SWEEPING CUTS
Trump signed an executive order on Friday targeting VOA’s parent US Agency for Global Media in his latest sweeping cuts to the federal government.
The agency had 3,384 employees in the 2023 fiscal year. It had requested US$950 million for the current fiscal year.
The sweeping cuts also froze Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, formed in the Cold War to reach the former Soviet bloc, and Radio Free Asia, established to provide reporting to China, North Korea and other Asian countries with heavily restricted media.
Other US-funded outlets being gutted include Radio Farda, a Persian-language broadcaster blocked by Iran’s government, and Alhurra, an Arabic-language network established after the Iraq invasion in the face of highly critical coverage by Qatar-based Al-Jazeera.
The White House said in a statement on Saturday that “taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda,” a charge rarely levelled before Trump at the staid VOA, long aimed at countering communism.
Trump regularly criticises media coverage of him and has questioned the wisdom of funding VOA when it has a “firewall” ensuring its editorial independence.
Trump, with the advice of tech billionaire Elon Musk, has vowed to drastically reduce the size of government to make way for tax cuts. His administration has already ended the vast majority of foreign development assistance and moved to eviscerate the Education Department.
The moves come as China and Russia invest heavily in state media to compete with Western narratives, with China often offering free content to outlets in the developing world.
In an editorial on the demise of VOA, China’s state-run Global Times said that “the monopoly of information held by some traditional Western media is being shattered”.
“As more Americans begin to break through their information cocoons and see a real world and a multidimensional China, the demonising narratives propagated by VOA will ultimately become a laughingstock of the times,” it said.
Source: CNA
