How Voice of America lost the plot

Last week, a reporter attending an Oval Office press availability asked President Trump about his “plan to expel Palestinians out of Gaza.” The president correctly denied there was any such a plan and asked the reporter who she was with.

When she answered Voice of America, Trump rolled his eyes and said dismissively, “Oh, no wonder.”

Two days later the reporter and everyone else at VOA were put on administrative leave. The timing was a coincidence, but VOA should have seen it coming.

Fundamental change is desperately needed in America’s broken public diplomacy system. Storied institutions that achieved critical success during the Cold War, such as VOA, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, are a shadow of their former selves.

Now we have Persian-language broadcasts that promote the interests of the Iranian mullahs, partisan political messaging aimed at domestic US audiences and reporters who think that criticizing the president is their daily job.

Media mismatch

A series of reorganizations during the “end of history” euphoria in the 1990s detached the government information networks from their mission to support US national strategy and focused them on generic journalism with no clear objective.

A complex system of oversight boards and a congressionally mandated firewall insulated the agencies from White House influence and oversight.

The result was a steady slide into irrelevance. The agencies became plagued by low morale, security violations and budget waste.

Foreign language services designed to promote American ideals in authoritarian countries instead echoed propaganda from the very regimes the US was seeking to undermine.

Even then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2013 that the information agencies were “practically defunct in terms of [their] capacity to be able to tell a message around the world.”

President Trump has tried to fix this problem once before. Late in his first term he appointed filmmaker Michael Pack to head VOA’s parent organization, the US Agency for Global Media.

Pack’s attempt to bring accountability to the agencies was met with the full, furious force of anti-Trump bureaucratic resistance. He was hamstrung by baseless personnel complaints, IG investigations, open insubordination and hostility from mainstream media reporters dedicated to defending the status quo.

When the Biden team arrived in 2021, they unceremoniously removed Pack and all lower-level Trump appointees.

Now the White House is done with half-measures: Trump’s new executive order gives USAGM wide latitude to defund its client agencies pending a reorganization.

VOA is irrelevant in its current form, a taxpayer-funded left-leaning news outlet more focused on slamming Trump policies than supporting US strategy.

Most of the foreign populations it was designed to reach already have access to more and better news sources, including those from US adversaries who do not suffer from the same mission confusion and out-compete us on every continent.

The government does not need to spend a billion dollars a year simply to “report the news.”

Information agencies like VOA should be strategic assets for telling America’s story to the world, promoting ideals of democracy and the benefits of American leadership.

Don’t discard – reform

Meanwhile, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Network need to refocus on penetrating closed societies to provide subject peoples with news and information that their dictatorial regimes deny them.

These information agencies should be staffed by patriots who believe in and support this mission, because many there currently do not.

As well, facilities and reporting techniques should be upgraded using New Media approaches such as podcasts, social media distribution, and crowd-sourcing news from citizen journalists inside foreign countries using advanced technologies such as direct satellite links that allow reporters to reach out to USAGM directly.

Finally, Congress needs to step in to reorganize USAGM and return it to a structure and mission more like the US Information Agency during the Cold War, when cabinet-level directors like Edward R. Murrow and Charles Wick effectively used information tools to promote freedom and push back against communist propaganda.

Voice of America is a well-established brand that should not be discarded — but it needs top-to-bottom reform.

Public diplomacy is the information tool of national strategy and the United States needs cutting-edge, mission focused and highly effective agencies if it hopes to compete in the global contest for hearts and minds.

James S. Robbins is the Dean of Academics at the Institute of World Politics graduate school and was a member of the Trump-Vance transition team for USAGM.