Lights out
Now, to a real life-and-death struggle on the streets of Myanmar.
Two months on from the 7.7 magnitude earthquake that killed almost 4000 people and leveled much of the capital, thousands remain in temporary shelter grappling with a bloody civil war that rages on and on and staring down a monsoon season ahead.
While this critical news soon faded from our bulletins, one news service against all the odds stayed put to report the crisis from on the ground.
This footage was broadcast by Radio Free Asia, one of the only international outlets to capture these dramatic developments, its own headquarters closed since the coup now reduced to rubble.
Established by the US Congress in response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Radio Free Asia has for almost three decades published independent news designed to penetrate repressive regimes. Reporting civil rights abuses in China, political persecution in Cambodia and the desperate struggle for freedom in Hong Kong.
Each week it broadcasts via shortwave radio and the internet to more than 58 million people in 10 languages. Often at great risk. At least 13 of its journalists and other staff have been imprisoned since 2008. Five remain behind bars as I speak to you tonight, including in Myanmar and Vietnam.
But in March, instead of Radio Free Asia programming, there was a sudden and awful silence as one by one its news services went dark beginning with Laos and Tibet.
Its Burmese service signed off like this:
KYAW KYAW AUNG: It is with deep sadness that we must farewell you, our audience … Our voices have been silenced. But our commitment to the truth remains unshaken.
- Radio Free Asia, 8 May 2025
And why was this programming abruptly suspended?
It turns out Radio Free Asia was finally muzzled not by civil wars or natural disasters but by Donald Trump, as its South East Asia editor Ginny Stein discovered by email:
GINNY STEIN: … our contract which had been signed late last year was no longer … funds were no longer going to be delivered to RFA … and it was just unilaterally decided that we would no longer receive those funds …
- Interview, 22 May 2025
In March, amidst a broad cost-cutting campaign, Trump shuttered America's other global broadcaster Voice of America.
Clearly no fan of the network, he voiced this opinion five years ago:
DONALD TRUMP: … have you heard what's coming out of the Voice of America, it's disgusting.
- PBS NewsHour, 15 April 2020
And brought in a trusted lieutenant to choke off funding for Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe, appointing failed Senate candidate Kari Lake to the organisation overseeing both services the US Agency for Global Media:
KARI LAKE: … it's a very corrupt agency I've learned since I've been here … Some people have said 'look I've seen Marxist programming going out, I've seen anti-American programming going out, I've seen programming that supports our adversaries. Why is the American taxpayer paying for that?'
- The Matt Gaetz Show, One America News, 4 April 2025
Fellow Trump sycophant Elon Musk described the US-funded outlets as staffed by radical left crazies:
GINNY STEIN: Well I'm not a crazy left wing loon and I'm in charge of these services, I'm a credible journalist and I have been my entire career … our role is to ensure accurate information and that's something we have worked extremely hard at …
- Interview, 22 May 2025
RFA and Radio Free Europe are both fighting to stay alive and have filed lawsuits against the US Government.
In the meantime those expatriate RFA journalists who had been working from the US now face an uncertain future:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Do you think you will be deported?
KHOA LAI: I believe so but I hope not. … If I go back then the Government will snatch me right away.
- CBS News, 22 March 2025
Another casualty closer to home is RFA's affiliate BenarNews, a digital news service which for 10 years has been filing richly reported stories from the Pacific and South East Asia exposing political repression, corruption and alleged war crimes.
Its website which hasn't been updated since early April now carries this banner.
Benar News' recently retrenched Pacific editor Stefan Armbruster told Media Watch the service displaced mis and dis-information across the region and focused on untold and neglected stories like:
… violence against women and massacres in Papua New Guinea, the continuing brutal conflict in West Papua … and the contestation of China's economic, diplomatic and military expansion …
- Email, Stefan Armbruster, Former Head of News (Pacific), Radio Free Asia/BenarNews, 23 May 2025
He added:
… the Trump administration has trashed the US's reputation in the region …
- Email, Stefan Armbruster, Former Head of News (Pacific), Radio Free Asia/BenarNews, 23 May 2025
In all, America's global news services reached a combined 427-million people every week, an extraordinary tool of influence promoting the rule of law and the institutions of democracy which the current US administration has chosen perhaps for a lack of interest in such ideals to cast aside like so much flotsam:
That Trump has surrendered a tried-and-tested tool of soft US power decades in the making, a brand trusted by overseas audiences amid the ongoing battle for ideas, can only be good news for those who RFA's reporting sought to combat.
- The Diplomat, 27 March 2025
And stepping into the vacuum?
China for one which celebrated Trump's cuts.
Ginny Stein told us Beijing had already been seducing local media outlets not just with free news copy which Radio Free Asia offered but with cash gifts:
GINNY STEIN: I have been met by a number of countries saying that look, we're taking material from China, we've been offered it and we're not only being offered it, we're being paid to take it …
- Interview, 22 May 2025
The European Union announced last week it would salvage Radio Free Europe with a five-and-a-half million Euro rescue package. No such suitor is likely however for Radio Free Asia and it's not just locals who will now miss out:
GINNY STEIN: … it's business people, it's foreign governments, it's people trying to make decisions about investment, about trying to work out whether to come to the aid of people … decisions are made on the basis of accurate information and without that whole systems breakdown …
- Interview, 22 May 2025
Foreign Minister Penny Wong declined to tell us whether she has made representations to Washington about the shuttering of these news services but says the Labor government has awarded more than $40 million to the ABC to expand its coverage of the Indo Pacific alongside other media initiatives in the region.
The ABC's head of international services Claire Gorman told us:
The US cuts amplify the need for Australia to step up its international media activity across the Asia Pacific … to counter narratives coming from illiberal states which seek to undermine democratic ideals and the rule of law.
- Email, Claire Gorman, Head ABC International Services, 23 May 2025
For the better part of a century Australia had relied on the US not just for its own security but as a bulwark against repressive ideology and authoritarian impulse.
Now with Donald Trump in the White House it seems we can rely on it no longer and nor can the millions across Asia who must once more make do with a sanitised world sanctioned by state-run media.
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