Spokane Valley's Ryan Crocker decries Trump administration defunding 'America's voice in the Middle East'
Apr. 19—WASHINGTON — In early 2024, Spokane Valley native and retired diplomat Ryan Crocker knew the U.S.-funded, Arabic-language news organization he had championed for years needed help.
Twenty years after the Middle East Broadcasting Networks were created to counter anti-American bias that Congress and the George W. Bush administration saw in the Arab world, the editorially independent news outlet was flagging amid unstable leadership and criticism of its coverage. As chairman of MBN's board, Crocker, whose storied career in the foreign service led Bush to dub him "America's Lawrence of Arabia," recruited Jeffrey Gedmin to take over as CEO and right the ship.
On April 12, after leading a yearlong overhaul that earned the support of even some of MBN's critics, Gedmin was forced to lay off more than 90% of the broadcaster's staff after Kari Lake, a former TV news anchor tapped by President Donald Trump to remake the U.S. Agency for Global Media, terminated the grants that fund MBN and other grantees, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia.
In an email to staff announcing the layoffs, Gedmin wrote that Lake had refused to talk with him after cutting the funding.
"I'm left to conclude that she is deliberately starving us of the money we need to pay you, our dedicated and hard-working staff," he wrote. "It makes no sense to silence America's voice in the Middle East."
In an interview, Gedmin said that, along with Crocker and the rest of MBN's board, he had faced a "very painful" choice: Either run out of cash entirely by April 18 or lay off 514 of the company's 557 employees and contractors in a last-gasp effort to keep MBN online and on the airwaves until — he hopes — the courts intervene. The board, whose members aren't paid, remains intact.
On April 1, MBN filed a lawsuit against Lake and the Trump administration, alleging that their funding was illegally terminated the day after Congress passed a funding bill on March 14 that includes $100 million for MBN, an amount Crocker noted is less than the cost of two Apache helicopters.
MBN secured pro bono counsel, including former Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who argued cases before the Supreme Court during the Obama administration.
As of Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth had not ruled on MBN's motion for a preliminary injunction that could at least temporarily restore its funding.
But Lamberth on Friday extended a temporary restraining order in a related lawsuit filed by VOA, which prohibits the cancellation of MBN's grant along with the further dismantling of the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
When MBN was established in 2004, Crocker said in an interview, it was modeled on Voice of America, created by the U.S. government in 1942 to broadcast overseas during World War II. In VOA's first broadcasts, its journalists famously said, "The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth."
VOA was followed in 1949 by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which broadcast into the Soviet Union and its satellite states during the Cold War. After initially receiving covert funds from the CIA, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty later adopted a funding model that made it editorially independent from the U.S. government, despite relying on annual appropriations from Congress.
When Congress established Radio Free Asia in 1996 and MBN in 2004, both outlets followed that independent model, while VOA has remained a federal entity whose charter requires its editorial independence from the White House. Gedmin, who previously led Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said that MBN is unique in that it has a mandate to cover not only the Middle East and North Africa but also the United States, helping to explain U.S. policies and American society to its audience of roughly 30 million Arabic speakers.
On March 14, the same day Congress passed legislation to fund MBN and its sister organizations, Trump signed an executive order decreeing that the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which was created by an act of Congress, "shall be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law." A day later, the White House published a blog post titled "The Voice of Radical America" that accused VOA of "radical propaganda" but didn't mention MBN or the other grantees.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media didn't respond to questions about the decision to defund MBN, but the White House defended the move.
"President Trump's Executive Order was clear — taxpayers will no longer be forced to fund international media outlets that promote radical anti-American propaganda," White House spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement.
The White House cited reporting from ProPublica in 2008 that found an MBN TV channel, Alhurra, had broadcast an hourlong, uninterrupted speech by Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah who was assassinated in 2024. ProPublica's reporting also found that MBN, in its early years, had given a platform to Holocaust deniers and harsh critics of Israel.
The White House also pointed to reporting by the Saudi Arabia-based Arab News in 2021 in which unnamed MBN employees complained that the organization's coverage was too favorable to Israel.
In response to the White House's assertions, Gedmin, who took the helm of MBN in April 2024, didn't deny that the organization had problems before his tenure. He said that hiring, training and leading a diverse staff from across the Middle East and North Africa is challenging, as is covering highly contentious issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that all sides consider fair.
The White House also pointed to more recent criticism of MBN's coverage by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, a media watchdog organization focused on coverage of Israel. Gedmin emphasized that he has worked closely with that organization over the past year to address its concerns, which included what CAMERA considered anti-Israel bias and the platforming of extremists who were presented as experts.
In a lengthy statement, CAMERA's president and executive director, Andrea Levin, said that MBN's senior management had been responsive and worked to address her organization's concerns.
"With more than 170 corrections consequently implemented to Alhurra's output, CAMERA is now satisfied that MBN has undergone a major change in leadership and direction," Levin wrote. "This change enables it to provide accurate, balanced perspectives on key Middle Eastern issues, including Israel, in a way that stands for the values of American taxpayers."
In contrast to other Arabic-language news organizations funded by European governments, Levin said, "the dialogue with MBN was fruitful, and reflected a professional and accountable approach on their part." Whatever action the Trump administration and Congress take with respect to MBN, she said, they shouldn't leave the media landscape in the Middle East to be dominated by state-run outlets and those backed by Iran, Russia and China.
But Crocker, whose four-decade career in the foreign service included stints as the ambassador to Lebanon, Kuwait, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan, said that's exactly what is happening now that MBN has been forced to all but shutter its operations. Iran and Russia, he said, have already increased funding to their Arabic-language media operations.
"We've basically pre-emptively surrendered the information space, and our adversaries have already moved to take advantage of it," he said. "Our enemies have tried to silence us. They couldn't. We're now silencing ourselves."
Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
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