“An awesome decision” was one reaction to President Trump’s executive order to dismantle the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees American independent news outlets like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting.
That comment, though, came from Margarita Simonyan, editor of Russia’s major state-controlled international propaganda network, RT. “We couldn’t shut them down,” she continued, “but America did so itself.”
Similarly, China’s Global Times, under the auspices of The People’s Daily, which has long fumed over Voice of America reportage, expressed joy over the station’s having been “discarded like a dirty rag.”
The order to eliminate the USAGM “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law” immediately shut down all the media under its umbrella, which were reaching 425 million listeners or viewers worldwide in nearly 50 languages .
USAGM was created by an act of Congress, so the president cannot actually eliminate it by fiat. So, predictably, there have been lawsuits challenging the order. In response to one suit, US District Judge Royce Lamberth issued a temporary restraining order halting the funding freeze for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Last week, VOA Director Michael Abramowitz asked a different federal court to determine the lawfulness of the presidential decree defunding his broadcasts.
“The radios,” as the group of American broadcasters are collectively known, have served for decades as sources of news and windows into American press freedom and civil liberties. VOA was established in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda.
Proponents of those media characterize them as the US’ “soft power,” for their ability to influence the world and project American values without military or economic strong-arming.
And they have indeed been an informational lifeline to hundreds of millions of people in countries whose leaders strive to control the media in order to prevent their populations’ exposure to Western news and ideals.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, VOA was allowed to open bureaus inside Russia, but President Vladimir Putin, when he assumed power, ended that, designating the broadcaster as a “foreign agent,” blocking its signals and forcing it to once again broadcast from outside Russia. But Russian citizens, like other populations in other countries that jammed VOA broadcasts, have accessed VOA programming through social media.
The administration’s determination to cut fat from the national budget is admirable and much needed. But the radios—even though Elon Musk called VOA a nest of “radical left crazy people”—are meat, not fat. A steak knife, not a chainsaw, is in order.
But, aside from the threatened deprivation of world citizens from information at odds with their leaders’ propaganda, the new development poses dangers to some of the radios’ employees who are on J-1 visas (non-immigrant visas meant to encourage cultural exchange) and, if relieved of their duties, may have to return to their home countries and to uncertain fates.
Even currently, two VOA contributors are imprisoned in Myanmar and Vietnam and four contributors to Radio Free Asia are imprisoned in Vietnam. Russia, Belarus and Azerbaijan also reportedly have imprisoned journalists affiliated with the radios.
Dozens of VOA staffers in Washington, according to VOA reporter Liam Scott, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, “may have to return to countries whose governments have a record of jailing critics.”
A VOA employee who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, told the British daily newspaper The Guardian that the abandonment of those who have worked for the radios “reminds me of what happened to Afghan interpreters”—a reference to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 during the Biden administration that left Afghan interpreters for the US military stranded and in danger while trying to obtain special visas to escape to the US.
Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev, who was captured by the Russians and spent 962 days in the Izolyatsia torture prison that Russia created in occupied Donetsk, posted on social media, after his release as part of a prisoner exchange, that he was tortured because of his having written for Radio Liberty.
“Now,” he contends, “the ‘enemy of Russia’ is being destroyed by America itself, and my torture seems doubly in vain.”
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