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Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Kari Lake brought back a skeleton crew to Voice of America. They're ‘angry most of the time'
While a federal appeals court appears to have given its blessing to the Trump administration's efforts to completely gut Voice of America, the bare-bones staff that Kari Lake brought back earlier this month has been wracked with low morale and confusion. 'I am angry most of the time I'm in there,' one staffer told Poynter this week. In March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA and its sister outlets, to reduce staffing down to the 'statutory minimum.' Lake, the failed Arizona politician who now serves as senior adviser overseeing the agency, subsequently laid off hundreds of contracted employees and placed the rest of VOA's staff on indefinite leave. Following a series of lawsuits from VOA employees and executives, Lake was ordered by a district court judge last month to restore Voice of America and bring back its workforce. Additionally, the judge ruled that the administration needed to reinstate Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks. 'Not only is there an absence of 'reasoned analysis' from the defendants; there is an absence of any analysis whatsoever,' Judge Royce C. Lamberth wrote. Earlier this month, however, a three-judge appellate court panel decided to freeze the lower court's injunction, saying it needed more time to consider the merits of the case. On Thursday, the full appellate court said it would not intervene at this time. 'We are devastated and concerned that this ruling might lead to further adverse reactions from the administration,' Patsy Widakuswara, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit and VOA's White House bureau chief for Voice of America, told The Independent about the appeals court decision. 'But our day in court is not over yet, and we are committed to fighting until we can return to our congressionally mandated right to broadcast factual, balanced, and comprehensive new.' After Lamberth's initial order to return Voice of America to the air and staff it back up, a small group of 30 employees – from a staff of 1300 workers on leave – was brought back by Lake earlier this month. In an article for Poynter, Liam Scott – VOA's press freedom reporter until he was placed on leave in March and informed he would be terminated this month – spoke to several of the staffers who returned this month and described the 'grim and confusing' atmosphere in VOA headquarters. 'People who are in there do not see this as some kind of hopeful return,' one employee told Scott. 'I am angry most of the time I'm in there… They can't credibly say that they haven't shut us down when zero people are working,' Prior to the president's executive order, VOA broadcast in 49 languages around the world to a weekly measured audience of roughly 360 million people, some of whom live in highly censored authoritarian states. Now, according to those at the pared-down network, Voice of America's content is only translated into Dari, Mandarin Chinese, Pashto and Persian. 'The amount of programming that's being produced is not a credible replacement for what was on air before,' a staffer said. 'We were a 24/7 news operation. Now we're a five-minutes-a-day, five-days-a-week operation,' another source added. 'We all know that this is not what this place is meant to be doing.' Voice of America's primary English-language newsroom, meanwhile, produces just one television segment and a handful of articles a day, which are then translated into four different languages and published, according to Poynter. Notably, with press freedom experts expressing concern about Kremlin propaganda filling the airspace left vacant by VOA's absence, the network is not publishing in Russian in its current depleted state. At the same time, the small cohort that is currently working to produce what little VOA content they can is still following the network's charter, noting that they haven't received any editorial requests from the agency since returning. Interestingly, despite Lake's recent announcement that VOA had partnered up with MAGA cable channel One America News to provide a news feed, Voice of America has yet to air any OAN content. 'No one's really in charge,' a staffer told Poynter, noting the lack of clear leadership at VOA right now. Mike Abramowitz, the network's director, remains on administrative leave. The Independent has reached out to Lake and the USAGM for comment. While fewer than three dozen employees man the ship, hundreds of other full-time VOA staffers remain on the sidelines and in limbo as they wait to hear from the administration about their fate. All the while, Lake has cut other 'frivolous expenditures' from VOA and its sister broadcasters. In March, for instance, she canceled the agency's contracts to carry reporting from wire services such as Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. The media agency also reneged on a 15-year lease for new office headquarters – even though it actually saved the government more than $150 million. Though much of the network's full-time staff remains on administrative leave, such as Widakuswara, hundreds of others have already been told they are gone. Last week, Lake announced that 584 total employees were terminated across the agency, the majority of whom came from VOA. 'We will continue to scale back the bloat at [the agency] and make an archaic dinosaur into something worthy of being funded by hardworking Americans,' she told The Washington Post of the terminations before adding: 'Buckle up. There's more to come.' Widakuswara, meanwhile, bluntly described how she feels that Lake and the administration are treating the VOA staff at the moment. 'My assessment of the situation is that this is just more emotional terror that they're applying to us,' she told The Independent. 'There's no rhyme or reason why they're bringing people back and then kicking them out. To me, it feels like emotional terror to ensure obedience.'
