Why Is Biden’s Global-Media Nominee Getting the Kid-Glove Treatment?

A manda Bennett, President Biden’s nominee to lead the often-controversial U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), has so far faced minimal political scrutiny, prompting Michael McCaul, a top House Republican, to urge his Senate counterparts to ask tough questions of her before her confirmation vote.

USAGM oversees Voice of America (VoA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and several of the other government-funded independent media outlets that broadcast and publish news for hundreds of millions of people around the world, particularly those living under dictatorial regimes. With a budget of slightly more than $800 million per year, it is a relatively small agency by Washington’s standards, though its outsized soft-power impact has placed it at the center of some of the fiercest debates in American foreign-policy circles.

Last November, Biden tapped Bennett — a former Voice of America director who resigned her post in 2020, when President Trump’s pick to run USAGM was poised to take over — for the agency’s top job. Some agency insiders point to her handling of management issues, an alleged left-leaning editorial bias, and claims that she presided over security lapses, enabled unethical administrators, and wasted government funds as reasons to oppose her confirmation. These critics have quietly mounted a campaign to bring lawmakers around to their position.

Given that campaign, Bennett was expected to face vociferous opposition from Senate Republicans, so much so that the Washington Post — whose coverage of USAGM is seen by some observers as sympathetic to Bennett and others in her orbit — ran a piece late last year entitled, “Biden favorite to run Voice of America parent agency could face trouble with Senate GOP.” (Bennett is married to Don Graham, the former Post publisher who founded an immigration-reform nonprofit to which Post owner Jeff Bezos donated $33 million in 2018.)

But during a confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 7, Bennett faced no such trouble. In fact, only a handful of the committee’s members attended the session at all, and she fielded mostly softball questions from those lawmakers — including two Republicans — who were present. Some of the only questions addressing the potentially controversial aspects of her nomination came from Bob Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat who chairs the committee. He asked about some complaints that she had directed coverage in a way that was sympathetic to authoritarian regimes, adding that he was giving her a chance to preempt criticism that could be raised during a full committee meeting. (Bennett replied that her whole career was about truthful news, not advocacy, and certainly not advocacy for repressive regimes.)

The uneventful hearing frustrated many in the tiny community of those who closely follow USAGM controversies, and McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, took note.

“As I understand [it], there was not a robust round of questioning at the hearing due to various time conflicts, and that is understandable given the nature of legislative duties,” McCaul wrote in a June 9 letter to the GOP members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The letter noted that the window for senators to submit questions to Bennett for written response remained open, and suggested several that McCaul would like to see asked. (That window has since closed, but not before at least one senator submitted several questions for Bennett to answer about her record.)

McCaul’s intervention here is particularly significant, because he was a vocal critic of Trump’s pick to lead USAGM, Michael Pack, whose management of the agency proved controversial and touched off several court fights. During Pack’s time at the helm, McCaul repeatedly derided him for declining to submit to congressional oversight efforts. Now, with Bennett sailing toward confirmation before the full Senate, McCaul is again leading the charge for tougher scrutiny.

In his letter, McCaul suggested six questions about Bennett’s record, as well as about the philosophy according to which she would run USAGM. He asked the senators to interrogate Bennett’s philosophy of U.S.-backed media agencies, and whether she believes that there is absolutely no room for U.S.-government intervention in certain editorial decisions that have national-security implications: “If the President orders the agency not to run a story because lives might be endangered, does she believe USAGM can ignore the President’s directive?” Bennett has previously suggested that she doesn’t think that U.S. officials can ever intervene in USAGM editorial decisions.

In addition, McCaul’s letter noted that Bennett’s tenure at VoA overlapped with the purchase of a costly content-management system whose rollout failed, and with “improprieties” in VoA’s Persian Service. He also noted a 2020 investigation ordered by Pack and conducted by the McGuire Woods law firm — as well as other reports by the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — that found “serious failings” in USAGM’s security procedures.

“Bennett should be asked why she did nothing to prevent the lapses, what her general views of the McGuire Woods report are, and why lawmakers should not expect that additional lapses will not [sic] continue to happen if she is confirmed,” McCaul wrote.

And, pointing to an issue that could become a critical objection to Bennett’s confirmation, McCaul also accused the agency of running “what amounted to Biden campaign endorsements in the past.” He cited an internal VoA report commissioned by Bennett, which found that “the perception of biased news coverage exists among agency employees.”

For her part, Bennett told the Foreign Relations Committee last week that she rejects biased news coverage and has done so throughout her career.

“I think that in my nearly 50-year career in journalism, I have striven to make sure that I always uphold the principles of neutrality, non-partisanship, unbiased reporting and journalism,” Bennett said. “And I intend to keep on fulfilling those principles.”