National Review Online
Thursday, March 20, 2025
President Trump’s move against Voice of America, the
executive branch agency that oversees it, and other U.S. international
broadcasters and grantee media is an understandable reaction to decades of
managerial lapses and an organizational structure that has remained immune to
accountability and oversight for too long.
On Friday night, Trump signed an order reducing the
functions of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) to only those required by
statute. His administration also moved to cut grants extended to Radio Free
Asia and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — nonprofit organizations that receive
all their funding from USAGM — and suspend the full-time staff of VOA, which is
a federal entity.
If this is an attempt to eliminate U.S.-funded
international media in its entirety, it would be grave mistake. But if it is an
opening bid in an ambitious reform effort, it has the potential to do much
good.
Many of the American and foreign reporters who have
squared off against the world’s most brutal dictatorships for VOA and other
U.S.-funded outlets every day have performed heroically. They have made America
safer and the world a better place. Unlike the propagandists who work for
Beijing or Moscow, employees of Voice of America and USAGM grantees are real
journalists who do real reporting, often at great risk to themselves and their
families.
But the impenetrable bureaucracy that had sprung up at
USAGM has long counteracted their work.
The White House pointed to a grab bag of outrages in a
press release defending Trump’s move. Among these: VOA’s directive to
journalists asking them to refer to Hamas members as “militants” instead of
terrorists; partisan social media posts written by VOA staff; and overtly
left-wing ideological content on race and transgenderism.
The full list of problems, involving lapses in vetting
foreign employees, mismanagement of resources, and the promotion of
anti-American narratives, is far longer.
While none of these incidents is enough on its own to
justify the drastic steps Trump took last week, they happened in the context of
a dysfunctional culture in which USAGM officials and grantee network heads
conceived of themselves as an independent power center, rather than as federal
employees with a statutory mandate to accurately tell America’s story to the
world.
Dan Robinson, a former VOA White House correspondent and
registered Democrat who has long crusaded for reform, recently described USAGM
as a “multi-headed hydra, with bloated bureaucracies and multiple boards.”
Behind closed doors, agency personnel have often expressed contempt for
government oversight and moved to obstruct investigations.
When Senator Bill Hagerty, the Republican from Tennessee,
asked former Acting VOA Director John Lippman to terminate a reporter who urged
her colleagues to use anti-Israel talking points in their reporting, Lippman
derided the request as “silly” in internal meetings.
Under Biden-appointed USAGM CEO Amanda Bennett, VOA
fought against a congressional investigation into potential fraud and abuse;
the House Foreign Affairs Committee ultimately assessed that a “culture of
corruption” runs rampant at the outlet.
Trump tried and failed to implement smaller reforms at
USAGM in his first term, and his administration was resisted at every turn as
it attempted to install new leaders at USAGM.
Already, court challenges against the president’s latest
moves are emerging, and intense mainstream media coverage has, of course, cast
what he’s done in a highly negative light.
The critics say that the administration is acting with a
hammer, when a scalpel would suffice.
But piecemeal reform of USAGM has been attempted for
years. The fact of the matter is that it is functionally impossible to reform
the organization as long as the old guard retains influence within the
bureaucracy.
It makes sense therefore to start fresh. The Trump
administration should reconstitute specific offices and personnel who performed
well from across U.S.-funded international media under the aegis of a new Voice
of America. This would include the bulk of Radio Free Asia, whose journalists
delivered scoops from Xinjiang, North Korea, and other dangerous places at
great risk to their personal safety. As it pursues reform, the administration
should also be an advocate for former USAGM journalists abroad who face
authoritarian persecution for their efforts to tell America’s story.
The goal should be to reinvigorate American public
diplomacy, with a truly effective and responsible Voice of America at its
center.
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