Two days after the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, Soviet television broadcast a 20-second report acknowledging that a minor “accident” had occurred. Omitted was any mention of the high levels of radiation that had been detected as far away as Sweden and of the tens of thousands of people who had been evacuated. Ukrainians needed to tune to a different source, one that the Soviets actively sought to censor, for that information: the Voice of America (VOA).
Nearly four decades later, history repeated itself when Ukrainians in Russian-occupied territory found themselves subject to repressive information control. Moscow’s forces blocked access to the open internet while killing, torturing, and disappearing local journalists, replacing their output with Kremlin propaganda. Determined to persevere and defy their occupiers, Ukrainians again turned to VOA, just as peoples across the unfree world have for the past 80 years. “I’ve been receiving messages from Ukrainians living under Russian occupation in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions,” said Voice of America Ukrainian service reporter Kateryna Lisunova. “They reached out to tell me they were watching every VOA show. For them, it was a glimpse of freedom and hope for future liberation. To do so, they have to use fake names on social media and remain as discreet as possible because if the Russians found out they were listening to VOA, these people under occupation could pay with their lives.”
The outlet, along with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and four other entities, is part of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which the Trump administration has recently targeted for shutdown. (The move is being challenged in court.) The audience of USAGM broadcaster is 427 million people who listen in their 63 languages, an increase of 20% in the past four years as press freedom has declined worldwide.
In many countries, USAGM outlets are among the few sources presenting uncensored, fact-based reporting hampered neither by authoritarian government nor oligarchic censorship or influence. They serve US interests by challenging authoritarians and by giving the people these leaders seek to oppress or influence access to unbiased news and other information. In Iran, RFE-VOA’s Radio Farda has exposed state-sanctioned corruption, violence, and repression. In Venezuela, VOA journalists have provided critical coverage of the Maduro regime. And in Afghanistan, Radio Free Europe’s Radio Azadi broadcast radio lessons for young girls barred from education.
Most Americans are unaware of these activities largely because USAGM’s statute prohibits it from creating programming targeting US audiences. This has created an enormous messaging challenge for those hoping to defend the agency. How do you convince Americans of the value of something from which they, by design, do not directly benefit?
This dilemma is not unique to international broadcasting. USAID and other foreign assistance programs also faced existential funding cuts in part because voters do not immediately feel the impact, unlike, say, if Medicaid or social security were slashed. USAGM supporters must recognize this and calibrate a defense of the agency that appeals to Americans’ desire to support global democracy—a position with strong if waning public support—and to their self-interest. To accomplish that, the agency’s backers should make clear its benefits to the US public.
USAGM Is Still Needed
A common refrain from critics of US broadcasting is that its utility has dissipated since the end of the Cold War. While the internet has made it easier for people to access information across borders and harder for authoritarians to restrict it (with China’s great firewall serving as a notable exception), there remains a dearth of information tailored to certain audiences in partly free or unfree media environments and produced in their languages. USAGM has continued to prove its relevancy in those markets, filling a critical void that the private sector is unlikely to occupy since the target audiences cannot be monetized. In a study from the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) at GMF prior to Moldova’s 2024 elections—which were viewed as referendums on the country’s tilt toward the West—RFE/RL’s Moldovan and Romanian services ranked as the top two outlets in Romanian-language search results for research on a range of topics relevant to the votes. In Russian-language searches, multiple USAGM outlets, including its broadcast news outlet, Current Time, were among the top 20, directly competing with Kremlin-funded sources. Without USAGM, there would be limited or no Western media presence, meaning that audiences in contested regions would see geopolitics through a lens that is decidedly less favorable to US interests.
Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Venezuelan state media outlets may have a limited following in the United States, but they have significant audiences elsewhere, especially in the “Global South”. On social media, RT en Espanol, Russia’s primary vehicle for Spanish-language propaganda, consistently outperforms its English-language accounts and, prior to Meta’s decision to ban Russian state media outlets in 2024, it was the most followed Spanish-language media outlet on Facebook. In sub-Saharan Africa, China has established an expansive content-sharing network known as the Africa Link Union, which spreads pro-Beijing, and often pro-Moscow, messaging to at least 35 African news agencies. Regional outlets backed by the Venezuela and Iran, while not as prolific as those funded by Russia and China, reinforce anti-American messaging, often through the dissemination of content produced by Chinese and Russian state-backed outlets.
These media, even prior to the second Trump administration, were outspending US government-funded sources in parts of the world critical to American national security interests. USAGM’s shuttering would, therefore, give greater opportunity for Washington’s adversaries to shape public perceptions worldwide. Further evidence of that comes from RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, who called the move to shutdown USAGM “awesome”.
Impossible to Replicate, Improbable to Rebuild
USAGM outlets have fought hard to gain the credibility that they deserve and earn the confidence of their audiences. Internal research suggests that “well over 80% of each network’s audience [finds] their content trustworthy”, one reason to explain why their radio and television broadcasts make up a core component of the information diet of many populations. No single or even group of international outlets could replicate this footprint, especially when broadcasting into many countries with severely restricted information spaces requires proxy tools and other workarounds.
The loss of USAGM outlets leaves Washington without a way to offer objective information, a particularly important goal in a crisis scenario, as Chernobyl demonstrated. And rebuilding them in the longer term would prove costly, a waste of decades of work and millions of dollars of investment.
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The views expressed in GMF publications and commentary are the views of the author alone.
