justified. | ||
| And in court, the lawyers have argued and federal judges have concurred that these were arbitrary and capricious moves and should be reversed. | ||
| You said that you had experienced the first Trump administration and that there was some animosity there from the administration. | ||
| When President Trump won the election again and was coming back into office, were you expecting VOA could be shut down completely? | ||
|
unidentified
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No, I don't think anybody was. | |
| We knew that there were probably going to be changes because I'm sure something that's been discussed on this program many times, Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation, there was a chapter in there about the Voice of America and our parent agency, USAGM. | ||
| And it was obvious that, according to that playbook, that they did want to make changes, for example, putting the Voice of America under either the State Department or the National Security Council. | ||
| So we expected there would be a battle for the soul of the Voice of America, but we did not expect that a dagger would be driven through its heart. | ||
| Dan in North Bend, Oregon, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Dan. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| I have a question. | ||
| Is there any chance that these cuts that have been instituted to VOA are going to be reversed and the funding come back? | ||
| And did I hear it said that Voice America isn't broadcasted here in the United States? | ||
| Yes, that is correct, Dan, because it's an external broadcasting service. | ||
| The funds for the Voice of America have not legally been cut. | ||
| Those funds were allocated by Congress, and there was this arbitrary and capricious move made not to spend this money. | ||
| Also for Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, which are under the U.S. AGM umbrella, those broadcasters are grantees, where Voice of America and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting are 100% under the federal government. | ||
| There's big discussion right now about the fiscal year, next fiscal year federal budget. | ||
| And I know in the House and in the Senate, there are debates about how much money should be allocated for U.S. international broadcasting. | ||
| So for those who would like to see the Voice of America revived and funded again, they need to contact their representatives in Congress. | ||
| You started a new job earlier this month at the University of Mississippi, focused on advocating for journalism and finding new ways to cover stories. | ||
| What's the future of journalism, do you think? | ||
| What's the next thing that's out there? | ||
|
unidentified
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Mimi, it's a great question. | |
| I think we're seeing an existential threat to traditional journalism. | ||
| There are fundamental changes being made. | ||
| Maybe journalists need to have a completely different approach to how they tell their stories. | ||
| And there are a lot of people attempting to do this on social media. | ||
| And so one thing we might be able to do is to help give journalism training to all these people, a citizen journalist. | ||
| There are also people going out and covering for a blog. | ||
| They may be the only person in these news deserts now covering what's going on with city or county government. | ||
| A lot of them are volunteering. | ||
| They don't have the time or inclination to go to a university for four years to get a journalism degree, but maybe there's a streamlined way to give them some education in the fundamentals of journalism. | ||
| I think it all goes back to the basics of who, what, where, when, why, and gathering all the facts and being as fair and unbiased as you can. | ||
| There is also advocacy journalism, as we're well aware of. | ||
| But the question is, is like, what platforms is this journalism going to be on? | ||
| What form is it going to take? | ||
| And for those that are doing it as a profession, how can they or the publishers at least have enough money to continue doing it? | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's Steve Herman, former Voice of America national correspondent, currently the executive director at the University of Mississippi Jordan Center for Journalism, Advocacy, and Innovation. | ||
| He's got a substack called News Guy if you'd like to check that out. | ||
| Steve, thanks so much for joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for having me, Mimi. | |
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. to across the country. | ||
| Coming up Friday morning, we'll talk about the controversy over the Epstein files and the Trump administration's claims about the 2016 Russia investigation with investigative journalist Catherine Haridge. | ||
| And Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Ashik Sadiq discusses the group's growing influence in the wake of Zuran Mamdani's New York City mayoral primary win. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Friday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at C-SPAN.org. | ||
| Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books. | ||
| Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend. | ||
| Book TV continues the celebration of America's 250th with author conversations on the American Revolution. | ||
| At 2 p.m. Eastern, contributors to the book Waging War in America, 1775 to 1783, discuss the operational challenges that American, British, French, and German military forces face during the conflict. | ||
| And at 6.45 p.m., U.S. Marine Corps Major General Jason Bohm explores the origins of the Marine Corps, including the formation of the Continental Marines during the American Revolution, in his book, Washington's Marines. | ||
| Then at 8 Eastern, Rick Atkinson shares his book, The Fate of the Day, examining the middle years of the Revolutionary War, from the 1777 capture of Fort Ticonderoga to the 1780 siege of Charleston. | ||
| Also this weekend, at 5.30 p.m., how did the like button become so ubiquitous? | ||
| Author Martin Reeves explores the origins of the thumbs-up symbol and how it changed the internet with his book, Like, The Button That Changed the World. | ||
| And at 10, Martha Blanding broke a color barrier at California's Disneyland, becoming the park's first black official tour guide in 1971. | ||
| She tells the story of her 50-year career with the Walt Disney Company and of social and cultural change in her book, Groundbreaking Magic. |