The Sound of Silence

The rest of the world will no longer be able to hear America’s voice, and silence like a cancer grows.

This is the first of occasional pieces chronicling how the Trump administration is crippling America’s soft power, a critical element of the nation’s diplomacy since the end of World War II. Subsequent ones drawn in part from my 25 years teaching at Georgetown University and from the experience of other experts will examine the costs of discouraging students and scholars from pursuing their studies and research in the United States and attacking America’s public broadcasting stations and networks.

First, however, is a former colleague’s expert look at how the administration is poised to do something foreign dictators have tried and failed to do for more than 80 years: shut down almost all of America’s international broadcasting. This will happen by the end of this year, absent an unlikely late save by Congress or action by the courts, also unlikely given this week’s Supreme Court ruling allowing the administration to proceed with sweeping cuts to federal agencies.

Here’s a take on what might be in store from Jeffrey Trimble, a superb Moscow correspondent who then spent two decades in senior management roles at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (renamed the U.S. Agency for Global Media in 2018).

My “ah-ha” moment came a little less than two hours into the June 25 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on U.S. international broadcasting. The Trump administration’s role model for a properly functioning information space, it turns out, is an increasingly authoritarian Hungary.

As a 20-year veteran of U.S. international broadcasting, I was struggling to recognize the media organization that was described by the hearing’s sole witness and by some Republican committee members. “Corrupt”, “politically biased”, “backwards”, “little to no oversight” and “a rotten piece of fish” were among the charges leveled by Kari Lake, whom President Donald Trump tapped earlier this year to lead the Voice of America (VOA) and is now the de facto head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the agency that oversees all U.S.-funded non-military international broadcasting.

As she came aboard, Lake was upbeat about VOA’s future. “We are fighting an information war, and there’s no better weapon than the truth, and I believe VOA can be that weapon,” she said in February at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

That lip service to VOA’s mission and traditions didn’t last long. In March, Lake, by then a senior advisor at USAGM, and without consulting VOA management or the leaders of the other USAGM networks, abruptly stopped almost all VOA programming and put most of the staff on leave. The shutdown was so sudden that longtime VOA listeners in Africa, hearing music on the airwaves instead of news programming, went online asking whether there had been a coup in the United States.

Lake also sought to revoke grants approved by Congress to the other USAGM networks, which include Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Amid ongoing court cases, these outlets continue to receive funding, but with delays that have forced staff furloughs and other reductions, including the loss of transmission assets.

The U.S. international broadcasting organization that I know from the inside is a vital, economical, highly successful soft power national security asset. Its gutting and possible demise already have tarnished America’s global reputation. The winners? Russia and China, whose relentless propaganda about the U.S. and global events immediately filled the empty airwaves and now goes unchallenged.

When Lake pulled the plug, the USAGM networks were drawing weekly measured audiences of more than 420 million people around the world in some 60 languages — and the number in fact is far higher, since in many authoritarian countries USAGM is unable to research its reach. By comparison, Joe Rogan draws between 11 and 14 million listeners to the podcasts he does three or four times a week. Fox News draws about 1.6 million viewers daily.

The shutdown of the VOA and the strangling of the grantee networks was greeted with glee in Beijing and Moscow, where the head of Russia’s RT propaganda network praised Lake’s handiwork as “awesome”.

The title of the June hearing neatly captured the firing-squad tone of the session: “Spies, Lies and Mismanagement: Examining the U.S. Agency for Global Media’s Downfall.” Lake’s loopy logic and flimsy justifications for shutting down U.S. international broadcasting drew plenty of pushback from Democrats and even from some Republicans. That was no surprise, as U.S. international broadcasting traditionally has had broad bipartisan support. But any hope of a Republican rescue died when Trump, immediately following the hearing, called the Republicans to heel, taking to social media to call VOA “a TOTAL, LEFTWING DISASTER” (caps are HIS, not mine) and directing them to “KILL IT”.

Judge for yourself. You can read Lake’s testimony, and a rigorous fact-check of her distortions and misinformation by laid-off VOA employees at: https://savevoa.com/fact-check/kari-lake-at-house-committee-on-foreign-affairs-june-25.html. If you have a strong constitution, you can watch the full hearing here: https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/hearing/spies-lies-and-mismanagement-examining-the-u-s-agency-for-global-medias-downfall/.

So why kill this precious asset, which for more than eight decades has earned the trust of global audiences and been the bane of dictators from Hitler to Stalin to Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin?

Are there problems at USAGM? Sure, but name a government agency — or media outlet, for that matter — that doesn’t have them. So why not do serious, professional examination and analysis — not a slap-dash, cherry-picking, partisan hit job — of the strengths and weaknesses, as well as the threats and opportunities, and then address them without abandoning huge, dedicated global audiences?

Back to the hearing.

