{"id":1133,"date":"2026-07-30T10:38:40","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T10:38:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1133"},"modified":"2026-07-30T10:38:40","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T10:38:40","slug":"how-donald-trump-silenced-the-voice-of-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1133","title":{"rendered":"How Donald Trump Silenced the Voice of America"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Voice of America\u2019s Persian Service began airing in its current form in 1979, shortly after the Iranian Revolution toppled the Shah and installed the Islamist clerics who rule the country to this day. V.O.A. was created by the U.S. government to tell America\u2019s story to the world, and, for decades, the Persian Service was one of its largest departments, producing news reports and talk shows that at times reached close to a quarter of Iran\u2019s adults. In February, when the United States and Israel launched co\u00f6rdinated air strikes on Iran, the Persian Service had no journalists reporting in the region. Its programming was limited to an hour a day, several employees said. \u201cNormally, we would have correspondents on the Iranian border, talking to people who were leaving the country, getting firsthand accounts,\u201d a V.O.A. journalist who has worked closely with the Persian Service told me. \u201cNow we barely do any of our own reporting. I\u2019m here only to be here when we rebuild this place so that somebody is still here who knows what we used to be.\u201d (A spokesman for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees V.O.A., said that the Persian Service had provided substantial original reporting at the start of the war.)<\/p>\n

Read more What Would It Mean to See a New Color?<\/a><\/p>\n

Soon after Donald Trump began his second term in the White House, he appointed Kari Lake, a former TV anchorwoman who had lost races in Arizona for governor and senator, to run America\u2019s global media operations. Lake said that her mission was \u201cto shut the entire agency down as per the instructions of President Trump.\u201d In March, 2025, a day after Trump issued an executive order slashing V.O.A.\u2019s parent agency to its legally required minimum, Lake put 1,042 of its 1,147 staffers on paid leave. The Persian Service, which had numbered more than a hundred employees before Trump returned to the White House, was down to a few dozen people at the start of the war. The service\u2019s coverage reflected its paltry staffing. \u201cTrump gave a speech, and Kari Lake asked us to carry it live,\u201d the journalist said. (The U.S.A.G.M. spokesman said that Persian Service editors decided on their own to air the speech.)<\/p>\n

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On the first day of the war in Iran, a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile struck a girls\u2019 elementary school in Minab. For a couple of days, the Persian Service did not publish any articles about the incident, which Iranian officials said had killed more than a hundred and seventy people, most of them children. In V.O.A.\u2019s newsroom in Washington, the journalist confronted a senior manager: \u201cAre we North Korea now? This is going to be all over the news. We can\u2019t just be silent about it.\u201d The journalist didn\u2019t receive a response until the next day, when the manager sent him a V.O.A. story recounting Secretary of State Marco Rubio\u2019s comment that the United States \u201cwould not deliberately target a school.\u201d The story said nothing about the worldwide outrage over the bombing. (The U.S.A.G.M. spokesman said that the Persian Service had reported on the strike as part of a live TV broadcast on the day it happened.) The Persian Service had previously made room, however, for a six-minute video report<\/em> titled \u201cMelania Trump: American\u2019s Influential First Lady,\u201d which began with fourteen seconds of the trailer for this year\u2019s \u201cMelania\u201d documentary.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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By then, Lake had brought in Ali Javanmardi, a former V.O.A. contractor, to oversee the Persian Service. Javanmardi was employed by the U.S.A.G.M., which, under federal law, is supposed to respect an editorial firewall that protects V.O.A. journalism from interference by political appointees. But Javanmardi\u2014whose LinkedIn profile features a photo of Trump, standing bloodied and triumphant, after the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania, in 2024\u2014breached that wall repeatedly, appearing frequently on V.O.A. videos. A Persian Service reporter told me that, when Javanmardi appeared as a commentator on V.O.A., he handed the anchor the questions to be asked.<\/p>\n

