President-elect Donald J. Trump on Wednesday night chose Kari Lake to lead Voice of America, aiming to put a fierce loyalist who has called journalists “monsters” in charge of a federally funded news outlet that reaches hundreds of millions of people around the globe.
Mr. Trump was accused of using his appointees to try to turn Voice of America, whose aim is to offer unbiased news to audiences around the world, into a pro-Trump propaganda outlet during his first term. In his announcement of Ms. Lake, a local TV news anchor turned election denier who lost races for Senate and governor in Arizona, Mr. Trump hinted that he believed he had found an ally to try to reshape its coverage.
Ms. Lake will “ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media,” Mr. Trump said in a social media post.
In 2022, Ms. Lake’s campaign for governor often leaned more on her vitriol toward news outlets and reporters than on her criticisms of the Democratic Party and her opponent, Katie Hobbs, now the governor of Arizona. Her attacks on the press mirrored those of Mr. Trump. Referring to journalists as “monsters,” she pledged to be reporters’ “worst nightmare” if elected.
“Let’s defund the press,” she said during one of her rallies.
She is set to sit atop an organization with a nearly $300 million budget and more than 2,000 employees, broadcasting in nearly 50 languages to a weekly audience of more than 326 million people. Founded in 1942, the outlet has a mission to counter propaganda and disinformation coming from authoritarian countries like China, Russia and Iran.
Mr. Trump’s White House attacked Voice of America over its editorial decisions during his first term, and his appointees were accused of trying to weaken journalistic safeguards.
In 2020, Mr. Trump appointed Michael Pack, an ally of his former aide Stephen K. Bannon, to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America and other federally funded media outlets.
Mr. Pack was accused of trying to turn Voice of America into a mouthpiece for the Trump administration, and a federal judge ruled that Mr. Pack had violated the First Amendment rights of the outlet’s journalists. A federal investigation later found that Mr. Pack had grossly mismanaged the U.S. Agency for Global Media, repeatedly abusing his power by sidelining executives he felt did not sufficiently support Mr. Trump.
He also rescinded a provision that prohibited U.S. government officials from meddling in the editorial decisions of Voice of America and its sister news agencies like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia. The provision, called a “firewall,” made his agency difficult to manage and “threatened constitutional values,” Mr. Pack said.
In April, President Biden appointed Michael Abramowitz, who was the president of Freedom House, a pro-democracy nonprofit organization, as the director of Voice of America. Mr. Abramowitz spent 24 years as a reporter and editor for The Washington Post. As the newspaper’s national editor, he led a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism.
Since abandoning her journalism career for electoral politics, Ms. Lake has frequently spread conspiracy theories and false assertions. In her 2022 race, she ran on the falsehood that Mr. Trump had won the 2020 presidential election and spun her own unsubstantiated claims that Ms. Hobbs committed election crimes. After narrowly losing to Ms. Hobbs in 2022, she refused to concede and instead brought legal challenges that were all later rejected by courts.
This year, after Representative Ruben Gallego defeated her in the Senate race by a wider margin than Ms. Hobbs did, she only hinted at a concession.
“I will never stop fighting for the state I love,” she said, in a video posted on her social media.
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