Trump slashes funding for US-funded media, sparks global alarm

WASHINGTON: The Trump administration has cut funding for US-backed media outlets, including Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, in a move that has raised international concerns over press freedom and America's ability to counter foreign propaganda.

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."

Gift to China?

"The Iranian ayatollahs, Chinese communist leaders, and autocrats in Moscow and Minsk would celebrate the demise of RFE/RL after 75 years," its president, Stephen Capus, said in a statement.

"Handing our adversaries a win would make them stronger and America weaker," he said.

US-funded media have reoriented themselves since the end of the Cold War, dropping much of the programming geared towards newly democratic Central and Eastern European countries and focusing on Russia and China.

Radio Free Asia, established in 1996, sees its mission as providing uncensored reporting into countries without free media including China, Myanmar, North Korea and Vietnam.

The outlets have an editorial firewall, with a stated guarantee of independence despite the funding from the US government.

The policy has angered some around Trump, who has long railed against media and in his first stint in office had suggested that US government-funded outlets should promote his policies.