Trump freezes US public media that operate abroad

Kari Lake, a fervent party from Trump and former Arizona news host that was put in charge of the media agency after losing a Senate candidacy, wrote that the money from federal subsidies “no longer reflects the agency’s priorities” in an email for the media she supervises.

A White House press employee Harrison Fields adopted a much less legalistic tone in a message at X by simply writing “goodbye” in 20 languages, a sarcasm over Voa’s multilingual cover.

Radio director Free Europe/Radio Liberty, who began transmitting in the Soviet bloc during the Cold War, qualified the cancellation of funding as a “great gift for the enemies of the United States.”

United States-funded media have reoriented themselves since the end of the Cold War, abandoning much of the programming directed to the new democratic countries of central and eastern Europe and focusing on Russia and China.

Radio Free Asia, created in 1996, considers that its mission is to inform without censorship in countries without free media such as China, Myanmar, North Korea and Vietnam.

The media have an editorial barrier, with a declared guarantee of independence, despite funding from the United States government.