Nearly two hours into the session, Lake jumped on a question from a committee Democrat to extol the authoritarian leadership of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Reminded by the committee member that Lake was on the record saying Orban was “doing it right”, Lake doubled down, saying Orban has “done the best job in Europe”, and has “put the people of his country first”.

Ah ha.

On one hand, that was no surprise: Orban is a long-time darling of the American right and an ardent Trump booster. On the other hand, Lake is the de facto head of U.S. international broadcasting, whose mission, enshrined in law, is “to inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy”.

Who is her model for a leader “doing it right”? Viktor Orban, described by Reporters Without Borders as “a predator of press freedom”.

Hungary, while a member of the European Union and NATO, is “on an illiberal and authoritarian trajectory,” according to Freedom House. That includes gaining a stranglehold on journalism. In the last decade Orban, using political, regulatory, and economic clout, including the purchase of media outlets by his oligarch buddies, has ruthlessly crafted an information space in which Hungary’s far right Fidesz ruling party controls 80 percent of the country’s media.

Orban-controlled media outlets, as documented by Freedom House and other human rights organizations, are used to smear political opponents and promote false allegations. Government advertising and sponsorships are steered to pro-government outlets, leaving independent news sources financially strapped. Surviving (for now) independent media outlets are subject to relentless political and regulatory pressures.

Orban regularly targets journalists, as well. In a speech in March, he compared his political opponents to “insects” that have “survived for too long”. He accused “politicians, judges, journalists, pseudo-NGOs and political activists” of taking “corrupt dollars” from abroad and vowed to “eliminate the entire shadow army”.

Things in Hungary are so bad that in 2020, at the direction of Congress, RFE/RL restored its Hungarian Service, which had been closed in 1993 after the end of the Cold War. (Might this contribute to Lake’s antipathy toward RFE/RL?)

Lake’s enthusiastic embrace of Orban and his way of “putting the people of his country first” presumably includes his treatment of journalism and journalists. To Orban and his ilk, journalism isn’t about being a socially responsible player in a democratic system of checks and balances. It’s not about providing a truthful and comprehensive account of events, acting as a forum for comment and discussion, representing diverse groups, and more that is necessary to a functioning democracy.

Instead, it is a 21st Century version of the oldest media model — an authoritarian press in which journalism and journalists are subservient to the government, tools to promote the state’s interests and maintain social order.

The authoritarian model, as characterized by academics back in the 1950s, emphasizes control and censorship to prevent challenges to the leadership and to protect the government's public image. It maintains a veneer of openness by occasionally including opposing views; it seeks instead to minimize and discredit them to the point of irrelevance.

Does Lake aim to remake U.S. international media in this mold? If so, the Voice of America will have only one voice: that of Donald Trump and his chorus of sycophants, and it will disseminate their version of American reality, period.

You don’t think so? Guess what media outlet, according to a May announcement by Lake, will provide content, free of charge, for Trump’s VOA? The far-right One America News Network (OAN), whose promotion of Trump’s false 2020 election claims forced the network to settle multiple lawsuits from voting software companies. That’s whom Lake will rely on to tell America’s story to the world.

For the moment, the U.S. International Broadcasting Act remains the legal underpinning of the VOA and the other USAGM networks. In contrast to Lake’s apparent vision, it requires “a balanced and comprehensive projection of United States thought and institutions, reflecting the diversity of United States culture and society”.

The VOA Charter stipulates that “VOA news will be accurate, objective, and comprehensive” and that it will “represent America, not any single segment of American society, and will therefore present a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions”.

Fulfilling the mandates of the Broadcasting Act and VOA Charter requires real journalists. Acting as a PR service for Trump’s version of American reality does not. That’s where the likes of OAN come in. As Xinhua does for China’s leadership and RT and TASS do for Vladimir Putin, so OAN will do for Donald Trump.

At this writing, the fate of U.S. international broadcasting remains uncertain, but salvation by Congress — given Trump’s marching orders to Republicans — seems unlikely. While lawsuits by USAGM employees and the grantee networks are pending, these are unlikely to be resolved before devastating cuts are made. Time is on Lake’s side, with a proposed budget for FY26 that provides little more than what’s needed to finish shuttering the agency.

Even if by some miracle U.S. international broadcasting is saved, regaining audiences and credibility would be daunting, if not impossible, in today’s jam-packed global information environment.

What a loss. I know that the thousands of journalists who have worked diligently, often at great personal risk, for the VOA and the other USAGM networks still support the historic mission of U.S. international broadcasting. That is to report the news without fear or favor and describe America to the world in all the richness, complexity, and breadth (and yes, also the mistakes and messiness) of our democratic experience.

Their model isn’t Orban’s Hungary. It’s the words spoken in the VOA’s first broadcast, in German during the height of World War II: “The news may be good for us, it may be bad for us . . . but we will tell you the truth”.