President Trump’s efforts to mute Voice of America and other U.S.-government-funded international broadcasters may not have received as much attention as his many other sallies, perhaps because these media outlets do not broadcast within the United States and so are not well known. But stifling America’s voice around the world carries serious consequences: It strips the United States of one of its most venerable and effective instruments of soft power.
The order to eliminate the U.S. Agency for Global Media “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law” was tucked into a measure also shutting down several other small government entities. As with so many of the president’s decrees, the answers to many questions remained unclear, including whether Mr. Trump had the legal authority to cut off the outlets, and whether they would be revised or fully dismantled.
Global Media is an umbrella agency that oversees VOA and several other global media “radios,” as they’ve been collectively known — including the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Also under the umbrella is the Open Technology Fund, formally started in 2019, which supports uncensored internet access to over two billion people.
Collectively, the outlets reached more than 425 million listeners or viewers worldwide. VOA, which counted approximately 360 million of those people in nearly 50 languages, fell silent immediately.
No one would dispute that the radios, most with their origins in World War II and the Cold War, required updating for a rapidly changing world with rapidly evolving technology.
But they were emphatically not a waste of money or effort. For millions of people worldwide — especially in places like Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela, where access to information is jealously controlled by authoritarian regimes — the American radios were a source of trusted news and information about the world and, more important, their own countries. For many Russians, Radio Liberty was the main source of reliable information about the war in Ukraine.
The radios were also a window into America and a Western culture of openness, democracy, press freedom and civil liberties — the sort of outreach that defines “soft power,” the ability to influence the world and project American values without resorting to arms, threats, insults or punitive tariffs.
I spent many years as a correspondent in the Soviet Union and then Russia, and can testify to the extraordinary influence of the Western broadcasts — most notably the Russian-language broadcasts by VOA, Radio Liberty, the BBC and Deutsche Welle. In the Soviet era, all were consistently “jammed” — drowned in noise broadcast from nearby towers, which were easily identifiable by their spokes, which resembled broken umbrellas. People quickly learned how to listen anyway, either in rural areas free of jamming or by tuning to the edge of the frequency. Some recorded the broadcasts, and the tapes and transcripts quickly spread through underground networks.
I was especially familiar with the Radio Liberty broadcasts during my years in the Soviet Union because my father, Alexander Schmemann, an Eastern Orthodox priest and theologian, had a weekly program in Russian about religion and culture. The show was popular. Many of the dissidents I met tuned in regularly, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for one, described to friends how he had listened “with spiritual delight.”
At one of the first jazz concerts in Moscow after the Soviet Union collapsed, a buzz swept through the packed hall. “Willis Conover is here!” people said. I had never heard of him, but jazz lovers in the Soviet Union grew up on the “Jazz Hour” program on VOA, which Mr. Conover hosted from 1955 until his death in 1996. At its peak, the program was listened to by up to 30 million people. That’s soft power plus.
Most important was news, which was the central mission of all the Western stations. While at college, I was an intern one summer on the Radio Liberty news desk, and the strict guiding rule was objectivity. The people behind the Iron Curtain who risked tuning in to a foreign broadcast, I was told, were allergic to propaganda, and would not take a big risk to get more of it.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, the radios were allowed to open bureaus inside Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere, and although their mission was now different, listeners continued to tune in for news they had learned to trust. Finally forced out of Russia as President Vladimir Putin tightened his authoritarian controls, the stations once again reverted to serving as an outside source of information, especially about Ukraine.
Not surprisingly, Russia and China rejoiced at the news from Washington. “This is an awesome decision by Trump,” declared Margarita Simonyan, editor of Russia’s huge state-controlled international propaganda network, RT. “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself.” China’s Global Times, which has long chafed over reporting on VOA, gloated that the station had now been “discarded like a dirty rag.”
Russians who had relied on Radio Liberty, meanwhile, mourned. Editors of Novaya Gazeta Europe, successors to a newspaper banned in Russia, wrote on their site that their work “will become more difficult without Radio Liberty, and many Russians will lose access to important information about what is happening in their country.”
“During the Cold War, VOA was a lifeline for those living under tyranny, and its mission was equally relevant today,” Michael Abramowitz, the head of VOA, wrote me in an email. “Our agency was an important instrument for combating false narratives about the United States that are pushed by American geopolitical rivals like China, Iran and Russia. Those countries are spending billions on information warfare, and closing VOA will unilaterally disarm America.”
None of that seemed to matter for Mr. Trump. He appointed Kari Lake, a former news anchor and unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor and senator in Arizona, as a special adviser on the U.S. Agency for Global Media, and a recent White House statement referred to VOA as “the Voice of Radical America.” It appears, however, that Elon Musk — who declared VOA to be a nest of “radical left crazy people”— set his chain saw onto the radios first, before Ms. Lake could get to work.
What next? Like other Trump executive orders, the legality of this one is moot. Congress chartered the agency as an independent one, and the lawsuits have begun. Many Republicans were supporters of international broadcasting, but this is another battle that they seem not to be fighting. The silence is deafening.
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