Los Angeles Times
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
‘Beacon of freedom' dims as U.S. initiatives that promote democracy abroad wither under Trump
CHICAGO — Growing up in the Soviet Union, Pedro Spivakovsky-Gonzalez's father and grandparents would listen to Voice of America with their ears pressed to the radio, trying to catch words through the government's radio jamming. The U.S.-funded news service was instrumental in helping them understand what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain, before they moved to the United States in the 1970s. 'It was a window into another world,' Spivakovsky-Gonzalez said. 'They looked to it as a sort of a beacon of freedom. They were able to imagine a different world from the one they were living in.' When Spivakovsky-Gonzalez and his family heard of President Trump's attempts to dismantle the U.S. Agency for Global Media — which oversees VOA, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia — he said it was a 'gut punch.' The first months of the second Trump administration have delivered blow after blow to American efforts to promote democracy abroad and pierce the information wall of authoritarian governments through programs that had been sustained over decades by presidents of both political parties. The new administration has decimated the Agency for Global Media, restructured the State Department to eliminate a global democracy office and gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development, which just last year launched an initiative to try to halt the backsliding of democracy across the globe. In all, the moves represent a retrenchment from the U.S. role in spreading democracy beyond its borders. Experts say the moves will create a vacuum for promoting freedom and representative government, and could accelerate what many see as antidemocratic trends around the world. 'The United States has historically been the leading power in spreading democracy globally. Despite different administrations, that has remained the case — until now,' said Staffan Lindberg, a political science professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. David Salvo, managing director for the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund, said promoting democracy abroad has been 'a pillar of American foreign policy in the last 50 years' as a means of ensuring more stable, peaceful relationships with other countries, reducing the threat of conflict and war, and fostering economic cooperation. Yet among President Trump's early actions was targeting democracy programs through the State Department and USAID, which had launched a new global democracy initiative at the end of the Biden administration. The Treasury Department halted funding to the National Endowment for Democracy, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in April he would shut a State Department office that had a mission to build 'more democratic, secure, stable, and just societies.' Funding cuts have hit the National Democratic Institute, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems and U.S. nonprofits that have worked for decades 'to inject resources into environments so that civil society and democratic actors can try to effect change for the better,' including through bolstering unstable democracies against autocrats, Salvo said. Whether global democracy programs are worth funding was central to a hearing Thursday by a U.S. House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, as Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) repeatedly asked how to 'ensure our return on investment is really high.' About 1.2% of the federal budget went to foreign aid in the 2023 fiscal year, according to the Pew Research Center. 'I understand the committee is interested in how we can improve ... and get back to basics,' Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic congressman from New Jersey and assistant secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor under President Obama, told lawmakers. 'The problem is the administration is eliminating the basics right now.' Uzra Zeya, who leads the international nonprofit Human Rights First after serving in the Biden State Department, said it was 'heartbreaking and alarming' to watch the U.S. essentially dismantle its democracy and human rights programs. 'The potential long-term impacts are devastating for U.S. national security and prosperity,' she said. For more than 80 years, VOA and its related outlets have delivered news across the world, including to more than 427 million people every week in 49 languages, according to a 2024 internal report. The broadcaster began during World War II to provide Germans with news, even as Nazi officials attempted to jam its signals. The Soviet Union and China attempted to silence its broadcasts during the Cold War. Iranian and North Korean governments have also tried to block access to VOA for decades. But the most successful attempt to silence VOA has been through its own government. It was in effect shut down in March through a Trump executive order. Lisa Brakel, a 66-year-old retired librarian in Temperance, Mich., said VOA was a 'mainstay' when she was a music teacher in Kuwait in the 1980s. She and her colleagues would listen together in the apartment complex where the American teachers were housed, to stay up to date with news from home. When she learned the news about the VOA funding cuts, 'I thought, 'No, they can't shut this down. Too many people depend on that,'' Brakel said. 