The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer respond to inquiries from “anyone affiliated with Voice of America” because the White House claims it “too often speaks for America’s adversaries — not its citizens.”
The CDC’s media relations department told members of the agency’s communications staff in an email sent on April 30 that “as a rule, do not send up requests for Greta Van Susteren or anyone affiliated with Voice of America.”
The email was obtained by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over the CDC’s restrictions on employees' ability to communicate with the press and members of the public. It includes a link to an article from the White House’s evening newsletter accusing Voice of America, a taxpayer-funded news network, of speaking “for America’s adversaries — not its citizens.”
The White House notes that “Secrecy from the Communist Party of China allowed the deadly virus to spread across the world,” and that “Journalists should report the facts, but VOA has instead amplified Beijing’s propaganda.”
Knight Institute Staff Attorney Anna Diakun told VOA: "We brought this lawsuit because we were concerned about the politicization of public health messaging and we thought it was critical for the public to know if and how the administration was stage-managing CDC communications, so that the public was able to judge for themselves the accuracy of any statements."
Van Susteren told the network: “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.”
She added that it is “absurd to blackball a person.”
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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