Cutting off funding for Voice of America, RFE/RL, et al doesn’t make the US president a ‘good guy’, but it’s a step in the right direction
He’s done it again. Or rather, they have. As part of their curious slash-and-burn crusade to dismantle – for better or worse – large swathes of the American state from the top, President Donald Trump and his bestie-in-chief Elon Musk with his gang of enforcers at DOGE have put the axe to yet another seven government agencies. Carried out by presidential executive order, this particular blitz is aimed at offices busy with things as diverse as labor dispute mediation and the mitigation of homelessness.
Yet, tellingly, there is only one kind of cut that has really made centrists, liberals, and the mainstream media furious. Nope, not the hit on the homeless; and not the one on labor relations either. What caused a ruckus instead is that Trump and Musk have gone after state propaganda. To be precise, state propaganda for the rest of the world.
For one of the offices that has been given the Trumpist flamethrower treatment this time is the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). And that is, in reality, the US ministry for propaganda abroad.
While it’s a fairly new (2018) label, USAGM’s roots reach deep into the fetid soil of the last century’s Cold War.
But that “involvement was kept secret until the late 1960s for fear of Soviet retaliation,” as Encyclopedia Britannica puts it with fine British understatement as well as a whopping portion of brute disinformation: The fact that the CIA remained in hiding was, of course, not due to the big bad Russians (the Soviets at the time) being so terribly scary. It was simply a means to manipulate publics in the East and the West and present what was geopolitically driven propaganda as ‘independent news’.
After 1971, the CIA (officially) ended its (direct) control. If you believe that means an agency specializing in lying – and so much worse – was no longer pulling the strings, I have a Ukrainian ‘democracy’, complete with ‘civil society’ and all the fixings, to sell you.
Formally, the Board for International Broadcasting took over. It was appointed by the president, which tells you all you need to know about how important this global propaganda machine was to Washington.
Finally, after further label changes, the board morphed into the USAGM. It ended up controlling not just Voice of America, as well as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty – long merged into RFE/RL – but a host of other outlets, including Radio Free Asia, and the very honest-sounding (not) Office of Cuba Broadcasting.
According to USAGM’s own website, it was reaching an audience of 427 million per week in 64 languages, and via traditional broadcasting as well as the internet. Those lucky viewers, listeners, and readers were fed an unhealthy diet corresponding to the US “national interest” (in USAGM’s own terms) of “more than 3,000 hours of original programming each week.”
Say what you will about this American ministry of foreign propaganda, but it was bigger and richer than anything comparable the poor old Soviets ever managed to rig up.
And that is the organization that Trump and Musk have just cut down. The Cold War, of course, has long been over. Any reasonable person’s response to this overdue move would be: ‘What took you so long?’ Elon Musk had a point when posting that the propaganda outlets are “just radical crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1bn/year of US taxpayer money.” Except, they were by no means only talking to themselves, unfortunately. And what made them “radical” and “crazy” is actually how very American-as-applepie they were.
Reason, in any case, is in short supply in America’s political center. Instead of a sigh of relief that this costly Jurassic Park of Cold War media dinosaurs has finally been taken off the US taxpayers’ books, a great lament set in.
Oh, that rich sound of the 1950s! It’s almost as if Duke Ellington and his Big Band orchestra are back to let it swing with Joseph McCarthy.
Funnily enough, Abramowitz didn’t include those living under genocidal siege by apartheid Israel. It seems that “objectivity” and “balance” were doing about as well at VOA as ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ are in the US.
The former chief financial officer at USAGM, Grant Turner – yes, that’s his real name, no kidding – has bemoaned a “Bloody Saturday.”
To be fair, it’s only natural that high-ranking propaganda cadres won’t yell with joy when their life’s work ends up in shambles or their careers meet a sudden, if deserved, end. But Abramowitz, Capus, and Turner are by no means alone. NBC News, the National Press Club, the Association for International Broadcasting, for instance, all joined the chorus of protest against Trump’s move.
And the Czech Republic’s foreign minister, Jan Lipavsky, believes the EU should put Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on life support. It’s a European thing now: Whatever really bad idea Washington finally drops – keeping expensive Cold War propaganda relics, running an even more expensive and very bloody as well as hopeless proxy war against Russia – the Europeans feel like picking them up.
Let’s hope they won’t succeed. It is time for these disinformation machines to go. They have never ceased doing massive harm, be it through warmongering or information war support for regime change camouflaged as color revolutions. Ivan Katchanovski, the leading authority on the false-flag Maidan massacre in February 2014 in Kiev has just posted about how they “covered up [and] misrepresented” it by purging inconvenient video evidence, and later omitting the “de facto confirmation” by a Ukrainian court that the massacre was indeed a nationalist far-right, pro-Western operation.
The Trumpists are not ‘good guys’. They believe in lying and censorship no less than their Bidenist predecessors. Ask the Palestinians and their harassed and persecuted supporters or the Yemenites or the Venezuelans. But no one needs more well-financed lying in this world. And if American factions are now going after each other’s propaganda machines, the sight is grimly funny.
