The Future of Voice of America and American Soft Power
Last summer, senior Trump administration official Kari Lake moved to fire hundreds of employees of the federally funded international broadcaster Voice of America in what was meant to be the final blow in dismantling the agency. Since the beginning of March of this year, a judge has ordered most of them to be reinstated, and a handful are suing Lake for allegedly airing propaganda material at the same time she was attempting to demolish the organization. To the Trump administration, the VOA represents two of its major grievances: government waste and liberal media bias. However for most of its history the VOA has enjoyed broad nonpartisan support. Since that support is waning we should examine what the original mission of the VOA was, its current legal challenges, and the implications for US foreign policy if it turns out to be permanently weakened.
The VOA was founded in the midst of World War II to counter German propaganda, in German. The intent behind the program was to deliver real news via the radio to the German public, not propaganda. The goal was to strengthen the United States’ credibility as a free society in comparison to Nazi dictatorship. That soft power campaign expanded rapidly upon entry into the Cold War. Up until the recent shake-up, the VOA offered programming in dozens of countries and languages daily. President Gerald Ford signed the organization’s 1976 Charter to preserve the principles of accuracy and objectivity it was founded on. Not only would the global public be kept informed, but it gave the US the chance to differentiate itself from its authoritarian competitors.
One would expect that a news organization designed to promote American values abroad would align rather well with conservative foreign policy. For most of the VOA’s lifetime this held true. Any tensions that existed between it and the rest of the federal government were kept largely under wraps. However, an article from VOA’s own website published during the first Trump administration recounts that President Trump once suggested replacing the VOA with a state-run (rather than simply funded) media arm meant to challenge ‘fake’ news. At the time those comments were a blip in the news cycle but the second Trump White House has managed to shake off the institutional guardrails and norms that once prevented the VOA being editorially co-opted or attacked from within the government.
The first offense was the appointment of Kari Lake herself. Lake is a longtime supporter and former gubernatorial candidate who once called journalists ‘monsters’. Assigning her to lead VOA was an overtly political maneuver, but not an unprecedented one for an administration staffed mostly by loyalists. The issue that employees and watchdog groups did manage to find recourse for was the nature of her appointment. One of the March rulings concerning the VOA determined that Lake’s leadership had been illegitimate because she was placed at the head of the agency by the President on what was described at the time as a temporary basis, therefore bypassing Senate confirmation. Without Senate confirmation, her attempts to dismantle the agency from within are technically legally baseless.
However toothless Lake’s authority is in theory, she managed to do what will probably be permanent damage. The institutional knowledge of more than a thousand employees has been lost, so even if by court order or a change in administrations the VOA has its full functions restored, it is past its peak. It will be an uphill battle in court and with lingering employee hesitancies to restore the full VOA workforce. At the same time, the broadcaster’s credibility has plummeted. During her tenure Lake brought the far-right TV channel One America News onboard, promising to use it as a source for future content. She also reduced the languages broadcast to six. The former employees allege in their lawsuit that on the remaining Persian channel, pro-Trump editorial content was presented as news. Even if Lake is replaced, and after Trump’s term ends, the reputational damage on a global scale has already been inflicted.
The VOA was founded in direct opposition to propaganda, partisan, nationalist, and otherwise. In an era of foreign policy where the US has become an unpredictable ally and negotiator, and source of aid, relatively low-cost operations like the VOA that generate goodwill abroad are worth well more than their budget. However, it is also a fragile source of soft power. Now that the VOA has been shown to be vulnerable to executive overreach, only the whims of Presidents to come prevent it from becoming the arm of the state Trump wished for. Legal safeguards might strengthen it but are unlikely to pass in a gridlocked Congress. Worse, even if VOA is successfully reformed, its mismanagement has been extremely public. There is no reason for the audiences that once tuned in to trust it again any time soon. Rebuilding that trust will cost much more time and money than slashing the VOA could have ever saved.
Image courtesy of Voice of America via Wikimedia Commons, ©2021. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
