Zombie version of VOA slain againIn a historic act of self-sabotage, the U.S. government completes the silencing of its most effective soft-power instrument.
The Voice of America died a second time today. Nearly all staff, on paid administrative leave since mid-March, received confirmation on Friday they are never being brought back. Some dozens of journalists, editors, producers and technicians had been hastily summoned to VOA in recent days to create a fiction of a statutory minimum to demonstrate to federal judges that the destructive acts by parent Agency for Global Media (USAGM) were not arbitrary and capricious. That resulted in a few minutes of daily broadcasts via shortwave radio from Kuwait to Afghanistan in the Dari and Pashto languages; a video package posted online in Mandarin Chinese; an hour a day in Farsi to Iran (no adequate substitute for the previous VOA Persian 24/7 TV service as a time when Tehran is being bombed and is firing ballistic missiles at Israel amid the threat of U.S. military intervention). Most remaining full-time staffers (hundreds of contractors had already been terminated), including those of the Persian Service, were informed by emails from Kari Lake, the so-called special adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, that they are part of a massive reduction-in-force and will be axed September 1, Labor Day. Friday’s VOA TV broadcast in Farsi was a repeat of yesterday’s news program. For the small cadre that had been brought back, badges were immediately deactivated. Some, including Persian staffers, who had briefly gone out of the Cohen Federal Building in Washington to make a mid-morning cell phone call or have a smoke couldn’t return. Left your keys or purse at your desk in the newsroom? Too bad. Some may have gone outside just to breathe. The air conditioning hasn’t functioned properly in the building for the past week. For the Office of Management & Budget Director Russell Vought, who considers the federal bureaucracy to be a Marxist takeover of government, the cruelty is the point. Prior to returning to the Trump White House, Vought in speeches had made clear he would launch a purge and put civil servants in trauma. Thanks for reading The Newsguy by Steve Herman. My Substack will always be free, focusing on journalism, the First Amendment and occasionally fascinating people, places and things. The silencing of the Voice of America throws a couple of thousand journalists, technicians and administrators out of work, including brave freelancers who risked their lives to bring us news in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Ukraine. I had the honor of being alongside many of them over the past 20+ years. They are incredibly talented and fiercely devoted to VOA’s mission of impartial reporting. Some in our language services found a voice at VOA after their reporting had been repressed by authoritarians in their home countries and then had to flee. They are doubly traumatized today. Also among those receiving RIF notices are the named plaintiffs in the primary lawsuit filed against Lake and others, including USAGM’s installed acting chief executive officer, Victor Morales. The historic legacy will be the loss of American soft power by destroying the country’s most cost-effective instruments of soft power: VOA, along with U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Al Hurra TV (Arabic). Perhaps because Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a fierce critic of the Cuban communist regime, another small U.S. government external broadcaster, Radio Marti, survives with a skeleton crew using an AM transmitter in the Florida Keys, a signal that is effectively jammed by Havana. USAGM broadcasts (radio and TV) and websites reached hundreds of millions of people outside the United States. In some languages and regions, VOA, RFE/RL or RFA served as the primary and only credible source of news and information. Lake, a local TV newscaster who became a twice-failed aspirant for statewide political office in Arizona, appears full of glee in her destruction of an 83-year-old institution. *Today, we took decisive action to effectuate President Trump's agenda to shrink the out-of-control federal bureaucracy," Lake said in a letter she posted to Elon Musk’s X platform. "Reduction in Force Termination Notices were sent to 639 employees at USAGM and Voice of America - part of a long-overdue effort to dismantle a bloated, unaccountable bureaucracy. For decades, American taxpayers have been forced to bankroll an agency that's been riddled with dysfunction, bias, and waste. That ends now. I'm proud to carry out President Trump's executive order and deliver results that put America First." The justification was not posted on USAGM’s website as Lake has also thrown out all of those who knew how to operate it. On VOA’s landing page, meanwhile, it’s forever March 15, 2025. Patsy Widakuswara, my successor as VOA’s White House bureau chief and the lead plaintiff in the first of the lawsuits filed against Lake and USAGM, issued a statement with the other named plaintiffs calling today’s terminations “the death of 83 years of independent journalism that upholds U.S. ideals of democracy and freedom around the world.” Their statement calls on Congress “to continue its long tradition of bipartisan support for VOA,” noting with the silencing of America’s voice that “Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and extremist groups are flooding the global information space with anti-American propaganda.” Another of our most respected and talented colleagues, who also received her RIF notice today, is Katherine Gypson, who began covering the House of Representatives in October 2015. With subsequent staff reductions, from October 2019 she single-handedly covered both the House and the Senate for our central newsroom. I queried her, while she absorbed her termination notification, about why both Democrats and Republicans have been virtually silent regarding the phased destruction of VOA in the past three months? “I ask myself that question all the time,” Gypson responded. “VOA was respected on Capitol Hill - members of both parties always stopped to talk to me because they knew I would ask them thoughtful, deeply researched questions about substantive issues. I never chased the scandal of the day. They knew I wouldn’t waste their time. To those who are silent now, I hope they will notice the absence of VOA’s in-depth reporting.” That’s a very diplomatic answer regarding what I am suspect Gypson considers (I certainly do) bipartisan hypocrisy and, yes, betrayal. Congress approved the annual funding for VOA and its operations are not to be significantly altered with Congressional notification and consent. As I told David Bauder of the Associated Press today, I am not optimistic lawmakers will suddenly rally to our cause, especially those of the governing party who dare to dissent but eventually acquiesce to pressure from above. The executive branch actions and the rogue DOGE chainsaw attacks on independent agencies, including USAID, rode roughshod over legislative checks and balances. The third branch of government, the judiciary, has issued conflicting rulings that have slightly impeded the executive overreach. One or more of these cases will eventually be decided by the Supreme Court, where the majority of the justices have generally upheld the current president’s diktats and may consent to Donald Trump’s desire to destroy the career bureaucracy and remake it in his own image. The sense of betrayal and dismay for VOA journalists goes beyond our overseers and stakeholders. For decades, my colleagues and I regularly sought out Heritage Foundation experts for comment on important issues, in order to ensure balance and scope in our news reports. It was Heritage’s Project 2025 that included the blueprint for VOA’s dismantling and criticism of the broadcaster’s charter and firewall meant to ensure fairness and autonomy for our journalism. The section’s author, Morvared Namdarkhan (aka Mora Namdar) was briefly brought into USAGM to work with Lake and has just been rewarded with a nomination to be an assistant secretary of state. Namdarkhan played a role in what were subsequently deemed illegal actions by USAGM political appointees in the first Trump administration. As the agency’s chief risk officer she instructed a colleague to compile negative information about USAGM executives deemed disloyal “regardless of whether he could verify the information," according to an inspector general's report on the executives’ suspension. Namdarkhan wanted the dossiers to include rumors that had been “heard in the halls” so that security clearances of those targeted could be revoked. This was straight out of the Joseph McCarthy/Roy Cohen playbook and it has also been a guide for Lake who has repeatedly claimed, without producing evidence, that VOA staffers are security risks, possibly spies for foreign governments. Some of us in recent years have been subject to multiple background investigations. I endured three in about five years, each time having to complete an onerous SF-86, followed by an interrogation by an outside investigator contracted by the Department of Defense. If you want to know more about what some VOA journalists endured, including the White House correspondents, during the final year of the first Trump administration, please read my book: Behind the White House Curtain: A Senior Journalist’s Story of Covering the President — and Why It Matters. Current events are writing a horrible sequel. |