'As a librarian, any cuts to free access to information deeply concern me.' The broadcaster's future remains in flux after a federal appellate court paused a ruling that would have reversed its dismantling. This was just a day after journalists were told they would soon return to work after being off the air for almost two months. Even if they are allowed back, it's unclear that the mission would be the same. Last week, the Trump administration agreed to use the feed of One American News, or OAN — a far-right, ardently pro-Trump media network known for propagating conspiracy theories — on VOA and other services. In Asia, dismantling Radio Free Asia would mean losing the world's only independent Uyghur language news service, closing the Asia Fact Check Lab as it reports on misinformation from the Chinese Community Party, and curbing access to information in countries such as China, North Korea and Myanmar that lack free and independent media, the broadcaster's president, Bay Fang, said in a statement. 'Their invaluable work is part of RFA's responsibility to uphold the truth so that dictators and despots don't have the last word,' Fang wrote in May in the New York Times. Experts who monitor global democracy said the information gap created by the administration will embolden U.S. competitors such as Russia and China, which already are ramping up their efforts to shape public opinion. Barbara Wejnert, a political sociologist at the University at Buffalo who studies global democracies, said diplomatic efforts through U.S. broadcasters and democracy nonprofits helped precipitate a 'rapid increase in democratizing countries' in the late 20th century. 'Especially today when the truth is distorted and people don't trust governments, spreading the notion of freedom and democracy through media is even more vital,' she said. Fernando writes for the Associated Press.
11-05-2025
- Politics
'Beacon of freedom' dims as US initiatives that promote democracy abroad wither under Trump
CHICAGO -- Growing up in the former Soviet Union, Pedro Spivakovsky-Gonzalez's father and grandparents would listen to Voice of America with their ears pressed to the radio, trying to catch words through the government's radio jamming. The U.S.-funded news service was instrumental in helping them understand what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain, before they moved to the United States in the 1970s. 'It was a window into another world,' Spivakovsky-Gonzalez said. 'They looked to it as a sort of a beacon of freedom. They were able to imagine a different world from the one they were living in.' When Spivakovsky-Gonzalez and his family heard of President Donald Trump's attempts to dismantle the U.S. Agency for Global Media — the agency that oversees VOA, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia –- he said it was a 'gut punch.' The first months of the second Trump administration have delivered blow after blow to American efforts to promote democracy abroad and pierce the information wall of authoritarian governments through programs that had been sustained over decades by presidents of both political parties. The new administration has decimated the Agency for Global Media, restructured the State Department to eliminate a global democracy office and gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development, which just last year launched an initiative to try to halt democratic backsliding across the globe. In all, the moves represent a retrenchment from the U.S. role in spreading democracy beyond its borders. Experts say the moves will create a vacuum for promoting freedom and representative government, and could accelerate what many see as anti-democratic trends around the world. 'The United States has historically been the leading power in spreading democracy globally. Despite different administrations, that has remained the case –- until now,' said Staffan Lindberg, a political science professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. David Salvo, managing director for the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund, said promoting democracy abroad has been 'a pillar of American foreign policy in the last 50 years' as a means of ensuring more stable, peaceful relationships with other countries, reducing the threat of conflict and war, and fostering economic cooperation. Yet among Trump's early actions was targeting democracy programs through the State Department and USAID, which had launched a new global democracy initiative at the tail end of Democrat Joe Biden's presidency. The Treasury Department halted funding to the National Endowment for Democracy, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in April he would shutter a State Department office that had a mission to build 'more democratic, secure, stable, and just societies.' Funding cuts have hit the National Democratic Institute, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems and U.S. nonprofits that have worked for decades 'to inject resources into environments so that civil society and democratic actors can try to effect change for the better,' including through bolstering unstable democracies against autocrats, Salvo said. Whether global democracy programs are worth funding was central to a hearing Thursday held by a U.S. House Foreign Affairs subcommittee as Rep. Maria Salazar, R-Fla., repeatedly asked how to 'ensure our return on investment is really high.' About 1.2% of the federal budget went to foreign aid in the 2023 fiscal year, according to the Pew Research Center. 