A VOA Story: Thoughts on the Passing of a Major VOA Figure by Dan Robinson
The new year began with tributes to a major figure from the Voice of America. André Peter de Nesnera, former correspondent and head of VOA’s news division, died at home on Christmas Day of complications from Parkinson’s Disease and long-term Guillain-Barré Syndrome. He was 72. An obituary can be seen here. A short video of Andre is viewable on the VOA website.
Andre and I were sworn in together at VOA in 1980. We would both go into foreign correspondent work. Andre would head news bureaus in Geneva and VOA’s first Moscow bureau and would later also report from London. I was VOA’s Southeast Asia and East Africa bureau chief in the 1980s and 1990s, Burmese (Myanmar) Service chief, and later congressional and White House correspondent.
As Andre’s obituary details, he emigrated to the United States in the early 1970s from Paris with his mother of Russian origin, and Hungarian father. Fluent in French and Russian, he would become an interpreter for the State Department and worked for a time as a desk assistant at CBS News in New York before finding his way to VOA. The obit says that Andre “credited the editors he met there with teaching him how to write a news story that was unbiased, accurate, and comprehensive -- skills that shaped his journalistic sense of ethics and integrity.”
Andre and I worked day, evening and overnight shifts in VOA’s old newsroom in the Cohen Building
at 330 Independence Avenue. (VOA and the agency will soon begin what will likely be a multi-year process of moving to a new headquarters, a separate story.)
Tragically, Andre’s Moscow assignment was cut short as he was “stricken with a rare but reversible total paralysis known as Guillain-Barré Syndrome.” Medically evacuated, he waged a decades long battle with Guillain-Barre. From the obit: he had to “learn to walk, write, eat, and move all over again.”
“Eight months later he returned to VOA’s Washington headquarters in a wheelchair where he became editor of the Russia desk and continued intensive physical therapy to regain his strength and mobility. Eventually, he could walk with the use of a cane though he never recovered fully from GBS.”
In 2000, Andre was named head of VOA’s news division, a role our former mentor, the late Bernie Kamenske, occupied in the 1970s and into the early 1980s and amid controversies at VOA during the Reagan administration.
My approximately four-plus years heading VOA’s Burmese/Myanmar Service led to one of the only times I had a significant disagreement with Andre in his role as head of VOA’s newsroom. As the first news division correspondent to lead a language service, I felt it was important to impart methods of news gathering and writing to Burmese staff.
But I discovered that the standards in force back in the newsroom were basically strangling the language service. VOA Burmese would often go to air lacking important news items for its audience because various stories from news agencies had not been double or triple sourced and were often ignored by the central newsroom.
At the same time, our competition across town at the newly-created Radio Free Asia, a “grantee” entity (VOA is formally a federal entity) would air these stories. RFA was thus able to be heard by its audience to be more up-to-the-minute with breaking news. When it came time for program review, VOA Burmese was criticized for attracting fewer listeners, losing out to RFA, which would use even one source material but attributing to the source. A real conundrum.
Fairly early on, I initiated a process in which stories that were “missing in action” because of this
VOA central news approach were identified and written up by VOA Burmese staff, and used on the
air. I would carefully edit most if not all of these, and wrote many myself.
This circumvention came to the attention of the newsroom, and my friend Andre. What played out was typical of how things often happen. I had rocked the boat, and this would contribute to an acceleration of my eventual departure from the Burmese Service and re-assignment as VOA’s House of Representatives correspondent. Andre too would run into a Washington buzz saw, but in a much more visible way.
Heading the news division at the time of the 9/11 al-Qaeda terrorist attacks, he was in place when VOA obtained a phone interview with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. Andre faced the wrath of the State Department and scathing criticism from William Safire in The New York Times, for airing the content. Safire’s commentary (still viewable online) was famously titled: “Equal Time for Hitler”.
Andre defended VOA’s broadcast of the Omar content. But in 2004, he was removed as news
director. Later, he would receive the 2002 Tex Harris Award for Constructive Dissent from the American Foreign Service Association, and the 2002 Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism from
the University of Oregon.
