History of VOA
 

By Doug Johnson
American Mosaic, in VOA Special English.

Our listener question this week is from Nigeria. Prince Onyebuchi in Aba
Abia State notes that February twenty-fourth was the sixty-third anniversary
of VOA. He asks about the history.

The United States government established the Voice of America during World
War Two. The first radio broadcast was in a language no longer heard on VOA.
It was a fifteen-minute program in German. It aired on February
twenty-fourth, nineteen forty-two. It told the German people that every day,
VOA would broadcast news of America and the war. The announcer said The news
may be good or bad, but we will tell you the truth.

Today, VOA broadcasts more than one thousand hours of radio programs each
week in forty-four languages. VOA also has television programs in English
and a number of other languages. These include Albanian, Cantonese, French,
Indonesian, Mandarin and Persian. And VOA uses more than fourteen thousand
computer servers around the world to put information on the Internet.

VOA has three main duties under a Charter signed into law in nineteen
seventy-six. One is to report the news fairly. Another is to tell about
America and its people. The third duty is to present the policies of the
government as well as opinions about those policies.

When VOA began, all broadcasts were on shortwave. Today many local radio
stations around the world carry VOA programs. It is estimated that VOA
reaches more than one hundred million people each week through radio,
television and the Internet.

More than ten million individuals visited the VOA Web site last year. We are
happy to report that Special English is the third most popular page after
the VOA home page and standard English.

Visitors can get to us from the English learning link at voanews-dot-com.
Some VOA language services also link to our site. Or visitors can go
directly to voaspecialenglish-dot-com.

http://www1.voanews.com/SpecialEngli...RICAN%20MOSAIC