Freedom's frequencies fall silent amid Trump cuts

President Donald Trump's efforts to mute Voice of America and other US government-funded international broadcasters may not have received as much attention as his many other sallies, perhaps because these media outlets do not broadcast within the United States and so are not well known. But stifling America's voice around the world carries serious consequences. It strips the United States of one of its most venerable, and effective instruments of soft power.

- Serge Schmemann

A federal judge on Friday halted the Trump administration's efforts to dismantle the eight-decade-old government-funded international news service. Meanwhile, staff can go back to work, at least for the time being.

Earlier, the order to eliminate the US Agency for Global Media "to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law" was tucked into a measure also scuttling down several other small government agencies, as with so many of the president's decrees, the answers to many questions remained unclear, including whether Trump had the legal authority to end the outfits, and whether they would be revived if he fully disbanded.

Global Media is an umbrella agency that oversees VOA and several other global media "radios," as they've been collectively known — including the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Also under the umbrella is the Open Technology Fund, formally started in 2019, which supports uncensored internet access to over 2 billion people.

Collectively, the outlets reached more than 425 million listeners or viewers worldwide. VOA, which counted about 360 million of those people in nearly 50 languages, fell silent immediately.

No one would dispute that the radios, most with their origins in World War II and the Cold War, required updating for a rapidly changing world with rapidly evolving technology.

But they were emphatically not a waste of money or effort. For millions of people world-wide — especially in places like Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela, where access to information is jealously controlled by authoritarian regimes — the American radios were a source of trusted news and information about the world and, more important, their own countries. For many Russians, Radio Liberty was the main source of reliable information about the war in Ukraine.