There is a Disaster Pending for US Journalism
In an opinion piece in today’s Guardian, Andrew Gawthrope raises a warning about the future of American journalism.
“The US’s foreign broadcasters,” Gawthrope writes, “may soon be forced to become pro-Trump propaganda.”
Gawthrope is referring to The Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Asia and Radio and TV Marti. Most Americans, because of the Smith/Mundt Act, have never seen or heard these broadcasts, but for more than a billion people around the world who live in repressive countries without a free press, they are an essential, and sometimes, the only source of honest reporting and news.
Last week, Trump nominated Kari Lake to be the head of the VOA, the Voice of America. Lake has long been a Trump sycophant and a supporter of his view that the media are “the enemy of the people”. She is also notoriously anti-immigrant. All of these services are made up of people who are immigrants and political refugees from the countries into which they broadcast — their crime, telling the truth about their native repressive regimes.
Project 2025 suggests that American public broadcasters, (and one must assume this includes NPR and PBS), “be placed directly at the command of either the State Department or the White House national security council, turning them into little more than pro-administration propaganda outlets.”
This would be, to say the least, a mistake and a tragedy.
I know this from personal experience. In the early 1990s, I was hired by the US government to take the Voice of America from being a short wave radio broadcaster to being a global television network, which I did, launching VOA-TV.
It was my pleasure then to work with some of the finest and most dedicated journalists it has ever been my privilege to know. These are people with a mission to tell the truth to the rest of the world, and it is that commitment to telling the truth that gives organizations like VOA or RFE/RL their power in a world denied access to the truth. The integrity and power of America’s news broadcasts to the world don’t rest on pro-American, or Pro-Trump propaganda. You can leave that to RT and the rest of the Putin media machine. The power of VOA et al is that they are committed to always telling the truth — the good, the bad and sometimes the ugly. This is waht people respect.
If the Trump administration turns the VOA and the others into propaganda agencies they will destroy them.
Together, VOA, RFE/RL and the rest reach more than 420 million people weekly in over 100 countries, making them the biggest broadcaster in the world.
America can garner far more respect and power in the world by being a beacon of truth than by being yet another propaganda mill.
We should not let this happen.
