Commentary: I fought to keep VOA independent. Now it's gone

The Trump administration has accomplished something that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and other dictators desired. It destroyed the Voice of America.

Until mid-March, VOA had been on the air continuously for 83 years. Starting in 1942 with shortwave broadcasts in German to counter Nazi propaganda, America’s external voice had expanded to nearly 50 languages, with a weekly combined audience of more than 350 million people worldwide, watching on TV, listening on radio, with a weekly combined audience of more than 350 million people around the world watching on TV, listening on radio or viewing its content online or through social media apps.

VOA was unique from the beginning. It vowed not to be a propaganda service. It would deliver news and information, whether it was good or bad. Over the decades, Congress passed and presidents signed legislation ensuring that VOA would not be the voice of the party, and presidents signed, legislation ensuring VOA would not be the voice of which political party was in power, nor would the White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department be able to censor its content. VOA had a mandate to be fair and balanced.

In my 20-plus years reporting for the Voice of America, mainly from Asia, we always stressed accuracy over speed. As many as three editors would pour over our scripts and texts to ensure they were free from bias. No one ever asked me to spin a story a certain way.

Near the end of the first Trump administration, as one of VOA’s high-profile correspondents (I was White House bureau chief), political appointees targeted me for retaliation when I led colleagues in fighting attempts to breach our sacrosanct journalism firewall. Subsequent court rulings and investigations by the Office of Special Counsel and the State Department’s inspector general backed us up and concluded that the political appointees at our parent agency, U.S. Agency for Global Media, conducted an illegal witch hunt. (This is detailed in my book: "Behind the White House Curtain: A Senior Journalists Story of Covering the President – and Why It Matters.")

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, written during the interregnum between the two Trump presidencies, unveiled a blueprint to bring VOA’s perceived liberals to heel. It suggested an end to VOA’s autonomy and having it placed under the State Department or the National Security Council.

Even before any of the Trump appointees returned to USAGM, incumbent management at VOA sought to appease the White House. Stories were spiked and headlines massaged. Those were subtle changes unnoticed externally. More overt pre-emptive obedience: suspending me from reporting as VOA’s chief national correspondent and removing Patsy Widakuswara from her position (she was my successor as White House bureau chief). Media critics noted that Patsy and I had been vociferous in opposing attempted partisan interference in VOA’s reporting in 2020 when the Trump appointees belatedly sought to tear up the broadcaster’s charter and tear down its firewall.

Just as Neville Chamberlain found out after 1938, appeasement is interpreted by enemies as weakness.

Firing the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, the president appointed as a USAGM “special advisor” a former TV broadcaster from Arizona who had twice failed to win statewide office, Kari Lake. She initially promised “reform” at VOA to eliminate the supposed radical left bias and remove imaginary internal security risks.

Lake herself, however, was big-footed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Two weeks after Patsy and I were sidelined, DOGE wiped out VOA. All 1,350 staffers were placed on leave with pay. Radio and TV broadcasts went silent. Our news websites were no longer updated. Leases for content distribution worldwide were canceled.

Patsy became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against Lake and USAGM figureheads to reverse what we contend were illegal actions, executive branch overreach, and viewpoint discrimination. It is possible we will ultimately prevail in federal court, but our audiences are already gone, with Chinese and Russian media outlets filling the void.

If the U.S. government is not mandated to restore international broadcasting or if Congress votes to eliminate such funding, what is the path forward?

At an annual cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, establishing a replacement VOA would drain the bank accounts of most potential philanthropists. Would benefactors even step forward to fund programming for a few geo-strategic languages in which the BBC does not broadcast, such as Khmer, Shona, or Tibetan?

It is also challenging to develop a commercial-driven structure for languages and others, such as Rohingya, for which VOA was the exclusive external source.

The likeliest replacement sponsors: other leading democracies. If not the British, perhaps Australia, Canada, or Japan – or the European Union? The EU has mulled funding Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Australia, Canada, and the UK, however, face domestic political pressure to reduce what remains of their foreign language services.

Lake, meanwhile, quickly changed her tune to support the DOGE's destructive acts. VOA could no longer be reformed. It was unsalvageable and a “rotten fish” spewing anti-American propaganda, an assertion that could be refuted by bothering to actually view, listen to and read VOA’s staid content, very similar in approach and tone to that of the Associated Press (which also became a Trump administration target for punishment for not accepting the White House’s unilateral move to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”)

Clearly, any entity not parroting administration talking points was now unacceptable. And it was unthinkable to have a government-funded independent media outlet, even if it had been an effective instrument of American soft power and public diplomacy over the decades and helped contribute to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Public broadcasters NPR and PBS would also come into the crosshairs with cuts to federal funding, while the Federal Communications Commission would be weaponized to bring domestic broadcasters into line by threatening to revoke their FCC licenses.

The actions resemble developments in other fragile democracies, including India, Hungary, the Philippines, Serbia, and Turkey, where press freedoms eroded under the guise of national security or so-called media reform, with aspiring authoritarians intimidating and discrediting journalists. To consolidate power, these leaders are compelled to control the narrative and minimize dissent. The casualties are accountability and democratic institutions.

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Steve Herman retired as VOA’s chief national correspondent on June 30, 2025, to accept a position as the executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation at the University of Mississippi.

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