In January, Javanmardi instructed his staff that, \u201ceffective immediately, all guest appearances\u2014including live guests, pre-recorded guests, and guests whose soundbites are used in packages\u2014must be approved by me in advance.\u201d He gathered his staff in a circle each day and delivered his latest thoughts about the Persian Service\u2019s coverage. \u201cThey\u2019re marching orders,\u201d the journalist said. \u201cYou only hear him talking, no one else.\u201d One day, Javanmardi announced that V.O.A. videos, web stories, and social-media posts would not be permitted to use the phrase \u201cDeath to America\u201d in reports about demonstrations on the streets of Iran. He also instructed his staff to avoid describing America\u2019s attack on Iran as a war; rather, he said, they should use the term \u201cmilitary action.\u201d V.O.A.\u2019s Farsi newscasts \u201cfelt like someone\u2019s one-man show,\u201d the journalist said. \u201cThe firewall has burned down.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Persian Service\u2019s content began to tilt sharply toward Javanmardi\u2019s idiosyncratic perspective on Iran. Javanmardi, who is Kurdish Iranian, is a longtime critic of Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran\u2019s late Shah, who lives in exile in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. A lawsuit filed by V.O.A. journalists and press-freedom organizations claims that Javanmardi refused to allow V.O.A. to use audio of protesters in Iran shouting Pahlavi\u2019s name. He also barred the Persian Service\u2019s staff and guests from talking about any possible restoration of Iran\u2019s monarchy. When V.O.A. covered a street protest in Norway against the Islamic Republic, it muted the audio when demonstrators chanted \u201cJavid Shah<\/em>\u201d (\u201cLong live the Shah\u201d), according to the lawsuit. A Persian Service journalist said that, when he refused to follow Javanmardi\u2019s orders, he was fired. (Javanmardi and Lake did not respond to requests for comment, and the U.S.A.G.M. spokesman said that the agency would not comment on personnel matters. Lake has said that Pahlavi was invited to appear on V.O.A., and did not respond.)<\/p>\n

The U.S. has struggled to balance propaganda and independent news reporting since the Second World War, when it became clear that information was as vital a tool of combat as bombs and battleships. The Nazis and the Soviet Union led the way in leveraging propaganda, using sharply skewed information and entertainment to inspire their troops, rally the homeland, and win over\u2014or confuse\u2014enemy populations. Hitler wrote in \u201cMein Kampf\u201d that radio is \u201ca terrible weapon in the hands of those who know how to make use of it.\u201d The Soviet Union embraced Lenin\u2019s concept of agitation\u2014the use of emotional slogans and half-truths to influence the masses. By 1953, U.S. officials estimated that the the Soviet Union was spending two per cent of its gross national product on propaganda, at least twenty times the U.S. government\u2019s information budget.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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America\u2019s news effort was launched on February 1, 1942, when the playwright Robert E. Sherwood took to the mike to deliver V.O.A.\u2019s first words: \u201cToday, America has been at war for seventy-nine days. Daily at this time, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth.\u201d Sherwood\u2014along with other early V.O.A. leaders, such as Edward R. Murrow, of CBS, and John Chancellor, of NBC\u2014believed in presenting the news straight, but the argument about the agency\u2019s mission and methods remained fractious. Presidents often grew frustrated that America\u2019s voice was not plainly on America\u2019s side. In 1943, on the day after Mussolini was overthrown, a V.O.A. broadcast quoted a New York Post<\/em> columnist calling the Italian monarch, Victor Emmanuel, \u201cthe moronic little King.\u201d President Franklin Roosevelt, in turn, criticized V.O.A. for conducting its own foreign policy, and directed its programmers to stick to undermining enemy morale.<\/p>\n

A few years later, President Harry Truman, who saw no need for peacetime information programs, asserted that the private news business should be the primary \u201cmeans of informing foreign peoples about this country.\u201d But, once the Cold War erupted and American concern about Communism metastasized, Truman reversed course. In 1951, he established the Psychological Strategy Board to supervise the war of words with the Soviets and instructed V.O.A. to broadcast hard-hitting anti-Communist messages from new transmitters in Okinawa, Munich, several locations in the Philippines, and on a ship in the Mediterranean Sea. In 1952, V.O.A. programs were broadcast in forty-six languages, aimed mainly at Communist countries behind the Iron Curtain. Each language desk at V.O.A. headquarters met daily to go over \u201cguidances\u201d from the State Department\u2014a few pages that didn\u2019t mandate specific language to be used in newscasts but did give V.O.A. editors \u201cthe word for the day,\u201d as Arthur Larson, the director of the U.S. Information Agency, which oversaw V.O.A. at the time, put it.<\/p>\n

