Fox News correspondent backs Voice of America during awards reception

Jennifer Griffin accepts the First Amendment Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association in March 2026. (Courtesy photo, supplied by Fox News Media)

A Fox News Channel correspondent expressed her support for hundreds of journalists who were laid off from the Voice of America (VOA) last year, the outlet where she began her broadcast career more than three decades ago.

The comments were made during the Radio Television Director News Association’s annual dinner in Washington D.C., during which Fox News Chief National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin was honored with the organization’s First Amendment Award.

Griffin noted that dozens of Farsi-speaking VOA workers were among the hundreds laid off last year after President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order that directed VOA’s parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, to reign in spending and cut unnecessary workers.

“They were fired last year as part of an attempt to get rid of government waste, and then they were rehired last summer when they realized that they needed them to broadcast those reports into Iran when the U.S. started bombing Iran’s nuclear sites,” Griffin said. “They were needed more than ever, and they’re needed now.”

Griffin noted that her career in broadcasting began at the VOA’s offices in Pakistan before she worked her way through other news outlets.

“I have a particular affinity for VOA and their language service reporters,” she said on Thursday.

For more than a year, the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle VOA’s operations around the world has led to a situation where corners of the world with the biggest need for reliable news are unable to receive it anymore. Among other things, the USAGM, under order from Trump, laid off or fired more than 250 employees and over 600 contractors, including freelance journalists who are commonly known within the industry as “stringers.”

Last year, during an Israel-led bombing campaign against Iran, the VOA was forced to reverse layoffs impacting dozens of Farsi-language reporters in order to adequately cover the situation there. VOA does not operate direct transmitters in Iran; instead, the broadcaster used shortwave and AM radio to beam its news and information into the country from neighboring locations.

Since then, the VOA has significantly reduced its shortwave and AM radio broadcasts, opting to release a limited amount of information through streaming radio and the VOA website. Most of VOA’s television broadcasts on terrestrial, satellite and streaming platforms are also gone.

That became an issue in late February, when the U.S. and Israel began joint military operations against Iran, targeting dozens of government figures and key locations across the country. Shortly after the first bombs fell, Trump released a statement on Truth Social in English that promised the fall of the Iranian dictatorship and urged the citizens of Iran to rise up and install a new, democratic government.

On Fox News, Griffin was asked how that message might be received in Iran, given the country’s control over the media and land-based Internet.

“As we were discussing before, Voice of America is sort of a shell of its former self,” Griffin said. “They fired a lot of people, they downgraded a lot of their language services. That would normally be how you would broadcast a message like this, in Farsi, to the Iranian people.”

Given the lack of a reliable, U.S.-backed broadcast operation targeting Iran, Griffin presumed information from the U.S. government would reach the Iranian people slower than usual, but said there were other ways for citizens to receive Trump’s message. She speculated that illicitly-obtained Starlink equipment used by some Iranian protesters last year might be repurposed to receive reliable information from outside the country.

“If those are up and running — and they do tend to work in these dire circumstances because they’re satellite-based — there is a possibility that this message is getting through,” Griffin said on Fox News. “But it would need to be translated into Farsi to have a broad reach in Iran.”

The full text of Griffin’s acceptance speech on Thursday evening is below:

I’m deeply honored to be here tonight alongside so many reporters whom I admire and all of you fighting for the First Amendment and press access which none of us realized was going to be taken, that we would take it for granted like we are right now.

In 1989 I started this journey with my husband, Greg Myre, who works for NPR now. He’s one of the most fair-minded, fact-based, even-keeled journalists I know, and I owe him a debt of gratitude for sweeping me away while he was covering the first Gulf War from Kuwait in 1991. The following summer we began reporting together in Mogadishu, Somalia, and we haven’t stopped. The state of the world is the first thing we talk about in the morning and the last thing we talked about at night. Some say we need better pillow talk. I’m constantly reminded, however, that covering these stories is dangerous business.

Four years ago this week, Fox News lost one of our greatest truth-tellers to a Russian missile in Ukraine. Photographer Pierre Zakrzewski gave his life to tell the story of the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine. I worked with him in Gaza and in many places, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Our colleague, Benjamin Hall, lost his leg and nearly his life trying to get to the front lines, and our young Ukrainian stringer, Sasha Kuvshynova, was killed alongside them. She was just 24 years old.

Local stringers who translate for us and teach us about their beloved countries are the hidden heroes behind every good foreign correspondent. They are our eyes and ears. They’re often targeted or jailed after Western reporters go home.

Tonight, I’m thinking of the brave journalists, as all mentioned, in Iran, in Evin Prison, and the Persian speakers who are working around the clock for VOA and Radio Free Europe. They were fired last year as part of an attempt to get rid of government waste, and then they were rehired last summer when they realized that they needed them to broadcast those reports into Iran when the U.S. started bombing Iran’s nuclear sites. They were needed more than ever, and they’re needed now. I started my broadcast career with VOA in Islamabad, Pakistan, so I have a particular affinity for VOA and their language service reporters.

Tonight, I’m also thinking of the brave Russian journalists we knew when we lived in Moscow who have defied Putin for the past four years. The Moscow Times moved to Estonia. They’re very, very brave, and they’ve risked their lives to tell the truth about Putin’s war.

For the past 18 years, I have been based at the Pentagon for Fox News. On October 15th, Fox joined journalists from all the major networks and outlets that have historically made up the vaunted Pentagon Press Corps, and we walked out in protest. I was actually in Israel reporting at the time, but I was there in spirit. We walked out and protested the strict reporting guidelines and restrictions imposed by the new Pentagon leadership. They had already kicked out some reporters from CNN, the Washington Post, NBC, New York Times, and Politico, out of those workplaces, and they had severely curtailed already our movements within the building even threatening our sources who normally were authorized to speak to the press, in fact encouraged to. They subjected them to polygraphs. It had a real chilling effect on all of us and on our sources.

I’m concerned that during this time of war, that news organizations, which have reported uninterrupted from inside the Pentagon since 1947, are no longer given that access. If it hadn’t been for reporters inside the Pentagon with USA Today, we wouldn’t have known about how the Marines were blocking the MRAP program. Those MRAPs saved the lives of some of the people who right now are curtailing press freedoms at the Pentagon. We wouldn’t have known without The Washington Post’s Dana Priest about the Walter Reed scandal. This is what the Pentagon Press Corps has done over the years.

I’m very grateful to my bosses at Fox News — Jay Wallace, Brian Boughton, Kim Rosenberg and Doug Rohrbeck — who are here with me tonight. They did not hesitate to stand united with the rest of the news organizations and fight for press access. They continue to do so every day.

Tonight, I accept this award on behalf of all of my colleagues who make up the Pentagon Press Corps. Our work continues. We won’t stop.