In 2002, a followup commentary by Safire appeared in the Wilmington Star News, in which he criticized AFSA for the award to Andre. “Champagne corks popped [and Secretary] Powell's presence was taken to be an official apology,” Safe wrote at the time, “and Mr. de Nesnera was hailed by foreign service officers for "the courage to challenge the system from within."
From 2004 until his retirement in 2015, one year after I left VOA, Andre would work as a senior news analyst based in VOA’s newsroom, applying his deep knowledge of post-Communist Russia to background reports and live VOA programming.
Meanwhile, at the White House in 2011, my second year as chief correspondent there, VOA had gone years without obtaining a single interview with a U.S. president. That included President Barack Obama -- extraordinary given that VOA for decades maintained correspondents and a physical booth and traveled with presidents on foreign and some domestic trips.
The White House finally made Obama available to VOA for a 15-minute interview – the only one granted in the eight years of the Obama presidency. Andre was chosen to conduct it rather than VOA’s hard-working White House crew.
Presidential interviews often go to “star” anchors. But to us, the action had every appearance of being punitive and placed pressure on our relationship -- details I have never revealed, but do so here for the interest of PDCA readers. Despite the friction caused – Andre offered me his personal apology at one point -- the Obama interview would be a fitting high point for him who had endured so many professional and physical challenges during his career.
Near the end of 2013, what I and other VOA staff viewed as mismanagement of VOA’s news division (one senior VOA manager was memorably ordered to undergo anger management training) was testing everyone’s patience. Andre and I would discuss all of this during occasional lunches – he would rail about these issues.
My own departure from VOA in 2014 was sudden and controversial, including a public statement blasting what I saw as insensitive managers, and reflecting what many of my colleagues viewed as incompetent handling of VOA’s still nascent television efforts.
Andre honored our long friendship by speaking at my retirement event in the VOA Newsroom, and would leave VOA one year later. He would start a home-based voice over business. After a last email exchange in 2016 in which we inquired about each other’s lives, we fell out of touch but I knew that he continued to battle the effects of GBS and later Parkinson’s.
During Andre’s funeral in early January, our fellow former VOA correspondent Jim Malone gave a eulogy in which he recognized Andre’s long years of commitment to VOA and his battles against efforts in the early 2000s to place restrictions on VOA content.
As 2023 gave way to 2024 – more than two decades after Safire’s columns blasting VOA for giving a Taliban leader air time after the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks and comparing that to “equal time for Hitler” – VOA and its parent agency continued to be wrapped up in controversies.
VOA faced harsh criticism from members of Congress (primarily Republicans) over a refusal to call Hamas terrorists, “terrorists” after the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attacks that massacred 1,200 people in Israel. VOA’s new acting director described congressional furor, including calls for firings of certain VOA staff, as “silly”.
And after years in which a succession of VOA and USAGM managers tolerated and even encouraged advocacy journalism by agency reporters, and failed to respond to violations of VOA’s own news standards and best practices by the organization’s journalists, VOA is now pledging new crackdowns in both of these areas.
I do not know what my friend Andre may have been thinking amid the latest controversy over how VOA should refer to Hamas. This brought back memories of the furor in the 1980s over whether VOA should refer to the contras as “freedom fighters.” Were he still in the news director chair, he would likely be resisting any pressure on VOA from points external, even though in my view the Hamas issue brought self-inflicted damage to VOA that could easily have been avoided.
Since my departure from VOA in 2014, I have chosen to write critically about VOA and USAGM, “an outspoken critic” as The Washington Times noted at one point, choosing not to sit back and throw kisses in retirement, but to give visibility for taxpayers to issues that normally never see light of day.
It’s a course that likely did not please Andre. But to the extent that my post-VOA views diverge from predominantly positive coverage and commentaries about USAGM and VOA, I want to believe that given his support for dissent which he obtained recognition for in his career, Andre would have respected that.
Dan Robinson was a White House, congressional and foreign correspondent, and head of VOA’s Burmese Service between 1979 and 2014. His investigative articles, commentaries and comments about VOA/USAGM have appeared here in the blog and in The Washington Post, New York Times, Washington Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Center on Public Diplomacy, Al-Jazeera, and in the independent watchdog site USAGM/BBG Watch.