The decision was met with dismay in Europe and delight in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran. Trump on March 14 decided to cut funding for the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) – home to international radio stations Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).
Hundreds of staff members – categorised as “radical left crazy people” by Trump ally and advisor Elon Musk – were placed on leave at the decades-old media outlets which, together, broadcast in more than 60 languages to 420 million listeners in more than 100 countries.
They are among “the few credible sources in dictatorships like Iran, Belarus, and Afghanistan”, said Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky at a meeting in Brussels on Monday as he urged EU leaders to stump up funds to save RFE/RL.
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A ‘lie factory’
But in Russia, China and Iran, media outlets celebrated the news. “This is an awesome decision by Trump!” said Margarita Simonyan, editor of Russia’s RT network. “We couldn’t shut them down, unfortunately, but America did so itself.”
The Kremlin did not comment but current and former Russian officials told independent media outlet The Moscow Times that it was glad to see the outlets go.
In recent years, the Kremlin was “especially irritated” by RFE/RL’s attempts to undermine “the wartime censorship Moscow imposed after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine” in Russia and former Soviet countries, the news outlet said.
An editorial in China’s Global Times branded VOA a “lie factory” that was “widely recognised as Washington’s carefully crafted propaganda machine”.
“When it comes to China-related reporting, VOA has an appalling track record,” it said, criticising its coverage of China’s treatment of the Uighurs, tensions in the South China Sea and Beijing’s economic difficulties.
In Iran, some media outlets said Trump had put a stop to “wasting money” to pay “corrupt” journalists who wanted to overthrow Tehran’s regime.
Soft power
Silencing VOA and RFE/RL “is not just like any other news organisation closing”, says Martin Scott, professor of media and global development at the University of East Anglia in the UK.
Both organisations are symbolic of the US itself, and its position in the world order, Scott adds. “They are an expression of US values in relation to press freedom and democracy.”
VOA was founded in 1942 to promote democratic ideas in Nazi Germany, including sharing content like American music programs as a form of cultural diplomacy. During the Cold War, RFE began broadcasting to Soviet satellite states while its sister station RL focused on the Soviet Union.
VOA, especially, is “a soft power tool that has been used since the Second World War”, says Jack Thompson, a lecturer in the American studies department at the University of Amsterdam. “It has been part of US foreign policy for the entire post-World War II era.”
Its success in building global reach was due, in part, to its annual budget of $267.5 million – a large sum compared with other public service international broadcasters.
“Voice of America had the means and the scale,” says Scott. “It was effective because of its massive reach in so many different languages to so many hard-to-reach precarious parts of the world.”
Both radio stations had undeniably political aims. “Their entire job was to highlight aspects of regimes that are run counter to what you might call liberal democratic values,” Thompson says.
The impact of their loss will be “enormous”, Alsu Kurmasheva a Radio Free Europe journalist who was freed from detention in Russian as part of a prisoner exchange in August 2023, told CNN. “How is America going to tell its story?”
A ‘democratic disaster’
Why would Trump want to silence pro-US media? Their government-funded but independent stance goes against the project 2025 plan to reshape the US federal government put forward by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation and endorsed by members of the Trump administration.
“The idea is that the president is the sole repository of all democratic authority, and there should not be democratic checks and balances against him – including independent federal agencies like the USAGM,” says Kate Wright, senior lecturer in media and communications at the University of Edinburgh and co-author with Martin Scott of “Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America“.
The president has attacked the USAGM since his first term and has been spurred on by new advisor Musk, who is in charge of overseeing sweeping government cuts.
Musk “is one of the first people that started saying the US needed to get rid of Voice of America”, says Thompson, “in part because he is an economic libertarian and he wants to dramatically shrink the size of the US government, and in part because he and a lot of others on the right viewed VOA and FRE/RL as essentially being captured by extreme left-wingers. They thought that too much of their content was woke.”
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But as the US decreases its media footprint, it risks ceding influence to other global powers. Around the world, “authoritarian countries are pushing more and more money into international media networks”, says Wright. “Media is the first and most consistent target for would-be autocrats.”
Amid a global wave of democratic backsliding, she says “the decision to withdraw a course of credible and independent journalism is a democratic disaster”.
If sources such as Voice of America disappear, their vast audiences will not stop seeking out news – they will get it from the few alternative sources they have available to them. “Often all you’re left with is news and information that is perhaps unreliable, untrustworthy, or not independent,” says Scott.
American think tank the Lowry Institute found that in Asia in 2024, VOA was the number one ranked foreign media radio broadcaster by a considerable margin. But in second place was Russia’s Sputnik.
The average listener may not be able to distinguish much difference between the two says Thompson, meaning that if one becomes unavailable, “they will get their information from another source. And if the next best source is Sputnik, then they are going to get their information from Sputnik.”
“There can’t be empty space in media,” adds Kurmasheva. Without organisations like RFE/RL, she says, “Russian and Chines propaganda will fill [the gaps].”
She hopes her organisation will find a way to survive with its values intact. “We are still in business. Nobody quit. Nobody resigned. Our leadership is working on it and we hope we will stay in business one way or another,” she said.
But the Trump administration may have other plans for its diminished global networks. “It may be that their intention is to replace these journalists with perhaps more compliant journalists,” says Wright, “or to create a new network, which perhaps would not be bound by the sort of legal restrictions that protects Voice of America from political interference. We can’t assume this is the end of the road.”
This article was adapted from the original in French.
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