CDC Tells Staff to Avoid Voice of America Host Greta Van Susteren
The Centers for Disease Control has directed staff to avoid working with Voice of America anchor Greta Van Susteren, new documents reveal.
“As a rule, do not send up requests for Greta Van Susteren or anyone affiliated with Voice of America,” said an email sent to staff by Michawn Rich, a CDC spokesperson. The email linked to a White House website arguing that VOA — where Van Susteren hosts “Plugged In” — “promotes foreign propaganda.”
The dictate appeared in a section providing guidance on interview requests forwarded by the agency to the Department of Health and Human Services and to the office of Vice President Mike Pence.
Van Susteren, who previously worked as an anchor for Fox News, CNN and NBC News, said in a statement published by VOA that she had been “blackballed,” adding, “The thing that’s stunning to me is that it’s VOA and I’m specifically named and nobody at the CDC, or the White House, or anyplace else has ever said that my reporting on the coronavirus or anything else has been unfair or inaccurate.”
VOA Director Amanda Bennett called on the CDC to withdraw the guidance, noting in a statement that her employer is federally-funded. “For a federal agency’s public affairs office to categorically deny in advance interview requests from VOA journalists, including our colleague Greta Van Susteren, based on a White House opinion statement referring to an Associated Press story about COVID-19 shared by the VOA newsroom as ‘propaganda,’ is even more troubling,” she added.
The White House page referencing VOA, dated April 10, said the agency receives approximately $200 million in taxpayer funding annually and took issue with its coverage tweets by Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and China’s handling of the coronavirus, noting, “VOA called China’s Wuhan lockdown a successful ‘model’ copied by much of the world — and then tweeted out video of the Communist government’s celebratory light show marking the quarantine’s alleged end.”
The email was released Friday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Knight Institute.
