Some employees of government-backed broadcast outlets who received layoff notices over the past few days are continuing to report to work anyway, delivering news and information over radio, television and the web, even as they remain uncertain over whether they will receive a paycheck.
Until Saturday, many of the workers were employees or contractors of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which operates a number of external broadcast outlets, including the Voice of America (VOA), the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (including Al Hurra), Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia.
In some areas of the world, the frequencies used by VOA and other government-backed broadcasters suddenly flipped formats over the weekend, playing an endless supply of pop, rock, country and classical music. But in other countries, little has changed — journalists who once counted on a government paycheck continue to report to work, producing news bulletins and their current events shows, just as they did in the prior weeks, months and years.
Some of those journalists are readying for what is likely to be a prolonged battle between their organizations and President Donald Trump, whose Executive Order last week required USAGM to end all non-essential activities and lay off workers accordingly.
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty was one of the affected outlets. The operation broadcasts news, information and entertainment from the United States and the Czech Republic in three dozen languages to nearly two dozen countries. Some of its target areas are former Soviet Union countries, where the American broadcaster served as a counter to Soviet propaganda and, today, works to offer fact-based news and information that often contradicts the narratives put out by Russian state media.
The broadcaster is hardly alone in its mission: Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty served as the model for a number of other international broadcast organizations backed by democratic governments, including Deutsche Welle (Germany), France 24 and the BBC World Service.
While some of those services have greater global reach, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty has the reputation of being the most-trusted voice of fact and reason in the European countries where it broadcasts.
That trust was the foundation for a law passed five years ago by Congress that intended to put USAGM and its external broadcasters at arm’s length of the Executive Branch of government — in other words, to remove any possibility that a sitting president might interfere with the media outlet’s mission.
Lisa Curtis, the Chairman of the Board at Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, says that law is now being violated, and the organization is willing to fight back.
“Our pro bono legal team is prepared to take all necessary steps to ensure that RFE/RL continues its Congressionally authorized mission,” Curtis wrote on LinkedIn, as first reported by CNN.
Curtis said the Trump administration’s move to withdraw funding from USAGM and its associated broadcasters was illegal because it violated Congressional appropriation laws, the Appropriations Clause of the U.S. Constitution, statutes governing Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, the Impoundment Control Act, and the Take Care Clause.
Curtis also took issue with a directive from Kari Lake, a former local TV news anchor-turned-politician who was nominated by Trump to serve as the Director General of VOA, but who is now working as a special advisor to Trump and USAGM while her nomination awaits Congressional approval.
Earlier this month, Lake said she issued a memo encouraging USAGM to terminate its contracts with several newswires, including the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters — a move that left VOA and other broadcasters with few options to publish news that covers certain parts of the world.
Lake and another Trump administration advisor, tech mogul Elon Musk, have also called for USAGM’s various broadcast operations to be shut down, and moved to terminate grants that were critical to the operation of some outlets like Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.
Last Friday, Stephen Capus, the President of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, said the grant termination “would be a massive gift to America’s enemies.”
“The Iranian Ayatollahs, Chinese communist leaders, and autocrats in Moscow and Minsk would celebrate the demise of RFE / RL after 75 years,” Capus said. “Handing our adversaries a win would make them stronger and America weaker.”
While Trump has sought to make public enemies out of Chinese government officials through economic and policy measures like imposing tariffs on imported goods, he has found some measure of goodwill with Chinese nationalists and state media, who quickly praised his decision to effectively unwind Radio Free Asia, VOA and other broadcasters.
On Monday, a newspaper aligned with the Chinese Communist Party covered the layoffs at USAGM by referring to VOA and Radio Free Asia as “the lie factory” with “an appalling track record,” CNN said.
“As more Americans begin to break through their information cocoons and see a real world and a multidimensional China, the demonizing narratives propagated by VOA will ultimately become a laughingstock of the times,” the editorial continued, noting that “almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it.”
That includes VOA’s coverage of the coronavirus health pandemic five years ago. The COVID-19 virus first spread in China, then continued to other parts of the world.
The accusations against VOA levied by Chinese state media are not unusual. What is unusual is that Trump has, at times, joined in the criticism, though on the other side of the argument.
During his first term in office, Trump took issue with VOA’s coverage of how the Chinese government was responding to the pandemic, accusing the outlet of “amplifying Beijing’s propaganda” because it republished a wire article from the AP that claimed the country’s practice of implementing curfews and lockdowns in Wuhan — the Chinese city where the virus is widely believed to have originated, and one of the hardest-hit by the pandemic — could serve as a “model” for other countries.
Trump also took issue with a graphic posted to the VOA’s social media pages that showed deaths in the United States attributed to the COVID-19 virus surpassing those reported in China. The Chinese government has been widely accused of underreporting fatalities during the pandemic.
A report issued by the Congressional Research Service in April 2020 said VOA “suffers from a lack of direction and funding, and a sufficiently aggressive approach toward countering Chinese propaganda,” though it conceded that some observers felt Trump’s view that VOA “supports” the same reporting that originates from China’s state media as “overblown.”
“China’s expanding official foreign media empire, cooperative programming with foreign media, and various forms of pressure on foreign media, reportedly have helped to support its propaganda and policies around the world,” the report concluded.
Thomas Lum and Matthew Weed, the authors of the report who served as specialists at the Congressional Research Center, encouraged federal lawmakers to examine the role of VOA and other external broadcasters, and potentially limit the influence of other parts of government in its operations.
In late 2020, federal lawmakers passed a measure that granted hiring and firing authority to USAGM’s seven-person board of directors — six of whom are appointed by the president, and which by law must include individuals from different political parties.
The law was passed after some USAGM executives joined lawmakers in expressing concern that the prior USAGM CEO, Michael Pack, interfered in the operation of VOA and other broadcasters at the encouragement of Trump during his first term in office. The measure was meant to ensure that the USAGM CEO “fully respects the professional integrity and editorial independence” of VOA and other USAGM networks.
Many at USAGM say the spirit of the law was violated when Trump signed his Executive Order last week, while others take a stronger position that the law was outright broken.
