VOA Broadcaster Shares 2007 Gusi Peace Prize with Colleagues

and the Hellenic American Community

Washington, D.C., November 21, 2007 – George Bistis, Chief of Voice of America’s (VOA) Greek Service, received the 2007 Gusi Peace Prize Award for Broadcast Journalism at a gala ceremony held in Manila, Philippines today.

The Gusi Peace Prize Foundation cited Mr. Bistis for his “untiring efforts, working for people’s amelioration, to find peaceful solutions to political and social issues through broadcast journalism, through Voice of America.”

Mr. Bistis remarked that he shares “this great honor with all my colleagues at the Voice of America, who daily search for the truth, sometimes risking their own lives, in a collective effort to provide an accurate and balanced account of the events around the globe and to be a voice for those who are still denied basic human rights and freedoms, the oppressed, the abused, the neglected and the underprivileged.”

Mr. Bistis dedicated the Gusi Peace Prize to the Greek-American community “that upholds and defends the principles of Hellenism, freedom, democracy and compassion, on which the U.S. is founded.”  He also paid tribute to numerous Greek Americans who have inspired his work.

The Gusi Peace Prize Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Manila, Philippines that annually gives awards to individuals worldwide based on their contributions to peace and human rights. 

The VOA Greek Service produces radio and television news programs directly for stations in Greece, Cyprus and other countries. The weekly television program produced by the Greek Service is fed to affiliates via satellite. The combined total of viewers and listeners of VOA’s broadcasting in Greece exceeds half a million per week.  More information and programming is available at www.VOAnews.com/greek.

The Voice of America, which first went on the air in 1942, is a multimedia international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors.  VOA broadcasts more than 1,000 hours of news, information, educational, and cultural programming every week to an estimated worldwide audience of more than 115 million people.  Programs are produced in 45 languages.

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