An executive order signed by President Trump aims to gut seven federal agencies in all, including the U.S. Agency for Global Media that oversees VOA, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia.
Global Media's budget request for the 2025 current fiscal year is $950 million. The agency says it employs about 3,500 journalists who reach a global audience of more than 400 million in 100 countries.
The history of the VOA goes back to World War II and the use of shortwave radios to hear its broadcasts in German-occupied Europe. After the war, VOA had a new mission when the Cold War was birthed. At the time the Soviet Union and its communist “Iron Curtain” attempted to shut off access to the West, including news and information.
The dismantling of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, now dates back more than three decades and six U.S. presidents.
Gary Bauer, of American Values, says Voice of America has wandered away from its original purpose.
“Voice of America was supposed to be a voice of propaganda, propaganda in favor of the United States of America,” he says. “But like so many other things in this town, they've been turned upside down.”
Critics of Voice of America say its news editors and reporters are, sadly, no different than their liberal counterparts at The New York Times and CNN. If true that means they see the world and everything in it – a right-leaning Supreme Court, abortion, the Republican Party, conservative Christians – through a left-wing point of view that despises the West.
China heard about 'land of freedom'
A telling Twitter post this week by Xi Van Fleet, the Chinese-American conservative activist, criticized VOA for a sad “shift” in news coverage over the years. She recalls how listening to VOA was a death sentence under Mao but people tuned in anyway to seek information from the “land of freedom.”
She listened to VOA broadcasts in college in the 1970s, when it was no longer blocked, and praised VOA for helping her discover she had been indoctrinated by her own country.
“But over the decades,” she wrote, “VOA, like all other American institutions, has been heavily infiltrated by American Marxists, transforming it into a propaganda machine against America.”
Van Fleet and others familiar with Radio Free Asia, including a former employee, also accuse VOA of being heavily influenced by China and its Chinese Communist Party.
A plea to keep broadcasting Farsi
After President Trump signed the executive order, an Iranian-American human rights activist urged the Trump administration to reconsider.
In an op-ed published at The Hill, Marjan Keypour praised VOA for providing a voice for Iranian dissidents and a source for reliable news. Ending those broadcasts is a "short-sighted and "self-defeating move," she wrote.
Keypour also acknowledged VOA is guilty of hiring journalists in the past who side with Iran's regime. "Its journalists and editors should be reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that their work aligns with American interests, rather than undermining it," she wrote.
The new boss of Voice of America is conservative firebrand Kari Lake, the former Arizona TV news anchor, who ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. Senate seat.
President Trump’s pick to lead Agency for Global Media is Brent Bozell, founder of media watchdog Media Research Center.
Speaking this week at the National Review Ideas Summit, he said VOA helped defeat Hitler and the Nazis, and then Radio Free Europe broadcast behind the Iron Curtain.
“But what happened was, after the [Berlin] wall came down, it really lost its sense of mission,” Bozell said.
