Bill Wanlund's Worth Noting: The Nimble Ms. Lake
Kari Lake, special adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM, the parent agency to the Voice of America and other U.S. Government broadcasters) boasted to Fox News Digital last week how the agency sprang into action to bring news of the U.S. military’s removal from office of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to Latin American audiences:“[T]he minute I heard about it, I had the team down in Miami that operates our office of Cuba broadcasting on the phone," Lake said, going on to describe “a rapid expansion of coverage, with the agency ramping up broadcasts, expanding language services and surging personnel within hours…broadcasting directly into Cuba, Venezuela, and across Latin America.”
Lake, however, is nothing if not nimble in her expressed views. She wasn’t so generous last year with her assessment of those who worked for USAGM, telling the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the whole Agency was “rotten to the core” and “riddled with dysfunction, bias, and waste.”
On the other hand, in December 2024, when President-elect Trump announced his support for Lake to be Director of VOA, she happily posted on the social media platform X that VOA was a “vital international media outlet” that promotes “democracy and truth.”
Since Trump’s inauguration, Lake has overseen the forced departures of hundreds of VOA employees.
I asked Steve Herman, a fellow PDCA member and former VOA White House correspondent (and one of those Lake forced out of his job) for his take on Lake’s remarks. He replied, “Ten months ago, Lake and DOGE effectively destroyed U.S. international broadcasting. Everyone at VOA was sent home (where nearly all remain). What has been hastily brought back, as a claimed ‘statutory minimum,’ resembles a Potemkin village.”
Steve also noted that, “Lawmakers in both parties want to restore $643 million for USAGM, recognizing its longtime value as a key instrument of American public diplomacy. Lake’s reaction was to grumble, ‘Congress is proposing half a billion dollars more in funding than we requested.’ That’s not a statement of gratitude, rather a repudiation of Capitol Hill’s largesse.”
As a boss, Kari Lake did the right thing by praising the fast response of the skeleton crew of remaining USAGM employees and suddenly-laid-on contractors to report the Administration’s action in Venezuela (no matter your opinion of that action). It’s a gesture bosses should make.
But, as a journalist, Steve Herman also does the right thing when he points out the inconsistencies between Lake’s situational praise for USAGM and her determination to make that agency go away. Lake’s accolades for USAGM’s performance begin to sound like hypocrisy when they bump up against her insistently stated intention to do away with it.
(Steve’s observations quoted here were later incorporated into his January 14 Substack post “Potemkin Airwaves,” appearing here as a PDCA blog.)
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 PD Today and the PDCA Blog; it seeks to address Public Diplomacy and related topics of interest to all.