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Steve Lodge, whose father Robert Lodge was corresponding to VOA, stands protest in front of the organization’s seat in Washington DC
The Chinese state media welcomed Donald Trump’s decision to reduce public funding for the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia media, which has long reported on authoritarian regimes.
The decision affects thousands of employees – some 1,300 employees have been put on leave paid in the voice of the voice of America (VOA) since Friday’s decree.
The criticisms qualified the setback for democracy, but the newspaper of Beijing Global Times denounced VOA for its “appalling history” in the report on China and said that it had “now been dismissed by its own government as a dirty cloth”.
The White House defended this decision, saying that it “will make sure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”.
Trump’s cuts target the American agency for the world media (USAGM), which is supported by Congress and finance the affected media, such as VOA, Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Radio Free Europe.
They have been acclaimed and grateful international for their reports in places where press freedom is seriously limited or non -existent, from China and Cambodia to Russia and North Korea.
Although the authorities of some of these countries block the emissions – VOA, for example, is prohibited in China – people can listen to them on a short wave radio or bypass restrictions via VPN.
RFA has often reported on the repression of human rights in Cambodia, of which the former authoritarian sovereign Hun Sen greeted the cups as a “great contribution to the elimination of false news”.
It was also among the first media to report on the Chinese network of “rehabilitation camps” in the Xinjiang, where thousands of Uighur Muslims were held – an accusation of Beijing Nie. Its reports on North Korean defectors and the alleged concealment of the Chinese Communist Party of Hard Deaths won prizes.
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Former American president Bill Clinton granted an exclusive interview to RFA on the eve of his trip to Beijing in 1998 – after the RFA journalists were excluded from China
VOA, mainly a radio point of sale, which also broadcasts in Mandarin, was recognized last year for its podcast on rare events in China against the leafy locking.
But the Global Times of China welcomed the cuts, calling VOA a “Lies factory”.
“While more and more Americans are starting to unravel their information cocoons and see a real world and a multidimensional China, the diabolization stories propagated by VOA will finally become a laughing stock,” he said in an editorial published on Monday.
Hu Xijin, who was the former editor -in -chief of the Global Times, wrote: “Voice of America was paralyzed! And there is Radio Free Asia, which was also vicious for China. It is such good news.”
Such responses “would have been easy to plan,” said Valdya Baraputri, a journalist from Voa who lost her job this weekend. It was previously used by BBC World Service.
“The elimination of VOA, of course, allows channels that are the opposite of precise and balanced reports to prosper,” she told the BBC.
The National Press Club, a leading representative group for American journalists, said that the order “undermines America’s long -standing commitment to a free and independent press”.
Founded during the Second World War in part to counter Nazi propaganda, VOA reaches some 360 million people per week in nearly 50 languages. Over the years, he broadcast in China, North Korea, Communist Cuba and the former Soviet Union. It was also a useful tool for many Chinese to learn English.
Voa’s director Michael Abramowitz said Trump’s order had shouted by VOA while “American opponents, like Iran, China and Russia, flow billions of dollars to create false stories to discredit the United States”.
Ms. Baraputri, originally from Indonesia but based in Washington DC, joined the VOA for the first time in 2018, but her visa was finished at the end of Trump’s first administration.
She joined in 2023 because she wanted to be part of an organization which “maintains factual impartial reports without influence of the government”.
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The FRG was among the first to point out that China would have held Uighur Muslims in facilities like these
The recent cuts left her “feeling betrayed by the idea that I had on press freedom (in the United States)”.
She is also concerned about colleagues who could now be forced to return to hostile countries of origin, where they could be persecuted for their journalism.
Meanwhile, the Czech Republic called on the European Union to intervene so that it can maintain Europe’s free radio. It reports in 27 languages of 23 countries, reaching more than 47 million people each week.
RFA CEO, Bay Fang, said in a statement that the organization planned to challenge the order. Cutting the financing of these points of sale is a “reward for dictators and despots, including the Chinese Communist Party, which wanted nothing better than to pass their influence in the information space,” he said.
RFA began in 1996 and reached nearly 60 million people each week in China, Myanmar, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. In China, he also broadcasts in minority languages like Tibetan and Oulur, apart from English and Mandarin.
“(Trump’s order) disinfranchit not only the nearly 60 million people who turn to FRG reports on a weekly basis to learn the truth, but this also benefits America from America at our expense,” said Fang.
Although the Chinese state media celebrated the cuts, it is difficult to know what the Chinese think of it since their internet is strongly censored.
Apart from China, those who have listened to VOA and FRF over the years seem to be disappointed and worried.
“Looking back the story, countless exiles, rebels, intellectuals and ordinary people persisted in the dark because of the voices of Voa and RFA, and saw hope in fear because of their relationships,” wrote Wen, a Chinese dissident living in Belgium, wrote on X.
“If the free world chooses to remain silent, then the dictator’s voice will become the only echo in the world.”
