America's Voice Goes Dark

Trump has ended Voice of America and despots are publicly thanking him.

by Julie Roginsky

One of my very earliest memories is watching my parents huddling around a radio in our Moscow apartment, trying to pick up the Voice of America feed that piped in reporting from the free world into the Soviet Union. News was a precious commodity in those days. There was Soviet government propaganda, which no self-respecting person took seriously or literally. And there was Golos Ameriki — Voice of America — which, if you adjusted your antenna just so, you could

occasionally receive when the Soviet authorities were unsuccessful at jamming the transmission.

For a people starving for a glimpse into the free world, Voice of America was a lifeline. When we were finally able to escape from behind the Iron Curtain, things seemed just familiar for my parents because they had had a inkling of what life was like in the West thanks to Voice of America.

Late on Friday night, Donald Trump issued an executive order gutting the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the parent agency of Voice of America and the Office for Cuba Broadcasting, which oversees Radio and Television Martí. Voice of America is now shuttered — a dream that autocratic leaders from the world over had never been able to achieve until Trump took office. Additionally, the Administration abrogated contracts for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Radio Free Europe is continuing to limp along, although it is unclear how long it will be able to function without American funding.

This has all come on the heels of Elon Musk tweeting last month that Voice of America and Radio Free Europe should be shut down. “Europe is now free, (not counting stifling bureaucracy). Hello??” Musk ranted, adding, “It’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”

It should come as no surprise that Musk is carrying water for his phone buddy, Vladimir Putin, and for the Chinese Communist Party, which allows Musk to operate his most profitable Tesla factory in Shanghai. Only despots who want to keep their people dependent on authoritarian government propaganda who would cheer the demise of these stations. For the rest of us, who consider Russian aggression in Ukraine a genocidal war and not a “special operation,” this development is a tragedy, spelling another nail in the coffin of American soft power.

Predictably, Putin’s mouthpieces celebrated the demise of Voice of America. Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT — Russia’s exporter of Kremlin propaganda — was ecstatic. “Today is a celebration for my colleagues at RT and Sputnik, etcetera, because Trump announced the closure of Radio Freedom and Voice of America. Right now they’re closed. Well, this is an awesome decision by Trump.”

"Several thousand chronic slackers will now be searching for jobs,” added Vladimir Solovyov, one of Putin’s chief propagandists. “I'm addressing independent journalists: die, bastards! You are lying, nasty and scum. You are traitors to the motherland. Die under a fence.”

Solovyov’s rhetoric is not so far removed from what the president of the United States said last week when he took the unusual step of visiting the Justice Department to — ahem — recommend that prosecutors look into media outlets who refuse to spout the official MAGA party line.

Trump went after CNN and MSNBC (or, as he called it, “MSDNC”) in particular, complaining that they “literally write 97.6% bad about me” and act as “political arms of the Democrat Party and in my opinion, they’re really corrupt and they’re illegal, what they do is illegal.”

Mind you, this is the same CNN and MSNBC whose parent companies have bent over backwards to please Trump since the election, shedding their most vocal anti-Trump voices in the process and giving lucrative contracts and increased airtime to MAGA pundits. But for Trump, no amount of groveling will ever be enough. Unless independent media companies fully submit, he will be content to have them die under a fence, too.

You can already see how much government propaganda is seeping into nominally independent news. The Rupert Murdoch owned-New York Post wrote yesterday that “Trump’s approval ratings are sky-high,” linking to an NBC News poll showing Trump with a 47% approval rating. In normal times, having more voters disapprove of your job performance than approve of it is not what one would call “sky-high” approval ratings but we are no longer living in the reality-based world — just in the fantasyland that MAGA so effectively peddles as propaganda to the American public.

Over at Fox News, it is not Trump’s policies that are driving the markets lower into correction territory. Apparently, it is the media that is the secret hand behind the drop. “Yeah, but what we’re seeing in the last couple of weeks is a media creation,” complained anchor Charles Payne. “The media has gone to war with President Trump to make tariffs the scariest thing in the world.”

I used to work with Payne and I doubt that he truly believes what he is saying. But the word has gone out that “the media” must be discredited, so discredit the media he will. Much like RT constantly refers to Putin’s war as “a special operation,” state media in the United States will now blame anyone but Dear Leader for the travesties that are visited upon us every day.

The delusion runs so deep that independent journalists are willingly turning into MAGA propaganda mouthpieces. The other day, I went on Piers Morgan’s show to debate three MAGA talking heads about the state of Trump’s America. One of them, who calls herself a “MAGA leftist,” parroted Kremlin talking points by saying that the war was going to end along the lines that it began in 2022 and that Crimea and Eastern Ukraine would be ceded to Russia — Ukraine’s position on this be damned. “Donetsk, Luhansk, the Donbas — at the time it was an independent republic,” she said.

Actually, no. Since independence, those regions have always been part of Ukraine, whose territorial integrity was guaranteed by the United States and the United Kingdom more than thirty years ago in exchange for Ukraine ceding its nuclear arsenal to Russia. Today, the United States has shamefully gone back on its long-standing commitment to protect Ukrainian sovereignty, with nary a word from Trump-aligned media. If a treaty with the United States falls without American media consumers ever hearing about it, did it even really exist?

The biggest crisis facing us today is a failure of imagination. Just because we have never before encountered someone like Trump in the nearly 250-year history of this nation does not mean that what he is planning to do is impossible. In fact, the guidebook from which he operates is not unfamiliar to those of us who grew up in authoritarian regimes: bully the media into submission, use whatever means at his disposal, including violence, to get his way and shut down facts in service of propaganda.

I was young when I left the Soviet Union but old enough to remember what it was like. Do not think that the First Amendment will hold here just because it is enshrined in our Constitution. In the first three months of his term, Trump has already persecuted people who had the temerity to express opinions he does not share. How long before the rest of us are huddling around a radio, trying to pick up a transmission from abroad that is piping in the truth?

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