On April 24, 1949, U.S. diplomats in Moscow reported something alarming: Soviet authorities were deliberately blocking Russian-language broadcasts from the Voice of America (VOA) radio network. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin saw the broadcasts as such a threat to his regime that he was willing to jam the frequencies with noise to keep Russians from hearing the truth.
Despite Soviet efforts, VOA broadcasts still reached the countries in the communist bloc. They countered the spread of lies, became a lifeline for people in totalitarian societies, and served as an inspiration for defectors who escaped. However, on March 14, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order taking VOA off the air for the first time since 1942, handing Russian President Vladimir Putin a victory that Stalin could have only dreamed of.
On April 24, 1949, U.S. diplomats in Moscow reported something alarming: Soviet authorities were deliberately blocking Russian-language broadcasts from the Voice of America (VOA) radio network. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin saw the broadcasts as such a threat to his regime that he was willing to jam the frequencies with noise to keep Russians from hearing the truth.
Despite Soviet efforts, VOA broadcasts still reached the countries in the communist bloc. They countered the spread of lies, became a lifeline for people in totalitarian societies, and served as an inspiration for defectors who escaped. However, on March 14, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order taking VOA off the air for the first time since 1942, handing Russian President Vladimir Putin a victory that Stalin could have only dreamed of.
Shortly after Trump’s executive order, one of Putin’s biggest mouthpieces, Russian TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov, went on the air and said that Russia is “for peace” in Ukraine and has been “since the beginning.” Putting VOA’s roughly 1,300-person staff on leave left no one on the air to repeat the truth: that it was Putin who invaded Ukraine in 2022, and it was Russian missiles that struck Ukraine last week only hours after Putin agreed to a partial cease-fire proposal with Trump.
Shuttering VOA and other media outlets under the umbrella of the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) is a win for Putin and dictators around the world. The cuts hit key broadcasters such as Radio Martí in Cuba—a U.S.-funded outlet that the country’s ruling Castro brothers tried to dismantle for decades—as well as other networks in Afghanistan, Belarus, Georgia, and Iran.
The Chinese Communist Party celebrated the move, calling Radio Free Asia (RFA)—another U.S.-funded network that faces cuts—a “lie factory.” RFA has done important stories like Beijing’s crackdown on Christianity inside China and the undercounting of COVID-19 deaths in the city of Wuhan in 2020. Without RFA, people living in China, North Korea, and Myanmar will be cut off from fact-based news.
Elon Musk has claimed that no one listens to Radio Free Europe, another USAGM network, or to VOA, but that is simply not true. Last year, VOA and its affiliated networks had a record audience of 427 million people in more than 100 countries every week. They gave a platform to the most vulnerable women living under Taliban rule. They covered the brutal conditions for Russian conscripts and gave Ukrainians collecting evidence of war crimes hope that someday Putin’s forces will be held accountable.
VOA broadcasts have been a first line of defense for the United States against the firehose of lies and disinformation spread by dictators like Putin. They are the work of brave journalists who often risk their lives to report the truth from inside brutal regimes.
Right now, four USAGM journalists are held in prison in Vietnam, two in Russia, one in Azerbaijan, one in Belarus, and one in Myanmar. Journalists working in the United States are also at risk: VOA reporters serving audiences in the United States and abroad who are now losing their U.S. work visas due to the dismantling of the network could be forcibly returned to the countries they have reported on.
Having the courage to stand up for the truth will only grow more important: A World Economic Forum report last year warned that misinformation and disinformation driven by artificial intelligence will be the top global risk over the next two years.
Whether it is cryptocurrency scams on TikTok, lies about COVID-19 vaccines on Facebook, or foreign propaganda campaigns meant to undermine Americans’ faith in elections, the Trump administration’s unilateral disarmament in the information space is a huge mistake.
It’s not surprising: Instead of fighting the threat of foreign propaganda, many administration officials have spent years undermining the State Department’s Global Engagement Center and its efforts to counter disinformation. That is why, as the ranking member and senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I will work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to highlight the vulnerabilities of the void left by the dismantling of USAGM and VOA.
When wars break out, truth is one of the first casualties. As we head into an era in which AI could radically alter information warfare, Republicans and Democrats need to join together to restore and strengthen networks like VOA that have been countering propaganda since World War II. If we don’t fight to ensure the separation of fact from fiction and allow journalists to speak the truth, future generations will only know what governments tell them.
This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage of the Trump administration. Follow along here.
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