In 1953, televised hearings of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in Room 318 of the U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan\u2019s Foley Square, focussed on \u201cmismanagement and subversion\u201d at V.O.A. \u201cThere are some people in the Voice of America who are doing a rather effective job of sabotaging\u201d U.S. foreign policy, Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin who led the nation on a frenzied anti-Communist search, declared. His chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who would go on to mentor a young Donald Trump, interviewed more than a hundred V.O.A. staffers. The hearings made for great TV. Employees of V.O.A. were accused of harboring an interest in collectivist nudist camps, softening scripts to downplay the Soviets\u2019 antisemitism, and positioning V.O.A. transmitters where magnetic storms might make it difficult for signals to reach the Soviet bloc. In March, 1953, Raymond Kaplan, a V.O.A. engineer who had worked on the transmitters, walked in front of a truck in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leaving behind a suicide note that told his family that he\u2019d wanted to spare them the pain of being dragged through McCarthy\u2019s hearings. McCarthy, who referred to V.O.A. as \u201cVoice of Moscow,\u201d called the suicide note fake news.<\/p>\n

The subcommittee\u2019s final report, signed only by its Republican members\u2014Democrats had walked out of the hearings and resigned from the subcommittee\u2014charged V.O.A. with broadcasting \u201canti-American content\u201d and employing people \u201cnot dedicated to the American way of life.\u201d V.O.A. fired thirty-one employees \u201cfor security reasons,\u201d but little else came of the subcommittee\u2019s findings. Still, for decades, V.O.A.\u2019s identity crisis persisted. In the nineteen-sixties, three V.O.A. directors complained of pressure to conform to Administration policies. One such director, Henry Loomis, quit in 1965, to protest meddling by political appointees from Lyndon Johnson\u2019s White House. (Chancellor, of NBC, wrote that V.O.A.\u2019s reporters faced too much \u201cinterference by policy officers.\u201d) And another director, John Daly, resigned in 1968 to protest \u201cundercutting\u201d by V.O.A.\u2019s parent agency.<\/p>\n

Other Western democracies had established a measure of independence for their international broadcast services; the BBC and Germany\u2019s Deutsche Welle, for example, are protected by rules that restrict political leaders from influencing programming. The U.S. Agency for Global Media was similarly created to provide V.O.A. with a buffer from government interference. V.O.A.\u2019s 1976 charter mandates \u201caccurate, objective and comprehensive\u201d reporting; the 1994 U.S. International Broadcasting Act also created a firewall to protect its editors from a President\u2019s predilections. That is the firewall that V.O.A. journalists now say has been burned to the ground.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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For decades, the Voice of America enjoyed bipartisan support in Washington. Republican senators such as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham were among its most vocal advocates. But, in the final year of Trump\u2019s first term, his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, began railing against the V.O.A. director Amanda Bennett, an Obama-era appointee, alleging that China had infiltrated the ranks of the agency\u2019s journalists. Trump personally called Republicans in Congress to drum up support for his nominee to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Michael Pack, a conservative filmmaker who had made a fawning documentary about the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Seven months before Trump\u2019s term ended, the Senate confirmed Pack in a party-line vote.<\/p>\n

