Donald Trump’s silencing of the Voice of America serves him two ways: Attacking the press and doing a favor for dictators around the world he so admires.
Since World War II, people worldwide have relied on the Voice of America for not only information about the United States but the world, as a news organization that has taken great pains to be robust and available even where other outlets have been banned or are targeted. Now those listeners and readers and viewers have found that their trusted source is offline, playing only music or nothing after Trump signed an executive order to gut the U.S. Agency for Global Media, putting some 1,300 global staffers on leave.
VOA is going dark because that’s the only news outfit that Trump could so directly target to such immediate effect. We have no doubt that if he could, Trump would move to shut down much more than just this one outlet. If he had the power to power down the Associated Press and others at the stroke of a pen, he would try it, because the press and its ability to surface abuses and hold his administration to account is an irritant to him.
The Voice of America and its later branches are designed to be irritants to undemocratic regimes. It was first created in 1942 specifically to serve as a foil to Axis disinformation and over the years became a beacon of hope to people living under all manner of totalitarian and despotic governments. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty notably helped spread American culture and news during the Cold War, undermining totalitarianism.
It’s telling that, while Voice of America could certainly have been an out-and-out propaganda outlet given its government ownership and financing, Congress and successive presidents took great pains to set the outlet up as an independent global newsroom. Its 1976 charter mandates the agency be “accurate, objective, and comprehensive” and its 1994 so-called firewall prohibits official interference in its independent reporting.
Other governments with state-owned and sponsored media use these outlets as mouthpieces for the official line, but the U.S. government determined that the best projection of our values would be to have an outlet that, while tasked with transmitting U.S. policies at home and abroad, would do so with its editorial independence and allowing robust discussion on those policies.
No U.S. president has ever had a completely frictionless relationship with the press, and each has at some point or another accused the media of missing the point, excluding context, being biased against them, harming U.S. interests and national security and so on. Some of these criticisms have had some validity, many haven’t, but that’s part of the push-pull that comes from having a free press, a push-pull that our leaders stretching back to the nation’s Founders understood to be necessary for the maintenance of a free society.
Journalism is the only private sector job mentioned in the Constitution, with the First Amendment protecting not just freedom of speech but specifically of the press.
That is, our leaders until now, as Trump is happy to trample on that principle and punish any outlet he sees as unfriendly. One more plank of the United States’ global influence goes dark at the president’s whim. No wonder that a French member of the European Parliament says that the U.S. should return the Statue of Liberty, as she represents liberty and immigration, two American values that Trump hates.
