Authors Note
I’ve written about the sudden death of VOA before, but I just can’t get it out of my mind as it is personal as I’ll explain. VOA going dark is one of the most vile, hateful things Trump has done in the growing list of vile hateful things he is doing across the federal government and around the world with the death of USAID, PEPFAR and other changes to our ethos.
Additional List of Agency Cuts:
(i) the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service;
(ii) the United States Agency for Global Media;
(iii) the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution;
(iv) the Institute of Museum and Library Services;
(v) the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness;
(vi) the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund; and
(vii) the Minority Business Development Agency.
All of these cuts fit into an overall agenda to gut the government of those entities and ideas that do not give Trump a tangible return on investment. If he can’t touch the benefit of something it’s as good as gone. The most recent example of this perverted ideology is the cutting down of a Magnolia tree planted by President Andrew Jackson in honor of his wife who passed away in 1829. Trump claims it is in a bad way and must come down. I’m sure it’s a woke tree.
Just as the Magnolia tree will be cut down and removed, root and stem, so too is this the case with Trump’s gutting of much of what the government does that has simply been for the good of the nation and the world. We’ve done these things and others, in some cases, because we can and it’s the right thing to do with no transactional relationship expected or required, but that era is as dead as the VOA, Radio Free Europe and the tree.
VOA Was Part of My Childhood
As a young boy in the mid 1960s, with a Sony transiter short wave radio, I would scroll through the analogue dial late at night slowly and carefully tuning in stations from around the world, long before the internet was even a dream. Our single television was black and white with only four stations and we had a black phone on the wall, but I was able to tune in stations from around the world, sometimes with static, but other times, with crystal clarity.
A sampling of what was available, included Radio Moscow, Radio Peking (now Beijing), Radio Havana, the BBC, Japan, Germany, some others and the Voice of America. Short wave was an amazing technology as it bounces up and down between the ionosphere and the earth’s surface traveling around the globe, unlike local TV, AM and FM stations that were more limited in reach.
As I got older, I would listen to the VOA English language broadcasts for news, music and a slice of Americana. They would cover the news of the US and the world, never political nature, guaranteed by statute and their charter, but only to give listeners a balanced look into American culture. Much of their programing was in the 49 languages of the listeners from around the world.
The Firewall: An essential guarantee of the journalistic credibility of U.S. global media content is the firewall enshrined in USAGM’s enabling legislation, the U.S. International Broadcasting Act.
The firewall prohibits interference by U.S. government officials, including the USAGM’s Chief Executive Officer, in the objective, independent reporting of news by USAGM networks (VOA, RFE/RL, RFA, MBN, and Radio and TV Martí), thereby safeguarding the ability of USAGM journalists to develop content that reflects the highest professional standards of journalism, free of political interference.
I listened to VOA well into the 1980s, especially when I was stationed in the UK while in the Air Force as well as the Armed Forces Radio and Television Network. It was way for us to keep tabs on what was going on back home.
VOA Today
It’s been many decades since I listed to VOA, but according to Trump and Project 2025, The Mandate for Leadership, in their words, from page 236:
VOA uses digital, web, and mobile media as well, which, while sometimes useful in propagating valuable information globally, has created specific violations of the agency’s prohibition against broadcasting to the domestic U.S. audience—particularly with regard to flagrantly political content, as has been the practice with recent and current VOA content directors and managers.5 The network once had a generally well-received brand value, but it has deteriorated under decades of poor leadership and a loss of its once-prized unbiased reporting. There are bright spots within VOA, but mismanagement and declining production values have diluted its once great reputation as a singular voice in American news broadcasting abroad.
Project 2025 supporters have attacked the US Agency for Global Media, the mother agency of VOA, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, as well as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the mother agency for both PBS and NPR with this concluding statement:
If the de facto aim of the agency simply remains to compete in foreign markets using anti-U.S. talking points that parrot America’s adversaries’ propaganda, then this represents an unacceptable burden to the U.S. taxpayer and a negative return on investment. In that case, the USAGM should be defunded and disestablished. If, however, the agency can be reformed to become an effective tool, it would be one of the greatest tools in America’s arsenal to tell America’s story and promote freedom and democracy around the world.
That key phrase, “return on investment” must be tangible to Trump or it’s gone, but this is as short sighted as are many other decisions coming down verbatim from Project 2025, the very group Trump claimed to know nothing about during the campaign.
A reading of Trump’s executive order on the closure VOA, where his advisors found a few anecdotal topics that VOA covered that didn’t meet his approved ideology, suggests there would be no negotiations or even an attempt at reorganizing the network, but simply a quick quiet death and the firing of 1300 employees with a twice failed candidate, Kari Lake, getting the consolation job of managing the demise and placing her own picture on the front page of the now empty website.
State Department Comment on VOA’s Closure
Maybe it’s just me, but Tammy Bruce the new State Department spokesman, does not look and sound as if she believes what she is saying and makes the statement that people know and trust Kari Lake as the envoy of VOA something that leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Spokesman Bruce seemed unaware that the VOA was being shuttered and not simply undergoing changes as she spoke to the press.
Reactions to the VOA and Radio Free Europe & Asia Closure
As might be expected, those who stand to gain the most from the silencing of both VOA and the Radio Free Networks are praising the closure as a further sign of the US retreating from the world stage. China and Cambodia are thrilled to see us gone from the airwaves.
“We should highly appreciate President Donald Trump for his courage to lead the world in combating fake news, starting with news outlets funded by the US government,” Hun Sen, who was prime minister for almost four decades until he was succeeded by his son in 2023, wrote in a Facebook post late on Monday. “This is a big contribution to eliminating fake news.”
“When it comes to China-related reporting, VOA has an appalling track record,” it said, adding that “almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it.”
“We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself,” editor-in-chief of Russia’s state broadcaster said.
European nations have been highly critical of the closure of the Radio Free networks and are working on something of their own to replace it.
The one group that has been silent has been the Congress, where not a single member has spoken out in support of the VOA or the other networks. At least, none could be found in the research for this article.
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