Pack promised to \u201cdrain the swamp\u201d at V.O.A., but there was relatively little he could accomplish during his ultimately brief tenure. Steve Herman, V.O.A.\u2019s White House bureau chief at the time, said that he and his colleagues had largely been able to resist pressure to parrot the Administration\u2019s policy agenda. \u201cWe all knew that if we just hung on, and Trump lost in 2020, we could run out the clock on them and keep on doing our work,\u201d Herman told me.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s inner circle used the years of the Biden Presidency to plan an unprecedented remaking of American institutions, including at V.O.A.\u2019s parent agency. The chapter on U.S.A.G.M. in Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump\u2019s second term, was written by Mora Namdar, who is now the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs. She accused V.O.A.\u2019s parent agency of having a \u201cgeneral disdain for U.S. taxpayers.\u201d Namdar, who did not respond to a request for comment, called out Herman for \u201cposting content highly critical of, and personally insulting to, the U.S. President.\u201d U.S.A.G.M., she wrote, had joined \u201cthe mainstream media\u2019s anti-U.S. chorus\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. denigrating the American story\u2014all in the name of so-called journalistic independence.\u201d Her solution was to put V.O.A. under the authority of the National Security Council or the State Department, to insure it \u201ctells America\u2019s story.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was a bold plan, albeit one that failed to account for V.O.A.\u2019s legally mandated governing structure. Right after Trump\u2019s second Inauguration, he fired six of the seven members of the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, which approves the appointment of the head of V.O.A. He had announced his decision to appoint Lake as V.O.A.\u2019s director in December. But now, with no board available to fire the current director, Michael Abramowitz, the Administration lacked the authority to install Lake in his place. Trump decided to give Lake a leadership role at U.S.A.G.M. instead. Under the law, the agency could be run temporarily by one of its senior officials. That person was Victor Morales, a senior policy adviser who had started his career as a V.O.A. journalist; he designated Lake to perform nearly all of \u201cthe functions and responsibilities\u201d of his job.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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For twenty-two years, Lake had been the face of Fox 10 News, in Phoenix, where she covered the usual mix of crime, severe weather, and goofy happenings around town. But in 2021, during the COVID-19<\/em> pandemic, she left the anchor chair because she believed that the news media was distorting the truth about how to combat the virus. \u201cI just wasn\u2019t willing to lie to the public,\u201d she said last year. \u201cI had to ask myself the question, \u2018Was this huge paycheck that I was earning worth the cost of my soul?\u2019 And the answer was no.\u201d Before her failed runs for governor and the U.S. Senate, Lake had pivoted from Obama-supporting Buddhist to MAGA<\/em> cheerleader who denounced Democrats\u2019 \u201cdemonic agenda.\u201d She dubbed herself \u201cTrump in heels.\u201d<\/p>\n

Initially, Lake spoke optimistically about V.O.A.\u2019s future. \u201cSometimes the coverage has been incredible, and sometimes it\u2019s been pitiful,\u201d she told the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, 2025. Under her leadership, she said, V.O.A. \u201cwon\u2019t become Trump TV, although I think the ratings would be very high. It won\u2019t become Trump TV, but it sure as hell will not be TDS TV. You can find all the Trump Derangement Syndrome that you want over on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, \u201860 Minutes,\u2019 the Washington Post<\/em>, and the New York Times<\/em>.\u201d V.O.A., she said, would still be a source of \u201csoft power for America.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. With a relatively small budget, along with honest reporting, we can spread the values of freedom all over the world and prevent trillion-dollar wars. I\u2019m for that.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Trump was elected to a second term, Herman reported on what he saw as a devastating slashing of America\u2019s capacity to tell its story abroad. On V.O.A., he said that Trump\u2019s top reason for selecting Cabinet nominees seemed to be loyalty rather than experience. On X, he quoted the head of Democracy Forward, a progressive legal organization, saying that zeroing out the United States Agency for International Development, perhaps the most high-profile victim of Elon Musk\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency, would make Americans less safe at home and abroad. Ric Grenell, the President\u2019s envoy for special missions, called Herman\u2019s comment \u201ctreasonous.\u201d \u201cYou don\u2019t get to work against the official U.S. government policies while being paid by US taxpayers,\u201d he posted on X. \u201cYou should be immediately fired.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of February, Herman was put on leave. A letter from management said that V.O.A. was investigating whether his \u201csocial media activity has undermined VOA\u2019s audiences\u2019 perceptions of the objectivity and\/or credibility of VOA.\u201d Grenell had said he wanted V.O.A. eliminated entirely. So did Musk, whose auxiliaries\u2014the young tech wizards deployed to federal agencies to shut down access to computer systems, eliminate workers, and freeze operations\u2014arrived at V.O.A. headquarters not long after. V.O.A., Musk said on X, was \u201cjust radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B\/year of US taxpayer money.\u201d<\/p>\n

