Week of March 20, 2025

From the editor’s desk

On March 15, the Voice of America went silent.

VOA is an international broadcaster that the U.S. government launched in 1942, in an effort to fight propaganda—including anti-American propaganda—worldwide. Until last weekend, it reported news to around 350 million people in almost 50 languages, mostly in countries where press freedoms do not exist, and high levels of censorship do exist.

VOA President Mike Abramovitz explained to PBS a recent instance in which the organization’s reporting mattered:

When the president of Iran, when his helicopter went down over the summer, there was a huge spike in traffic on the VOA website because the people of Iran knew that they could not get accurate information about what was going on, so they came to VOA to get it. That’s the kind of thing that we can do.

Nico Colombant, a journalism professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, reported in French and English for VOA for the better part of the 2000s. As West and Central Africa bureau chief during the early part of that decade, during the blood diamond wars, he often traveled to Liberia. 

“I was reporting when there were a lot of peace negotiations, also when Charles Taylor was being pressured out of power,” Colombant said during a phone call yesterday. (Taylor was then president of Liberia and was later convicted of various atrocities, among them conscripting children to fight as soldiers.) In parts of Liberia, regular radio signals were weak or nonexistent, but people could access the VOA’s news about Taylor over shortwave.

Colombant said that—while radio journalists typically aren’t recognized in public when they’re off-duty—Liberians often recognized his voice and would thank him for providing the only journalism about Taylor that they were receiving. He added that this was also the case in several other conflict-torn regions.

The termination memo received by more than 1,000 VOA employees this past weekend cited the need to reduce federal bureaucracy, but it’s clear that there’s a more alarming motivation at play: We are dealing with a president who wants to see the free press diminished. 

Toward the end of this video clip of a March 13 White House press exchange, when a reporter reveals that she is with Voice of America, Trump responds with a condescending, “oh-pshaw” hand gesture, says, “Oh, no wonder,” and dismisses her question. 

Then there’s the follow-up memo from the White House itself deeming VOA “radical propaganda,” listing sources that call it “anti-American” and “exceedingly partisan.” 

Meanwhile, two of the main organizations that keep track of media bias call VOA “middle,” “reliable,” and “center.”

If you’re wondering why it would make sense for the U.S. government to foot the tab for VOA, Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in an interview with NPR this week that closures like this one could compromise national security worldwide:

… We’ve called it a gift to autocrats. If independent organizations like Voice of America, like Radio Free Europe, are not able to report, that simply creates a vacuum into which lies and propaganda from authoritarian regimes can flourish.

Take care,

—Kris Vagner, managing editor