Geoffrey Cowan weighed in on the information war in Russia and Ukraine with an op-ed published in Politico on March 28.

At first glance, it may seem like Russian citizens have few options to obtain information outside of state media. As Cowan writes, “The [Russian] government has closed down the few remaining independent newspapers such as Novaya Gazeta and the Moscow Times. President Vladimir Putin signed a law that calls for sentences of up to 15 years in prison for people who distribute “false news” about the Russian military. CNN, Bloomberg, CBS, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and German ARD and ZDF have suspended reporting from inside Russia in response. Russia has shut down social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram that some Russians used to access news.

Yet despite the Kremlin’s sophisticated attempts to control the narrative surrounding its invasion of Ukraine, there are still ways to reach Russian audiences. As former director of the Voice of America, Cowan has a message for the West: focus on public broadcasting.

“It might seem like Russians have been shut off from all information except Putin-controlled state media — but they haven’t. The West has a lot of practice breaking through the wall of silence the Kremlin has reerected. To win the information war, we need to revamp the tools we already have in our information war arsenal.

Those include Western news services that broadcast into Russia via a range of technologies. The BBC World Service’s Russian broadcasts have played an important role, as have the Russian language services of Germany and France. But perhaps the most important and effective services are the Voice of America (which was created in 1942 to combat German propaganda) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (which was created to combat Soviet propaganda during the Cold War). Both are produced by the United States Agency for Global Media. As a group, these U.S.-funded journalists reach a weekly audience of about 400 million people in 62 languages.”

Read more.

On April 22, The L.A. Times published a non-partisan editorial co-authored by Geoffrey Cowan and James K. Glassman  in response to Trump’s recent criticism of the Voice of America. 

This past fall, Geoffrey Cowan taught “The Power and Responsibility of the Press” (JOUR200w) after the class’s popularity in the fall of 2017. It was the first ever General Education course offered by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and covered topics such as the Iraq War, the Pentagon Papers, whistle-blowing, journalistic ethics, and modern day politics. The class had close to 200 students and featured renowned guests such as Alan Dershowitz, Congressman David Dreier, and former Editor in Chief of Glamour Cindi Leive. He will also be teaching the class next spring.

For his spring semester class, “Social Responsibility of the News Media”, Geoffrey Cowan decided to give his students firsthand insight into the process for building a credible and high-quality news organization. Once a week, the students had a chance to speak by phone with staff members of the media start-up Axios, a new enterprise started by POLITICO’s Mike Allen that embraces the concept of “smart brevity”. The students learned about advertising, production, digital design, and journalism from the Axios’ perspective. The experience was a highlight for the students and, as a result, Annenberg News covered the unique series in its May article, “News outlet Axios gives journalism students an up-close look at its startup“.

In Volume 47, Issue 2 of Presidential Studies Quarterly, for June of 2017, Stephen Tootle called LTPR “a great history book” in his essay of reviews, “The Roosevelt You Already Knew“.

LTPR was also reviewed by the Theodore Roosevelt Association in their fall 2016 journal. James Strock, of the Board of Trustees of the TR Association, concluded his review of LTPR by writing that, “One expects that Let the People Rule will find its place on the select shelf of books to read by anyone seeking to comprehend Theodore Roosevelt and his era. Geoffrey Cowan has indeed produced a very admirable and very valuable work of historical scholarship.”

In the spring of 2017, Geoffrey Cowan traveled to Capitol Hill to make the case for and highlight the virtues of Voice of America, the U.S. government-funded multimedia news source and the official external broadcasting company of the U.S. Cowan explained the importance of English-language news broadcasting in other countries and the need for Voice of America as an organ of public diplomacy with distant parts of the world.

Geoffrey Cowan reviewed the same topic in a report published by the USC Center on Public Diplomacy called “Why the Voice of America Remains a Vital Force in the World” in March of 2017.  The article was modified from a speech that Geoffrey Cowan delivered to the World Affairs Council of the Desert in Indian Wells, CA, on December 13, 2015.