In the past two weeks, a passel of journalists lamented the loss of Voice of America and what the shutdown of the 83-year-old U.S. broadcast network means for press freedom, at home and around the world. (A court has temporarily halted the dismantling.)
Unexpectedly, perhaps, it was a sports columnist who would ace the serve. Sally Jenkins wrote that you could measure the VOA’s value “by the impact it had on a skinny-as-a-wight kid named Martina Navratilova, listening to it on a red plastic radio in a small Czech country village.”
Navratilova told Jenkins: “It was what we listened to, (to) find out what was really going on around the world.”
“But Voice of America offered far more than news; it offered ungovernable ideas, the sound of how you might live if your life wasn’t stolen,” Jenkins wrote in The Washington Post only five days after the Trump administration locked out journalists from VOA’s headquarters.
Jenkins writes of an international radio news hour on VOA, in Czech, of jazz and rock music and book reviews. This is the Cold War story of VOA with which, maybe, many are most familiar.
Most Americans, however, are not so well acquainted with the impact VOA has in these times on a globe now engulfed in propaganda, the map smudged with dark autocratic smears led by dangerous dictators.
“I felt so proud scooting around the country on my motorbike, hearing VOA’s theme song perk up in house after house as people turned on the radio,” writes Kate Woodsome of her youthful VOA reporting assignment in Cambodia two decades ago. The country then was led by a brutal dictator, Hun Sen, who handed power over to his son only two years ago.
VOA Khmer Service coverage ceased on March 15, the day the Trump administration shut down the agency’s broadcasts.
“By gutting U.S. broadcasting agencies, the Trump administration is killing one of America’s greatest sources of power: Hope,” Woodsome said on Threads.
“I’ve met many in our audience who told me VOA gave them their first taste of freedom, led to their decisions to defect from authoritarian lands or that they now speak our language because of VOA’s Learning English broadcasts,” writes Steve Herman, VOA’s national correspondent.
Herman covered news for VOA’s audiences in “dozens of countries,” spending much of his time in Asia.
Don’t believe him or Woodsome?
Look at the Lowy Institute’s exhaustive measurement of power and influence in 27 countries in Asia. In 2024, Australia’s leading think tank found VOA attracted more than half of the continent’s online listeners. VOA led in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
Number Two?
How about China? A few years ago, police arrested a university professor during a live interview, as he demanded free-speech rights.
Consider the surge in global interest in VOA coverage in the first five weeks following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – more than 800 million video views, tens of millions interactions and 21 million readers of contextual web stories. Audiences stayed at historic levels inside Russia even after Putin blocked the VOA Russian Service online sites.
Check out VOA Afghan Service numbers. Even after the Taliban took over, VOA material reached six in 10 adult mobile-phone owners.
For two decades, VOA set an example of free press in Afghanistan helping to ignite an environment of free media – attracting young women and men to journalism. The shutdown cedes the media space almost entirely to the Taliban, at the expense of hard-earned influence.
Are you tempted to believe the Trump executive order on VOA that claimed “leftist bias?” The London media-research firm AKAS asserts it’s false, finding the right-leaning news curator Breitbart hyperlinked to VOA stories far more than any other news provider.
And now, who celebrates VOA going dark?
Propagandists: “Today is a holiday for me and my colleagues at RT and Sputnik. This is an awesome decision by Trump!” said Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Kremlin-backed RT network.
And dictators: Cambodia’s Hun Sen praised Trump’s “courage to lead the world in combating fake news, starting with news outlets funded by the U.S. government.”
See also: American Society for News Excellence
Jim Fry, a former VOA journalist, retired as the agency’s chief of outreach.