The Foreign Service Journal, June 2020

16 JUNE 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL At an April 21 press briefing in Geneva, World Health Organization Spokesperson Fadéla Chaib said the available evidence suggests the coronavi- rus came from animals in China late last year and not from a laboratory. Shooting the Messenger T he White House launched a highly unusual attack on the Voice of America on April 10, charging the federally funded but independent news service with promoting Chinese govern- ment propaganda in its reporting about the coronavirus outbreak. The critique, posted on the White House website, bore a provocative head- line: “Amid a Pandemic, Voice of America Spends Your Money to Promote Foreign Propaganda.” It said, in part: “Journalists should report the facts, but VOA has instead amplified Beijing’s propaganda. VOA called China’s Wuhan lockdown a suc- cessful ‘model’ copied by much of the world—and then tweeted out video of the communist government’s celebra- tory light show marking the quarantine’s alleged end.” “I’m afraid I can’t tell you what prompted it,” said Amanda Bennett, VOA’s director, when asked about the attack. “It just came out of the blue.” But she quickly issued a lengthy rebut- tal, pointing out just some of the many instances where VOA has harshly criticized Beijing’s policies on a range of topics. “One of the big differences between publicly funded independent media, like the Voice of America, and state- controlled media is that we are free to show all sides of an issue and are actu- ally mandated to do so by law as stated in the VOA Charter signed by President Gerald Ford in 1976,” Bennett wrote in her rebuttal. “We are thoroughly covering China’s dis-information and misinformation in English and Mandarin and at the same time reporting factually—as we always do in all 47 of our broadcast languages—on other events in China,” she added. State Releases 2019 Human Rights Report S ecretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized the human rights records of four U.S. adversaries during a March 11 press conference unveiling the depart- ment’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2019. Calling China’s detention of Uyghur Muslims “the stain of the century,” he criticized China, Venezuela, Iran and Cuba as examples of “dark places” where human rights “are infringed on.” Some human rights advocates criti- cized the Secretary for aiming his rheto- ric only at adversaries, thereby politiciz- ing the report, according to a March 11 Washington Post story. The Center for American Progress, in a March 18 article on its website, echoed those concerns. Secretary Pompeo “was silent about the abuses committed by some of the administration’s closest friends, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the Philippines.” But Robert Destro, the State Depart- ment’s assistant secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, who heads the office that compiled the report, told the Post that “any fair-minded person who reads these reports will see that they’re pretty hard-hitting across the board. And so we’re no more or less hard-hitting with respect to those coun- tries than we are to other countries that are flagged here for having problems.” T he COVID Local website bills itself as “a frontline guide for local decision-makers” around the world as they seek to determine what needs to be done to reduce the impact of the novel coronavirus on their communities. The site features a 33-page downloadable guide and checklists developed by a team of experts and former public health officials together with current global, state and local officials. The guide focuses on seven key objectives for addressing COVID-19 at the community level, including slowing and reducing transmission, focusing prevention on high-risk Site of the Month COVID Local (covidlocal.org) groups and mitigating economic and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each of the key objec- tives features priority objectives and resources for further learning. Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior pol- icy fellow at the Center for Global Development and former director of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance for USAID, is one of the guide’s authors.