America’s news effort was launched on February 1, 1942, when the playwright Robert E. Sherwood took to the mike to deliver V.O.A.’s first words: “Today, America has been at war for seventy-nine days. Daily at this time, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth.” Sherwood—along with other early V.O.A. leaders, such as Edward R. Murrow, of CBS, and John Chancellor, of NBC—believed in presenting the news straight, but the argument about the agency’s mission and methods remained fractious. Presidents often grew frustrated that America’s voice was not plainly on America’s side. In 1943, on the day after Mussolini was overthrown, a V.O.A. broadcast quoted a New York Post columnist calling the Italian monarch, Victor Emmanuel, “the moronic little King.” President Franklin Roosevelt, in turn, criticized V.O.A. for conducting its own foreign policy, and directed its programmers to stick to undermining enemy morale.

A few years later, President Harry Truman, who saw no need for peacetime information programs, asserted that the private news business should be the primary “means of informing foreign peoples about this country.” But, once the Cold War erupted and American concern about Communism metastasized, Truman reversed course. In 1951, he established the Psychological Strategy Board to supervise the war of words with the Soviets and instructed V.O.A. to broadcast hard-hitting anti-Communist messages from new transmitters in Okinawa, Munich, several locations in the Philippines, and on a ship in the Mediterranean Sea. In 1952, V.O.A. programs were broadcast in forty-six languages, aimed mainly at Communist countries behind the Iron Curtain. Each language desk at V.O.A. headquarters met daily to go over “guidances” from the State Department—a few pages that didn’t mandate specific language to be used in newscasts but did give V.O.A. editors “the word for the day,” as Arthur Larson, the director of the U.S. Information Agency, which oversaw V.O.A. at the time, put it.

In 1953, televised hearings of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in Room 318 of the U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan’s Foley Square, focussed on “mismanagement and subversion” at V.O.A. “There are some people in the Voice of America who are doing a rather effective job of sabotaging” U.S. foreign policy, Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin who led the nation on a frenzied anti-Communist search, declared. His chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who would go on to mentor a young Donald Trump, interviewed more than a hundred V.O.A. staffers. The hearings made for great TV. Employees of V.O.A. were accused of harboring an interest in collectivist nudist camps, softening scripts to downplay the Soviets’ antisemitism, and positioning V.O.A. transmitters where magnetic storms might make it difficult for signals to reach the Soviet bloc. In March, 1953, Raymond Kaplan, a V.O.A. engineer who had worked on the transmitters, walked in front of a truck in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leaving behind a suicide note that told his family that he’d wanted to spare them the pain of being dragged through McCarthy’s hearings. McCarthy, who referred to V.O.A. as “Voice of Moscow,” called the suicide note fake news.

The subcommittee’s final report, signed only by its Republican members—Democrats had walked out of the hearings and resigned from the subcommittee—charged V.O.A. with broadcasting “anti-American content” and employing people “not dedicated to the American way of life.” V.O.A. fired thirty-one employees “for security reasons,” but little else came of the subcommittee’s findings. Still, for decades, V.O.A.’s identity crisis persisted. In the nineteen-sixties, three V.O.A. directors complained of pressure to conform to Administration policies. One such director, Henry Loomis, quit in 1965, to protest meddling by political appointees from Lyndon Johnson’s White House. (Chancellor, of NBC, wrote that V.O.A.’s reporters faced too much “interference by policy officers.”) And another director, John Daly, resigned in 1968 to protest “undercutting” by V.O.A.’s parent agency.

Other Western democracies had established a measure of independence for their international broadcast services; the BBC and Germany’s Deutsche Welle, for example, are protected by rules that restrict political leaders from influencing programming. The U.S. Agency for Global Media was similarly created to provide V.O.A. with a buffer from government interference. V.O.A.’s 1976 charter mandates “accurate, objective and comprehensive” reporting; the 1994 U.S. International Broadcasting Act also created a firewall to protect its editors from a President’s predilections. That is the firewall that V.O.A. journalists now say has been burned to the ground.