'I understand the committee is interested in how we can improve ... and get back to basics,' Tom Malinowski, a former Democratic congressman from New Jersey and assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor under President Barack Obama, told lawmakers. 'The problem is the administration is eliminating the basics right now.' Uzra Zeya, who leads the international nonprofit Human Rights First after serving in the Biden State Department, said it was 'heartbreaking and alarming" to watch the U.S. essentially dismantle its democracy and human rights programs. "The potential long-term impacts are devastating for U.S. national security and prosperity," she said. For more than 80 years, VOA and its related outlets have delivered news across the world, including to more than 427 million people every week in 49 languages, according to a 2024 internal report. The broadcaster began during World War II to provide Germans with news, even as Nazi officials attempted to jam its signals. The Soviet Union and China attempted to silence its broadcasts during the Cold War. Iranian and North Korean governments have also tried to block access to VOA for decades. But the most successful attempt to silence VOA has been through its own government. It was effectively shut down in March through an executive order. Lisa Brakel, a 66-year-old retired librarian in Temperance, Michigan, said VOA was a 'mainstay' when she was a music teacher in Kuwait in the 1980s. She and her colleagues would listen together in the apartment complex where the American teachers were housed, using it as a way to stay up-to-date with U.S. news. 'When I saw the news, I thought, 'No, they can't shut this down. Too many people depend on that,'' Brakel said. 'As a librarian, any cuts to free access to information deeply concern me.' The broadcaster's future remains in flux after a federal appellate court paused a ruling that would have reversed its dismantling. This was just a day after journalists were told they would soon return to work after being off the air for almost two months. Even if they are allowed back, it's not clear the mission would be the same. This past week, the Trump administration agreed to use the conservative and heavily pro-Trump media network OAN's feed on VOA and other services. In Asia, dismantling Radio Free Asia would mean losing the world's only independent Uyghur language news service, closing the Asia Fact Check Lab as it reports on misinformation from the Chinese Community Party, and curbing access to information in countries such as China, North Korea and Myanmar that lack free and independent media, the broadcaster's president, Bay Fang, said in a statement. 'Their invaluable work is part of RFA's responsibility to uphold the truth so that dictators and despots don't have the last word,' Fang wrote in May in The New York Times. Experts who monitor global democracy said the information gap created by the administration will embolden U.S. competitors such as Russia and China, which already are at work trying to shape public opinion. Barbara Wejnert, a political sociologist at the University at Buffalo, who studies global democracies, said diplomatic efforts through U.S. broadcasters and democracy nonprofits helped precipitate a 'rapid increase in democratizing countries' in the late 20th century. 'Especially today when the truth is distorted and people don't trust governments, spreading the notion of freedom and democracy through media is even more vital,' she said. ___ here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Miami Herald
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Miami Herald
Radio Marti' is back on the air. Here's why its signal is likely not reaching Cuba
Despite an earlier announcement that Radio Martí was back on the air following a presidential executive order that suddenly halted the U.S.-funded radio broadcasting to Cuba, its signal is probably not reaching the island because its shortwave transmitters remain silent. Early in March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order mandating that the U.S. Agency for Global Media — the parent agency of Voice of America and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which oversees Radio and TV Martí and the online news site Martí Noticias — reduce operations to a minimum. All Martí employees and senior management at the Office of Cuba Broadcasting were placed on leave, and the radio station stopped transmitting for the first time in four decades. Following intense criticism in South Florida and lobbying efforts by members of the Republican congressional delegation from Miami, Martí's full-time employees and seven contractors were called back to work. But the station's shortwave radio signal, which is less likely to be jammed by Cuban authorities, was never restored. An attendant at the Greenville Transmitting Station in North