After three months of legal battles and lobbying, the Voice of America network is officially being reduced to a fraction of its pre-Trump form.
Widespread layoffs took place Friday at VOA and its parent agency, the US Agency for Global Media, or USAGM for short, which has led America’s efforts to broadcast information around the world for decades.
“This move follows USAGM’s firing of more than 500 contractors last month. It spells the death of 83 years of independent journalism that upholds US ideals of democracy and freedom around the world,” three VOA journalists who sued to stop the terminations said in a joint statement.
For President Donald Trump, who has been critical of VOA for years, Friday’s firings are a political victory.
When Trump signed an order in March to drastically shrink USAGM and several other federal agencies, the president and his pick to run VOA, Kari Lake, depicted US-funded international broadcasting as biased, bloated and obsolete. But advocates for the agency, including some Republican lawmakers, said the networks were a crucial tool for fighting disinformation and telling America’s story to the world.
Without the networks, there will be an “empty space” in the global media, and “Russia and Chinese propaganda will fill in,” Russian-American journalist Alsu Kermasheva warned.
VOA was the biggest part of the agency, operating broadcast services and websites in many languages, and employing about 1,400 people. Trump’s order in mid-March effectively silenced VOA, as staffers were placed on paid administrative leave and the broadcast platforms were put on hold.
Lake said then that the agency was “unsalvageable.” But on Friday, in a press release announcing the mass layoffs, Lake signaled that it will continue to exist in some stripped-down fashion. She said the “lean and focused” agency would employ about 250 people in total.
Lake previously promoted a plan to have One America News, a small far-right pro-Trump channel, provide content for VOA free of charge.
Three VOA journalists who sued to stop the terminations, Patsy Widakuswara, Jessica Jerreat and Kate Neeper, all received layoff notices on Friday. The trio said their legal fight would continue and called on Congress “to continue its long tradition of bipartisan support for VOA.”
“Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and extremist groups are flooding the global information space with anti-American propaganda,” they said in a statement. “Do not cede this ground by silencing America’s voice.”
The fate of USAGM’s other networks, which are structured as nonprofit organizations that are funded through federal grants, is unclear. Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and other grantees have been fighting to save their federal funding in the courts.
Friday’s press release made no mention of those networks. The messaging from Lake was all about enforcing Trump’s order and cutting “waste” in government.
Last week, as the Israel-Iran conflict escalated, dozens of VOA staffers who had previously worked on Farsi-language programming were brought back to revive some US efforts to beam programming into Iran.
Lake told Fox News that VOA’s “Persian news service is rising to the occasion” to cover the conflict.
However, some of those staffers received layoff notices on Friday, journalists there said.
Jennifer Hansler contributed reporting.
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