Donald Trump shoots his own global mouthpiece

Many have tried to stifle the Voice of America (VOA) in the eight decades since its hurried birth as a wartime broadcaster in 1942. These days China blocks its website and jams its signals. In 2017 Russia declared VOA to be a “foreign agent”. Yet it is President Donald Trump who may silence it for good.

His executive order on March 14th to “eliminate” the network as far as legally possible had an immediate effect. Its 1,300 staff members were placed on paid leave. Broadcasts in 48 languages soon stopped. Such is the demise of a network whose “jazz hour” famously beamed the “music of freedom” behind the Iron Curtain. A similar fate has befallen or awaits Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks’ Arabic-language outlets and Radio and TV Martí, which broadcast to Cuba.

For Elon Musk, America’s chief cost-cutter, the networks are just waste. “Nobody listens to them anymore” he posted on X, claiming they consisted of “radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money”. Mr Musk is wrong to say “nobody” listens. The US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the government body that oversees all these outlets, claims they reach 427m people weekly in 63 languages and over 100 countries. VOA alone has a bigger audience than other publicly funded international broadcasters, such as the BBC World Service (see chart 1). Few people in America will have heard of them because they do not broadcast to the home audience. This may explain why the outlets have few powerful friends there.

Yet there are legitimate and longstanding questions to be asked about whether they spread democracy and enhance American power, and whether they provide value for their annual $900m cost. These are even more salient in a world awash with blogs, newsletters and podcasts.

“Project 2025”, a conservative blueprint for Mr Trump’s second term, argued the USAGM was rife with left-wing bias, prone to repeating foes’ propaganda, poorly run and, because of lax practices in security clearances, a target for foreign spies. Little of this has been proved. Nevertheless, Project 2025 recommended reform of the agency if possible, or its abolition if not. Kari Lake, a former TV presenter and devotee of Mr Trump, who has been nominated as VOA’s director, for a time favoured reform and returning VOA to “its glory days”. When Mr Trump announced his executive orders, though, she declared that “from top to bottom, this agency is a giant rot.”

Controversy over VOA and its siblings dates back almost to their establishment. RFE and RL were set up in the early cold war, partly inspired by George Kennan, an American diplomat, to wage “organised political warfare” on the Kremlin. RFE transmitted to “captive nations” under Soviet occupation; RL beamed to the Soviet Union itself. After the collapse of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, RFE was accused of having crossed a legal line between reporting and incitement. Nearly two decades later the revelation that the CIA had been funnelling money to the stations led to efforts in the Senate to shut them down, using arguments that sound surprisingly contemporary: their high cost; that western European countries should pay; and the difficulty of knowing whether they were useful. Their defenders included Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.

Some ten years later the debate still raged: “The worth of the broadcasts, in dollars and cents, is almost incapable of measurement,” said a study published in 1982, concluding that “the benefits do seem substantial.” Many credit the stations with helping to defeat Soviet communism. Lech Walesa, Poland’s former president, said his country’s freedom was won by RFE and the pope. Meanwhile, RL was the first to broadcast the full text of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”, a book that reputedly struck Soviet leaders “like an atom bomb”. It is inevitably harder to assess the broadcasters’ contribution in more recent times.

Radio killed the Soviet star

By some measures the outlets have reported considerable success. Over the past decade they have nearly doubled the size of their weekly audience, from 215m in 2014 to 427m in 2024, despite increased competition. One reason for this may be that listeners see them as trustworthy. The Lowy Institute, an Australian think-tank, found that VOA accounted for 55% of online searches in 26 countries in Asia for foreign-radio broadcasters, well ahead of the second-most popular outlet, Russia’s Sputnik, with 27% (see chart 2).

The USAGM’s most valuable units are probably those that most Americans have never heard of, such as Radio Free Asia, which can reach audiences living under the boot of authoritarian states that have few other reliable sources of news. It is one of the few independent media outlets that can winkle stories out of North Korea, or can generate scoops from Xinjiang and Tibet in China. The revelations of ethnic Uyghurs being corralled in massive Chinese “re-education” camps were largely its work. It is also one of the few independent news outlets that reaches Uyghurs, who try to evade state censorship of the internet by listening to its radio broadcasts.

Though Russians face nothing like the levels of censorship and oppression of Uyghurs, RFE/RL plays an important role in nurturing independent local journalism. The strength of these outfits lies in their history as surrogates for local media behind the Iron Curtain, where they hired exiles to report on those countries in the local languages. This tradition continues today, with tailor-made programmes reaching the remotest regions that other outlets do not, from Dagestan to Siberia, and breaking stories about local corruption scandals and much more.

VOA is akin to a state broadcaster like the BBC, offering a mix of political (especially American) news and lifestyle features and has the largest audience. But it is harder to argue that it provides an irreplaceable service across much of the world. Never before have people had access to such a wide range of news sources. There are, however, exceptions, particularly in parts of Africa where VOA covers smaller countries and contested elections that are often ignored. Its publicity can play a role in protecting opposition politicians and activists. “In shining a spotlight on individual leaders, VOA helps to add a layer of security for them,” says Jeffrey Smith of Vanguard Africa, a pro-democracy outfit based in Washington. “It lets leaders of [oppressive] governments know that the world—and that Washington in particular—is paying attention.”

Staff at USAGM still hope that, faced with an outcry and lawsuits, the administration may relent. RFE/RL may be in a better position than their siblings as they may win a reprieve from European governments, ten of which said they would work together to find funding. The networks are trying to protect vulnerable staff from being sent home to repressive regimes. One reform option might be to merge overlapping functions and language services.

USAGM uses complex metrics to measure its impact, including its audience, its trustworthiness, influence, and whether it increases knowledge of international news, particularly in places targeted by state-sponsored disinformation. Yet are reach and trustworthiness enough?

Insiders argue that they produce invaluable journalism for less than Russia and China spend on their foreign-influence operations. They argue that they must be pricking a nerve, given the repression their journalists suffer: at least ten are currently in prison. Yet amid America’s wider retreat from the network of alliances that have largely kept the peace for almost 80 years, and its gleeful destruction of a liberal economic order that made it richer, there is little hope that arguments around soft power or appeals to high-minded ideals will sway Mr Trump or Mr Musk.

Nor will the gloating of America’s foes. “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately,” said Margarita Simonyan, the editor of Russia’s RT network. “But America did so itself.” As their broadcasts cease, candles of hope in some of the world’s darkest places are being snuffed out.