Carolina, which carries the station's signal, confirmed to the Miami Herald that transmitters used to broadcast Radio Martí's shortwave signal to the island are off. A source knowledgeable about the station's internal decisions who was not authorized to speak publicly said that the station's programming is only available online and through a secondary AM signal transmitted from Marathon in the Florida Keys. The AM signal is easier for Cuban authorities to jam. The person said only one contractor had been called back to work to ensure the safety of the old technology used at the Greenville station. Last month 14ymedio, an independent news outlet based in Cuba, reported that no signal was detected in Havana nor in Villa Clara, in central Cuba, on the shortwave frequency where Radio Martí used to broadcast. Though full-time staffers were brought back to work at the station's office in Doral, Radio Martí has been unable to resume its full programming. In recent days, seven contractors previously fired have been called back to work, but some produce videos for social media or write for the news site and are not involved in radio-related work. The U.S. Agency for Global Media did not reply to a request for comment. Trump's orders to reduce the U.S. Agency for Global Media's 'performance of [its] statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law' has upended the work of Voice of America, Radio Marti and other stations that the agency funded. Several employees have sued the administration over its plans. Central to their claims is how the agency's top leadership has interpreted the functions mandated by Congress. The 1983 law creating Radio Martí specifically names the Marathon facility and states it can be used for radio broadcasting to Cuba. It also says the station can use frequencies other than AM, but it appears to tie their use with a requirement to broadcast Voice of the America content. Voice of America is still off the air and is the subject of several lawsuits. In recent years, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting has tried to modernize the stations — redirecting resources from controversial television programming that could not be watched on the island because of signal jamming — to produce videos for Martí Noticias and social media. While past administrations and some members of Congress have questioned the spending on radio, Cuban American members of Congress have supported Radio Martí as a vehicle for news on an island where internet access is expensive, blackouts are common, and the government shuts down the internet during protests.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
US court orders release of $12M RFE/RL funding after Trump administration freeze
A U.S. court of appeals ruled on May 7 that the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) must release $12 million in funding previously approved by Congress for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), the media organization reported. The ruling marks a significant victory for RFE/RL amid growing concerns about U.S. funding cuts to independent media countering Russian disinformation. The court order compels USAGM to comply with an April 29 district court ruling and transfer the funds, which had been blocked following an order by U.S. President Donald Trump. The money is part of broader congressional appropriations supporting RFE/RL's operations in Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and beyond. The media organization, established during the Cold War to challenge Soviet influence, operates as an independent media corporation funded by U.S. congressional appropriations through USAGM. On March 15, Trump signed an executive order slashing funding to seven government agencies, including USAGM. The agency soon after issued a notice terminating a congressionally approved grant for RFE/RL, freezing around $75 million already allocated for the 2025 fiscal year. Join our community Support independent journalism in Ukraine. Join us in this fight. Support Us The freeze sparked legal action from RFE/RL. On March 25, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled in favor of the media outlet, but USAGM withheld the funds. The corporation returned to court, prompting the April 29 ruling mandating the immediate release of the funds. That ruling was briefly suspended by a panel of appellate judges just hours before the appeals court hearing. The May 7 decision reinstates the lower court's order, forcing USAGM to release the $12 million. The agency can still appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. USAGM's interim leadership justified the funding freeze under Trump's executive order, which mandated cuts to "inefficient spending of U.S. taxpayer funds." The move, however, has been celebrated by Russian propagandists and coincided with Trump's diplomatic outreach to Moscow as he seeks to broker a peace deal in Ukraine. RFE/RL's broadcasts have long been a target of Kremlin ire. The outlet provides critical coverage of authoritarian governments, human rights abuses, and Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine. Read also: 'The front is noisy' — for Ukraine's soldiers, Russia's Victory Day 'ceasefire' is yet another sham We've been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.
