Voice Of America Greek Service
Archive 1942 – 2014
Voice of America (VOA) is the state-owned international radio broadcaster of the United States. It is the largest and oldest U.S.-funded international broadcaster. VOA produces digital, TV, and radio content in 48 languages, which it distributes to affiliate stations around the globe. VOA was established in 1942 and it is primarily viewed by a non-American audience. VOA is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and is overseen by the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), an independent agency of the U.S. government. Indicatively, in 2016, VOA broadcast an estimated 1,800 hours of radio and TV programming each week to approximately 236.6 million people worldwide.
On August 11, 2014, after 72 years on air, the Voice of America Greek Service – one of the longest-running language services of VOA – concluded the final broadcast to its listeners in Greece, Cyprus, and beyond. The Greek broadcasting service, comprised of a small yet dedicated team of experienced journalists, was established on November 1, 1942, and went on to cover historic turning points of modern Greece, from the civil war in the late 1940s, to the accession to the E.U., and most recently the country’s struggles to remain an integral part of the E.U. The Greek Service was among the first services at VOA to transition to exclusively affiliate-based broadcasting in the early 1990s. For over seven decades, the staff of VOA Greek Service served as an objective news source, providing regular and ad-hoc content to its affiliate stations in Greece, with unique perspectives on U.S. politics, coverage of issues concerning the Greek-American community, and live Q&As during major global news events.
The physical and digital archive of the Greek broadcasting service of Voice of America has now been donated to the Hellenic American Project (HAP). Sixteen boxes containing the Greek Collection of legacy broadcast media, as well as more than 60 digital video files were recently transferred to HAP, after the U.S. Agency for Global Media, VOA’s parent agency, and the Hellenic American Project Cultural Center, Inc. signed a memorandum of agreement in July 2022. The Collection includes Greek broadcasts, as well as interviews with key figures that spanned the period of approximately July 1969 to June 2014. HAP and its expert staff will supervise and be responsible for the preservation and presentation of the VOA Greek Service Archive, both in physical and digital form. Following an extensive process of cataloguing and dissemination, the audiovisual material will, then, be accessible to the public, physically, in a newly-furbished space within the HAP facilities at Queens College in the City University of New York, and, after a process of digitization, will be published and made accessible online through the VOA Greek Service Archive website. Additionally, the audiovisual material of the VOA Greek Service Archive will be used as stock footage in future projects of HAP’s production company anthroPhos, as well as rented or donated for use by other production companies and non-profit organizations.