On March 12th, during an Oval Office news conference with Trump and Miche\u00e1l Martin, the Prime Minister of Ireland, V.O.A.\u2019s White House bureau chief, Patsy Widakuswara, asked Martin if the leaders had discussed Trump\u2019s suggestion that Palestinians be expelled from the Gaza coast, to make room for beach resorts. Trump, miffed, turned on the reporter: \u201cNobody is expelling any Palestinians\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. who are you with?\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Dear Pepper: How to Have Some of It All?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI\u2019m with Voice of America, sir,\u201d Widakuswara replied.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, no wonder,\u201d Trump, who had called V.O.A. \u201ca total, left wing disaster,\u201d said, waving her off with a flip of his hand.<\/p>\n

Two days later, Trump issued an executive order: V.O.A. and its parent agency were to be slashed \u201cto the minimum presence and function required by law.\u201d The White House justified the order with a news release<\/em> titled \u201cThe Voice of Radical America,\u201d which accused V.O.A. of producing \u201cradical propaganda,\u201d citing a story about Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop, a segment about transgender women from Honduras who sought asylum in the U.S., and an article with the headline \u201cWhat Is \u2018White Privilege\u2019 and Whom Does It Help?\u201d The next day, Lake sent the staff home, halted TV and radio broadcasts, and cancelled the lease for V.O.A.\u2019s new headquarters. That morning, Widakuswara texted her attorney: \u201cI received email that I\u2019ve been put on admin leave.\u201d<\/p>\n

On March 17th, workers at V.O.A.\u2019s transmitter sites were told to shut down all operations within two days, silencing the agency for the first time in eighty-three years. V.O.A., a U.S.A.G.M. news release said, harbored \u201cspies and terrorist sympathizers\u201d and wasted taxpayers\u2019 money on a news service \u201cthat often parrots the talking-points of America\u2019s adversaries.\u201d Lake later alleged that agents of the Chinese Communist Party had met regularly with V.O.A. management to tell them how to cover China. \u201cThe rot is so bad,\u201d she told a reporter, \u201cit\u2019s like having a rotten fish and trying to find the little portion you can eat. It\u2019s unsalvageable right now.\u201d The agency, she told Steve Bannon on his podcast, was \u201cgoing on an Ozempic diet.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a sunny afternoon this March, several dozen Voice of America journalists gathered in the social hall of All Souls Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., for an event to raise money for former employees. V.O.A. had resumed some of its TV and radio operations. But, since last year\u2019s cuts, its programming has been available in just seven languages\u2014Farsi, Mandarin, Dari, Pashto, Korean, and two Kurdish dialects\u2014rather than the forty-nine language services it previously provided to a weekly audience of more than three hundred and fifty million people worldwide. Hundreds of employees had been on leave for a year, being paid their regular salaries to do no work.<\/p>\n

At the front of the social hall, the attendees were greeted by a potluck spread featuring dishes from nations that V.O.A. had cut its services to: Indonesian salad, Indian chaat, Vietnamese banh mi, Colombian stew. A journalist who\u2019d been called back to work after almost a year on leave said that the V.O.A. office was now like \u201cthe American Wild West, just people trying to survive.\u201d He lamented the agency\u2019s diminished state, but he preferred to tell stories about its better days. Before Trump, V.O.A. used to transmit extensive programs into remote areas of Afghanistan; its broadcasts informed people in West Africa on how they could protect themselves from polio; in Pakistan, street theatre was produced to combat disinformation about vaccinations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A man who was working in the Ukrainian Service at the start of the Russian invasion recalled how V.O.A. had beefed up its staff to get video from the battlefields and on-the-scene accounts from reporters in the country to Ukrainian audiences. \u201cBefore Lake, we covered stories nobody else did, with reporters in Ukraine showing where American support was making a difference, combatting Russian propaganda,\u201d the Ukrainian Service employee told me. \u201cNow there\u2019s nothing to balance it, nothing to correct it.\u201d He spoke to his mother, who lives in Ukraine, every weekend. \u201cIt takes me half an hour to repair what she heard that week from Russian disinformation about America,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n

