Bringing Back National Interest — and Climate Coverage — With VOA?

In a news environment where few mainstream outlets still practice straight journalism, WatchDog suggests that before the Trump administration decapitated VOA and its siblings, the news service mostly stuck to the facts, benefiting press freedom. Photo: Miki Jourdan via Flickr Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

WatchDog Opinion: Bringing Back National Interest — and Climate Coverage — With VOA?

By Joseph A. Davis

In early March, a federal judge ruled that President Donald Trump’s effort to dismantle Voice of America and a tangle of taxpayer-funded agencies broadcasting news abroad was illegal. 

District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ordered the U.S. Agency for Global Media to reinstate most of its employees. They had been put on paid temporary leave for the past year.

It would be easy to declare a victory for press freedom. But that might be too easy. Telling the good guys from the bad guys as Trump pursues his war on the news media is a challenge.

But — to be embarrassingly obvious — VOA had been doing more climate coverage than most of the broadcast and cable nets. Right up until Trump pulled the plug. 

On March 10, 2025, for instance, it reported that the U.S. had pulled out of the United Nations’ climate loss and damage fund. Few, if any, other news media reported that. VOA went silent days later. 

 

Lifeline? Or propaganda?

To the people of Uzbekistan, an authoritarian former Soviet state in Central Asia, Radio Azattyk had been a lifeline. The Islamic people there speak Uzbek and don’t get much other reliable news.

The first question most serious journalists would ask is: Is it propaganda? Answering that is problematic. You could get both yes and no answers. Like most USAGM broadcast streams, it tries to be factual.

Is Fox News propaganda — or for that matter, Media Matters? How about Fox wannabes Newsmax and One America News? Sinclair? And have you looked at the editorial page of The Washington Post lately? 

Let’s face it: Propaganda lives large among today’s nongovernment news media. Even among many “mainstream” outlets. Blessedly, a few still practice straight journalism. Look at The New York Times. Among today’s media, VOA and its siblings have mostly stuck to the facts.

 

If the VOA family ever partook

of McCarthy-era jingoism,

it eventually cleaned up its act.

 

It hasn’t always. U.S. government propaganda once flourished. In WWI, there was the Committee on Public Information. In WWII, we had the Office of War Information. And if the VOA family ever partook of McCarthy-era jingoism, it eventually cleaned up its act. McCarthyites complained that it was full of Communists.

But it once was propagandistic. The laws establishing it, the oft-amended Smith-Mundt Act, once forbade the dissemination of VOA material inside the U.S. It seemed the idea was to avoid exposing U.S. citizens to propaganda. Until Trump blew it up, however, contemporary VOA was mostly just the facts, ma’am.

 

In the sights of Project 2025

At the time Trump did blow it up, USAGM was broadcasting in 64 languages, reaching 427 million listeners, viewers and internet users every week in some 100 countries around the world.

Was the shutdown just some random act of destruction that rose from the ketamine-addled brain of Elon Musk? 

Hardly, although DOGE was a convenient scapegoat to blame it on. Nope: It first showed up on a hit list when it was extensively criticized in Project 2025, the unofficial conservative game plan for Trump 2.0. Trump himself had ordered the guillotine for USAGM in a March 2025 executive order.

Why? Whom would it benefit? It’s hard not to think of Trump’s patron saint, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Also worth noting: To many supporters, the purpose of VOA-style broadcasts was to communicate and exemplify American values like freedom and democracy. It’s not hard to think that freedom and democracy are on the outs in the current administration.

 

What will Trump do with VOA?

During the Cold War, one major premise behind the VOA-style agencies was that Soviet media were broadcasting lies — while the U.S. government was countering that with the truth. 

It’s different today. You can’t get through a White House press briefing without several lies. You can’t get through a Trump speech without dozens. During his first term, Washington Post fact-checkers counted 30,573 Trump lies. Today, they have given up.

The WatchDog thinks “Faux News” has every bit as much right to publish as does the New York Times. Even the right to publish lies. And the Post has a right to count them and print that, too.

Donald Trump thinks press freedom is “frankly disgusting.”

And now he has his very own billion-dollar media company to publish whatever he wants.

 

The next chapter of this story

is what VOA and kin will do,

now that they are legally

required to publish.

 

The next chapter of this story is what VOA and kin will do, now that they are legally required to publish. That chapter hasn’t been written yet. 

We know at least that Kari Lake will not be the showrunner. She is a former broadcaster and an election denier. Judge Lamberth had ruled that Lake had taken over USAGM unlawfully — making her layoffs of some 1,000 employees null and void. 

We don’t know yet whether or how Trump will resist Lamberth’s decision. Or whether he will appeal it. Or whether that appeal will succeed.

The question after that is what Trump and any future appointee will actually do with USAGM. Will he turn it into a pro-Trump publicity machine? Will he encourage it to cover some things but not others? Will he ask it to slant the news? Will he encourage it to publish lies that are convenient for him? Will he use it to attack his enemies and political adversaries?

Stay tuned — at least until the government cuts off media access where you are.

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 11, No. 14. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.