WASHINGTON: The Trump administration has abruptly suspended journalists at US-funded broadcasters, including Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, ordering them to leave their offices and surrender equipment in a move critics say weakens America’s global media influence.
Hundreds of reporters and other staff at VOA, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe and other outlets received a weekend email saying they will be barred from their offices and should surrender press passes, office-issued telephones and other equipment.
Trump, who has already eviscerated the US aid agency and Education Department, on Friday issued an executive order listing the US Agency for Global Media as among “elements of the federal bureaucracy that the president has determined are unnecessary.”
Kari Lake, a firebrand Trump supporter and former Arizona news anchor who was put in charge of the media agency after she lost a US Senate bid, wrote – in an email to media outlets she supervises – that federal grant money “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”
A White House press official, Harrison Fields, took a much less legalistic tone in a post on X, simply writing “goodbye” in 20 languages, a sarcastic jab at VOA’s multilingual coverage.
The head of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which started broadcasting into the Soviet bloc during the Cold War, called the cancellation of funding “a massive gift to America’s enemies.”
