Gutting VOA

Mar 18 2025 The BBC & The Guardian

A few days ago Trump signed an executive order “to strip back federally funded news organisation Voice of America, accusing it of being "anti-Trump" and "radical".

Trump moves to close down Voice of America

A White House statement said the order would "ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda"

The order targets the Agency for Global Media, which funds VOA, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia. Overall the organisation broadcasts in 49 languages, and has a weekly estimated audience of more than 361 million people.

VOA was founded during WWII to counter Nazi propaganda, and Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia were originally founded to counter communism.

Mike Abramowitz, VOA's director, said he and virtually his entire staff of 1,300 people had been put on paid leave.

Some US politicians and right-wing media were happy about the cuts in funding, but nowhere near as happy as the Chinese state media.

Chinese state media celebrates Trump’s cuts to Voice of America and Radio Free Asia

Beijing's Global Times said that the VOA has "now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag".

“From smearing human rights in China’s Xinjiang … to hyping up disputes in the South China Sea … from fabricating the so-called China virus narrative to promoting the claim of China’s ‘overcapacity’, almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it”

But not everyone agrees that it is a good idea to dismantle VOA.

Radio Free Asia’s union said in a statement that the move would “hand a victory to the Chinese Communist party, which harbors a particular disdain for free media and truth” and would “embolden Kim Jong-un’s totalitarian regime in Pyongyang, where information control reaches unprecedented levels”.