A veteran of V.O.A.\u2019s Latin American division said that, when U.S. forces toppled the Venezuelan dictator Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, in January, her relatives had assured her that she would soon be called back to work. V.O.A. had a long-standing plan for how to cover a sudden change in government, including beefed up daily TV newscasts and radio shows, weekly analysis programs, digital video reports, and hourly bulletins. But the call never came. Even as Russia and China expand their Latin American programming, with China offering free trips to local broadcasters, V.O.A.\u2019s Spanish Service, which had the largest audience of all its language services, remains shuttered.<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing exists anymore,\u201d another reporter told me, describing his driftless days and sleepless nights. \u201cOur identity was gone in one single second. It was a sudden questioning of my value. Who am I without all of this?\u201d The reporter had applied for a job as a police officer\u2014and received an offer\u2014but he put it on hold in the hope that V.O.A. might call him back. \u201cI had believed in America,\u201d he told me. \u201cI didn\u2019t care if it was Trump or Biden.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of V.O.A.\u2019s employees found new gigs. A United Nations correspondent got her real-estate license and pivoted to selling New York City properties. Several former employees started driving for Uber or DoorDash. One reporter got a job at Newsmax, another at the Washington Post<\/em>. Danila Galperovich, a correspondent at the Russian Service, now works at Trader Joe\u2019s. The pay was significantly less than what he\u2019d made at V.O.A., but, \u201cafter three years of writing about the killing of Ukrainian children, it\u2019s like a Zen retreat,\u201d he told me. \u201cI never heard \u2018thank you\u2019 two hundred times a day in my press job. Now I do.\u201d<\/p>\n

When my wife and I visited the Soviet Union as tourists in 1984 we made stealth stops to deliver medicine to Jewish refuseniks, dissidents who had sought to leave the country but were denied permission by the Communist regime and subsequently lost their jobs. Our hosts, in their Moscow apartments, turned up the volume on their TVs to mask our conversation from the bugs they assumed the government had planted in their living rooms. This, they explained, was how they listened to Voice of America: TV blaring, while an illicit shortwave radio, with its volume raised to little more than a whisper, was held up to their ears so that they could hear the news or the jazz played by the legendary V.O.A. host Willis Conover, who often opened his episodes saying, in his gentle baritone, \u201cThe music of jazz parallels the freedom that we have in America, something that not every country has.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Today, many of the V.O.A. journalists who lost their contracts also lost their legal right to remain in the United States. \u201cYou\u2019ve come to this country to say things you can\u2019t say at home,\u201d Jessica Jerreat, who ran V.O.A.\u2019s press-freedom desk, said. \u201cThen, all of a sudden, you lose your visa and you\u2019re told you have to go back.\u201d At least a dozen V.O.A. journalists who\u2019d been fired risked imprisonment or violence if they returned to their native countries. \u201cThe reply from U.S.A.G.M. was \u2018What date would you like for your plane ticket?\u2019\u00a0\u201d Jerreat recalled.<\/p>\n

At least nine contributors to V.O.A. or its sister networks Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia are currently imprisoned in foreign countries. Le Anh Hung, a reporter and blogger in Vietnam who had reported on corruption within the country\u2019s ruling party, was arrested in March and charged with \u201cpropagandizing against the state.\u201d In Azerbaijan, Ulviyya Guliyeva, who had been reporting on political persecution, was arrested last May and charged with smuggling foreign currency, an allegation she denies. Guliyeva said that police officers had struck her seven times on the head and torn out her hair. She has been in prison ever since.<\/p>\n

In March, 2025, a group of V.O.A. employees sued Lake, arguing that the Administration had illegally sought to quash the independent newsgathering mandated by Congress and protected by V.O.A.\u2019s firewall. Michael Abramowitz, the V.O.A. director, sued separately, saying that Congress had repeatedly renewed funding for V.O.A. programs and that the executive branch could not defy Congress\u2019s appropriations. \u201cThe law is quite clear about the approach V.O.A. must take,\u201d he told me. \u201cThe charter says you\u2019re supposed to explain U.S. policies and present responsible debate about them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last summer, Lake tried to demote Abramowitz to a job at a remote site in North Carolina, which broadcasts to Cuba. V.O.A. had once used it to broadcast shortwave-radio programs to South America and Africa\u2014services that Lake switched off. Abramowitz declined to report to that post, and U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, ruled that Lake had no power to dismiss him.<\/p>\n

