With 275.2 million people worldwide regularly tuning in to Voice of America, fans in some of the countries most hostile to a free press trust VOA the most.

"In China, our surveys showed 89% of the Chinese trust us and in Turkey, the figure is 79%," VOA Director Amanda Bennett revealed Monday.

Bennett was the speaker at a forum in Washington, D.C. hosted by the U.S. Diplomacy Council.

She noted there were attempts by the Chinese government to block traffic from the digital broadcasts of the 77-year-old U.S. government broadcasting agency.

But nine million Chinese citizens are able to receive the broadcasts because they know how to deal with circumvention devices, explained the VOA director.

"They are banned by the law from seeing us, but they still seek us," Bennett said.

She also addressed Turkey, where the press has been regularly under fire from an increasingly authoritarian regime. According to the Swedish-based Stockholm Centerf or Freedom,  231 journalists have been arrested since 2016 and 122 have received jail sentences since 2018.

Rather than addressing any specific programs, Bennett simply showed a film clip of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's bodyguards attacking and beating protestors outside the Turkish embassy in Washington, D.C. during the strongman's visit in May 2017.

The clip shocked viewers throughout the U.S and the world, but was never shown by any TV outlets in Turkey — except for VOA, explained its director.

"It speaks for itself," she told Newsmax.

The current turbulence in Venezuela is also being showcased on VOA, Bennett said.

"And as a result of our Venezuelan coverage, [VOA] traffic is up in Iran and in China," she noted.

John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.