It's just as shambolic as her political career.
Liz Dye at Public Notice:
During the first Trump administration, Trump put filmmaker Michael Pack, an associate of Steve Bannon's, in charge of the US Agency for Global Media. Pack fired the heads of Voice of America and the other networks under USAGM's purview, installed Trump loyalists on governing boards, paid a Republican-aligned law firm $1.6 million in a no-bid contract to compile dossiers on career executives, rescinded the rules protecting journalists from political interference, and blocked visa renewals for foreign journalists, suggesting they might be spies. This time around, it's worse.
A year ago, Trump signed an executive order targeting USAGM for destruction, along with several other “woke” agencies like the Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Minority Business Development Agency, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Each of these was created by Congress with a statutory mandate to do things and funded in the budget. Nonetheless, Trump demanded they “be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, and such entities shall reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.”
So far, he’s been unable to do it, thanks to the intervention of an 83-year-old Reagan appointee. And annoyingly, Congress refused to zero out funding for the media outlets, which have been a major source of American soft power since World War II. Now the president seems to be trimming his sails, hoping instead to turn USAGM into a North Korea-style state mouthpiece to broadcast MAGA propaganda worldwide.
Silencing America’s Voice
For more than 80 years, Voice of America and its sister networks, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Open Technology Fund, and Office of Cuba Broadcasting, have beamed high-quality media across the globe. In 2024, USAGM’s partners reached an average of 427 million people every week. Born as a counter-propaganda campaign against the Nazis, VOA outlasted the Soviet Union and transitioned to the digital age, fulfilling its statutory mandate to report the news accurately and independently, free from political interference. This put it crosswise with Trump, who routinely refers to the press as “the enemy of the people,” a term borrowed from Stalin.
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to put Kari Lake, Arizona’s sorest loser, in charge of VOA “to ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.” But the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, which must approve the VOA director, lacked a quorum after Trump fired most of its members. So in March of last year, Lake was installed as “Senior Adviser to the Acting CEO” of USAGM and later as Acting CEO, in flagrant disregard of the constitutional requirement that the CEO be confirmed by the Senate. Within 24 hours of the executive order, Lake had placed 1,042 of USAGM’s 1,147 full-time employees on leave, terminated contracts with 598 personal service contractors, and halted broadcasts to whole regions of the globe. In a cursory “Statutory Minimum Memorandum” devoid of any policy or legal analysis, Lake informed Congress that USAGM, an agency with an $882 million budget in 2024, could fulfill its statutory duties with a staff of just 68. Lake, who called USAGM “a rotten piece of fish” and a vector for foreign propaganda, proposed to replace much of its original reporting with broadcasts from such Trump-friendly outlets as One America News.
[...]
Burning down the firewall
The International Broadcasting Act requires the USAGM CEO to “respect the professional independence and integrity” of the agency’s journalists and prohibits political interference with editorial content. But Lake has been quite open about wanting to tear down this firewall. In testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Lake said, “We need to make sure the firewall is gone. We should be able to have control over what kind of content goes out. It should be in alignment with our foreign policy.” And last July, she warned that, “With the editorial firewall at Voice of America, they could go completely rogue, and the President couldn’t pick up the phone and stop them. There are no guardrails.”
[...]
On March 12, Trump nominated Sarah Rogers, currently Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, to serve as permanent CEO of USAGM . The previous CEO, Amanda Bennett, was a career journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize and went on to serve on the organization’s board, as well as the boards of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the German Marshall Fund, and the Neiman Fellowship program at Harvard University. Rogers, by contrast, is an extremely online right-wing lawyer who previously represented the NRA and Philip Morris, and is prone to spouting dogwhistles like “AI with a Western soul.” But Rogers is certainly confirmable, and was in fact already blessed once by the Senate for her State Department role. Rogers says she intends to keep her State Department job while running USAGM — a strong indication that she’ll be CEO in name only. Indeed, Lake seemed to confirm as much, tweeting that she’s staying right where she is, and nothing will change.
The USAGM and VOA under MAGA lunatic Kari Lake has destroyed its once-sterling prestige in news presentation and accuracy.
