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Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist Named VOA Director


Amanda Bennett will be sworn in as the new Director of the Voice of America on Monday, April 18, 2016.
Amanda Bennett will be sworn in as the new Director of the Voice of America on Monday, April 18, 2016.

Amanda Bennett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author, has been chosen as the new director of the Voice of America, the U.S. government’s largest international broadcaster.

Bennett will be sworn in on Monday April 18 at VOA headquarters, according to a statement from the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which oversees VOA and four other U.S. broadcasting entities.

Bennett served as the executive editor of Bloomberg News, where she created and ran a global team of investigative reporters and editors until 2013. Previously, she was editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. She also spent two decades as an editor and reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where she and her colleagues shared a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on how public health officials misrepresented the AIDS epidemic in order to secure more public funding and financial support.

“I am confident that Amanda is the best person to lead VOA through the vast media challenges of the 21st century,” said BBG CEO John Lansing

Bennett is the author of six books including “In Memoriam” (1998), co-authored with Terence B. Foley; “The Man Who Stayed Behind” (1993), co-authored with Sidney Rittenberg; “Death of the Organization Man” (1991) and “The Quiet Room” (1996), co-authored with Lori Schiller.

"The Cost of Hope," Bennett’s memoir of the battle she and Foley, her late husband, fought against his kidney cancer, was published in 2012.

More recently, she has been a contributing columnist for The Washington Post. With her husband, Donald Graham, she co-founded The Dream.US, which provides college scholarships to the children of undocumented immigrants.

"I am happy and excited to be part of such a vital news organization," said Bennett. "We are the only source of reliable, objective, credible news and information for a large part of the world. What’s more, our mission of covering the fascinating complexity of our country and its people is a beat like no other.”

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    The Voice of America provides news and information in more than 40 languages to an estimated weekly audience of over 326 million people. Stories with the VOA News byline are the work of multiple VOA journalists and may contain information from wire service reports.

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