The World Reacts to President Trump Shuttering of U.S. Global Media, by Bill Wanlund
The Trump Administration’s March 14 announcement that it was shutting down the Voice of America and other U.S. Government broadcast media garnered heavy press coverage, much of it critical. Below, PDCA presents a sampling of media reaction to Trump’s decision.
CNN and other media report that, while VOA has shut down and its employees fired or put on administrative leave, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) are – for now - continuing to broadcast and have sued the Trump Administration to restore their funding.
The RFE/RL suit, [Case 1:25-cv-00799] was filed March 18 in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and names as defendants the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM); Victor Morales, USAGM’s Acting CEO; and Kari Lake, Morales’s senior advisor. (President Trump had earlier chosen Lake to be VOA Director, pending USAGM approval.)
The suit argues that, while VOA staffers are federal employees, RFE/RL journalists work for nonprofit agencies funded by federal grants provided by Congress and are therefore immune from Executive Branch personnel actions.
In a March 17 editorial, The Washington Post called VOA and the other USAGM broadcasters “the epitome of ‘soft power’ for the United States, the muscle that comes not from armies but from credible news and information… If all these courageous reporters and editors suddenly stop — as ordered by the president — millions of people will be abandoned to dictatorships that treat information as a tool of control.”
Former VOA Director (1994-96) Geoffrey Cowan, writing in the Los Angeles Times March 19, wrote “Under Trump, the Voice of America has fallen silent. U.S. enemies are cheering.” Russia and China, he wrote, “continue their robust international broadcasting operations, as do Iran and many of America’s friends and adversaries.” USAGM affiliate partner stations “need to fill air and screen time (and) are already lining up programs from the international broadcasting services of Russia and China to replace American programming.”
The American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) called USAGM “a critical instrument of foreign policy and national security” and said VOA “is vital“ to advancing American interests, democracy, and press freedom worldwide.” Losing it “weakens the nation’s ability to counter disinformation, promote objective journalism, and engage global audiences just when these efforts are more vital than ever.” AFSA vowed to mount “a vigorous defense of USAGM and the Foreign Service professionals whose expertise is indispensable to its mission.”
Yale Historian Timothy Snider turned over his March 19 Substack posting to Stanislav Aseyev, whom Snider describes as “a Ukrainian philosopher, writer, and journalist who reported from Russian-occupied Ukraine for Radio Liberty.” Aseyev begins his essay, titled “America Destroys One of its Own,” with a description of his electroshock torture by Russian agents in 2017 “for articles I’d written for Radio Liberty… By that time, I’d managed to write fifty-some articles for Radio Liberty, which exposed the totalitarian world of torture in the occupied territories of Ukraine. The masked people who tortured me told me Radio Liberty was still a branch of the CIA, and therefore an unequivocal enemy of Russia.”
Other Voices
The Director General of German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Peter Limbourg, warned that authoritarian governments such as Moscow and Beijing would seek to fill the gap left by any US retreat from state-funded international broadcasting. “Trump has weakened freedom and strengthened autocracy," Limbourg said, adding that DW and other international public media organizations would be unable to fill the void alone. “As long as there is a vacuum, the Chinese and Russians will intervene…. Europe really urgently must do something.”
AP reported March 18 that Europe is considering filling the vacuum left by the departure of American broadcasters. Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský pointed out that “[RFE/RL] broadcasts to a number of countries from Russia to Iran and Belarus, where it is an anchor for democratic forces…it is in the interest of Europe that the broadcasting will continue…. The institution is composed of people, processes, systems, and collaborations with other broadcasters. If that ends, then we can’t simply replace it. So, it’s imperative to discuss what we can do to preserve the institution if the US cuts funding.”
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas recalled RFE/RL’s influence on her as she grew up in Estonia — then part of the Soviet Union. “It is sad to hear that the U.S. is withdrawing its funding,” Kallas said. “Coming from the other side of the Iron Curtain, it was (from) the radio that we got a lot of information. So, it has been a beacon of democracy.”
On March 15, the White House issued another EO, titled “The Voice of Radical America,” saying, “President Donald J. Trump’s executive order (of March 14) will ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.” As evidence, the EO cited ten examples, most or all disputed by factcheckers as misleading, incomplete or false.
Autocracies Applaud
The Chinese Communist Party daily newspaper Global Times (GT), a major propaganda outlet, exulted. In a March 17 article, it called VOA “a lie factory” and gloated that, “The so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.” GT predicted that, “As more Americans begin to break through their information cocoons and see a real world … the demonizing narratives propagated by VOA will ultimately become a laughingstock of the times.”
Russia seemed pleased as well. On March 17 the independent Moscow Times ran the headline, “’Today We Celebrate’: Kremlin and Russian Propaganda Rejoice as Trump Guts RFE/RL, VOA.” Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Kremlin-backed RT network and the Rossiya Segodnya news agency, said, “This is an awesome decision by Trump…We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself."
On the record, said the paper, Russian officials played down the development. “These media outlets can hardly be called popular or in demand in Russia; they are purely propagandistic. This is an internal sovereign matter of the United States; it does not particularly concern us,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
However, citing anonymous “high-ranking officials,” Moscow Times reported that that “the Kremlin was irritated by RFE/RL’s regional affiliates that broadcast in local and Indigenous languages…(because) they undermined the wartime censorship Moscow imposed after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Two current and two former Russian officials told the paper that these outlets’ reporting had created serious problems for Kremlin propaganda, damaging Moscow’s influence in the post-Soviet region.”
Bill Wanlund is a PDCA Board Member, retired Foreign Service Officer, and freelance writer in the Washington, DC, area. His column, Worth Noting, appears occasionally in the PDCA Update and the PDCA Blog; it seeks to address topics of interest to PDCA members.