Lamberth is handling most of the V.O.A. cases, and so far his decisions have been resolutely supportive of the employees. He moved to void Lake\u2019s dismantling of the agency, finding that she was \u201cplainly ineligible to serve\u201d as U.S.A.G.M.\u2019s top official, because Trump lacked the authority to appoint her. He also declared that Lake\u2019s failure to co\u00f6perate with the court had been a \u201cHallmark production in bad faith.\u201d Lake criticized the judge on X. \u201cWe\u2019ve been so effective over the last year that the Deep State has done everything they can to stop us,\u201d she wrote. \u201cA rotund DC District Court judge wants me OUT of the agency, but despite his absurd orders and rulings, I remain in the exact same position today as I was before.\u201d<\/p>\n

In May, Trump nominated Lake to be his Ambassador to Jamaica. While she awaits a confirmation vote in the Senate, she remains nominally at U.S.A.G.M., though V.O.A.\u2019s journalists said that they never see her at their office. Earlier this year, there was speculation that she might run for a Senate seat in Iowa, where she grew up. Last November, a trust controlled by her family bought a two-bedroom condo in Davenport, near her former high school, for fifty-eight thousand dollars. \u201cI love Iowa,\u201d she told a local TV station. She said that the purchase had been about getting \u201ccloser to the values that shaped me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The House, meanwhile, in a rare bipartisan act of resistance, has voted to fund V.O.A. to the tune of $199.5 million for 2026\u2014down from two hundred and sixty million dollars in 2024, but nonetheless part of an over-all international broadcasting appropriation four times larger than what the President had requested. In late March, Lamberth gave Lake and U.S.A.G.M. less than a week to bring back all of the employees who were still on paid leave. The Administration protested that that was impossible; the agency could only produce employee badges and process paperwork for seventy people a week. The judge approved that pace. But by late May, when U.S.A.G.M. finally submitted its reconstitution plan, the agency had only restored another forty-four employees to active work. In late June, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard testimony on Lake\u2019s ambassadorial nomination, the Democratic senator Jeanne Shaheen, of New Hampshire, said that paying U.S.A.G.M. employees to sit at home had so far cost taxpayers around a hundred and forty million dollars.<\/p>\n

Some Trump Administration officials now seem to recognize that the silencing of V.O.A. has left the country with a diminished capacity to push back against other countries\u2019 disinformation efforts. In March, Marco Rubio ordered American diplomats to work with the military\u2019s PsyOps unit to confront disinformation from Russia and China. (Chinese state media had celebrated the Trump Administration\u2019s gutting of V.O.A., saying that it had \u201cbeen discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.\u201d) A cable sent to U.S. embassies directed staffers to use \u201cevery tool in our diplomatic toolkit\u201d in \u201ctelling America\u2019s story.\u201d In July, Javanmardi was effectively replaced as head of the Persian Service by a career V.O.A. journalist, Reza Nejat. The e-mail announcing the change said that the agency was expanding its \u201cbroadcasting hours while maintaining VOA\u2019s strict standards of credibility and journalistic excellence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before the war in Iran, Lake appeared on the Persian Service to praise Trump and to justify her downsizing of V.O.A. She contended that, even after the cuts, \u201cwe\u2019re doing an incredible media product.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. We are an incredible soft power.\u201d But editors said that V.O.A.\u2019s pro-Administration slant under Trump has undermined its credibility. \u201cI don\u2019t know why I\u2019m here,\u201d a longtime journalist who had been called back to the office told me. \u201cWe used to work with a number of reporters who covered Washington, and did original reporting, and now we\u2019re just rewriting press releases from the Administration.\u201d The Persian Service reporter told me, \u201cBefore, I had the freedom to contrast what Trump did with what critics thought of it. Now I just say, \u2018Trump said,\u2019 \u2018Trump said,\u2019 \u2018Trump said.\u2019\u00a0\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Fairfield Porter\u2019s Lush, Lonely Vision of the World<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The agency was created to spread the story of freedom and democracy around the world. Now, with many of its journalists being paid to stay home, it\u2019s delivering a very different message, writes Marc Fisher.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1132,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annals-of-communications"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Donald Trump Silenced the Voice of America - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1133\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How Donald Trump Silenced the Voice of America - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The agency was created to spread the story of freedom and democracy around the world. 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