A beacon of American freedom and democracy may soon go silent | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on May 7, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: As a bulwark against the flood of propaganda and misinformation coming from China and Russia, the United States Agency for Global Media is a global beacon of American freedom and democracy, reaching nearly 500 million listeners every day. Two of the six entities underneath USAGM are Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. While a March executive order by President Donald Trump to dismantle them has been reversed by the courts, their continued existence is uncertain as Republicans hammer out a new budget that aims to deliver on the president’s agenda. Why should Americans care? Japhet Quitzon, an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, joins The Excerpt to talk about the agency's historic role in spreading American culture and values.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, May 7th, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. As a bulwark against the flood of propaganda and misinformation coming from China and Russia, United States Agency for Global Media is a global beacon of American freedom and democracy reaching nearly 500 million listeners every day. Two of the six entities underneath USAGM are Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. While a March executive order by President Donald Trump to dismantle them has been reversed by the courts, their continued existence is uncertain. As Republicans hammer out a new budget that aims to deliver on the President's agenda, while the future of USAGM is uncertain, why should Americans care? Here to help us dig into this is Japhet Quitzon, an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Japhet, thanks for joining me.
Japhet Quitzon:
Thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Let's start with a little history. Voice of America's first broadcast was back in 1942 to Germany and included this bit, quote, "We bring you voices from America today and daily. From now on, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good for us, the news may be bad, but we shall tell you the truth." Unquote. Tell us a little bit about VOA. What was the intent?
Japhet Quitzon:
So if you look at VOA, we're looking at a radio program that tried to, as you said, bring out factual information no matter if it was good for Americans, if it was bad for Americans. The point was the truth. With Nazi disinformation so prevalent in European airwaves, it behooved the United States to provide up-to-date developments on what was happening. There were also snippets of American music, American culture, snippets of an American life to show the European people, these are the kinds of values of the people who are pushing into the country, and this is what we have. This sort of soft power, this war for ideas concept kind of started there and definitely pushed into the other outlets that would come in the wake of Voice of America.
Dana Taylor:
And Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, what's their origin story?
Japhet Quitzon:
So building up on the war of ideas, during the Cold War the United States found itself in a position of having far more power than it did when it entered the war. It was in a position where Europe was war torn, Asia was rebuilding, and it was the top economy in the world, one of the top industrial powers in the world, and it figured it needed to expand its influence. Radio Free Europe emerged in the late-1940s targeting Russian satellite states, places like Czechoslovakia, places like Poland, Hungary, and East Germany to build upon that cultural aspect and the truth aspect that Voice of America espoused. Radio Liberty started in the early fifties, particularly against the Soviet Union and its constituent republics. It was initially a lot more belligerent sounding. I think it was something like Radio for Liberation against Bolshevism, and that got toned down to Radio Liberty, but it was also to bring factual news and provide a snippet into an American life and American values.
Dana Taylor:
Japhet, some have argued that in the current age, more than 80 years after VOA's first broadcast, with no Cold War anymore, with the internet and social media, the need for these kinds of legacy media don't exist anymore. What's your response to that argument?
Japhet Quitzon:
I would argue that there's still a significant need for independent outlets, especially nowadays. If you look at your phone, if you look at any social media out there, there's quite a lot of disinformation and misinformation going around. You can't go through your Reels, you can't go through your TikTok, your X feed, or what have you, without encountering some wild claim that tries to bring you into the orbit of a certain way of thought. And it's sometimes these fantastical claims that can drag people into a loop, just a feedback loop of the same kind of information and leading them to believe it, even though it may be absurdly false. Outlets like Voice of America, outlets like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have had a mission of giving unbiased, factual news, and especially now with all the noise on social media, it's crucial that we have a voice standing apart from this.
Dana Taylor:
When Trump's executive order to shut down the Agency for Global Media was first signed, both China and Russia celebrated. According to Newsweek, the editorial staff of Chinese state media outlet Global Times said, "The so-called beacon of freedom, VOA has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag." Unquote. Russia propagandists also celebrated calling for independent journalist traitors to quote, "Die in a ditch." How might the absence of these US funded international broadcasters impact the Chinese and the Russians?
Japhet Quitzon:
Well, they absolutely had cause to celebrate. Russian and Chinese disinformation channels are becoming widespread everywhere you look, whether it's through deep fakes, whether through its astroturfing, through fake accounts on social media to spread a message, of course they have reason to celebrate. With the absence of Voice of America and outlets like it, they can go unchecked, unhindered to spread a message, spread a message against the rules-based international orders, spread a message against democracy, freedom of press and the like, which of course poses very much danger for the international community and countries that are on the brink. Nowadays, like I mentioned, with the influx of disinformation, people have less and less faith in their governments, less and less faith in the international order that's been upheld since the war, and it is definitely to their advantage for people to question this order and for people to think, well, maybe they have a point.
Maybe these are just imperialist outlets that are just trying to push an American perspective when again, they're very much more than that. Unbiased, independent information has even been crucial to Russia and China in ways they might not have expected. For instance, I think what an interesting piece to me was during the Chernobyl incident, turns out Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were big information spreaders of actual information that was going on from the plant when the Soviet government refused to put out any details. Its citizens also rely on outlets like these for factual information. So certainly it's not in their advantage when the truth is out there for everyone to hear, but just a couple modifications to their shortwave radios, of course.
Dana Taylor:
All of the agencies underneath the global media umbrella are really aimed at wielding soft power on behalf of the United States, and though a court reinstated their funding for this year, that just takes us to the end of September. There's absolutely no guarantee that Congress will fund them for the next fiscal year. What are you hearing on that front?
Japhet Quitzon:
In this case you're absolutely right. It's quite unpredictable what the funding situation would look like. We can rest assured that this budget process won't completely kill these agencies as these require a loss passed by the Congress to be disbanded. But what they can do, of course, is a death by a thousand cuts, cutting every last dollar, every last bit until they're functioning even more and more like a skeleton crew as they already are. We're looking at thousands of people furloughed, people with uncertain visa situations and unable to get support from these main organizations, kind of being a little listless trying to figure out what to do, and so it'll be very important for us to look at what the budget develops into. I would imagine that Speaker Johnson has an unenviable task of gathering together a very rowdy caucus. I can imagine that they're not necessarily unified in their stances toward this.
Certainly you have many people very aligned with the president on shutting these down, decrying Voice of America and similar outlets as woke liberal institutions that have a significant anti-conservative bias. I'm sure there is still elements within the Republican Party, within that caucus that believe in the mission of Voice of America and similar outlets of spreading factual information and pushing back in countries with not so stellar human rights records. I believe that there's still a significant number of them thinking through this, and because of how small the majority is, they're probably going to have to cater to everyone. They can't afford to lose too many votes or the whole budget thing will go up in flames.
Dana Taylor:
Let's turn now to Southeast Asia and another international arm of the broadcasting agency, Radio Free Asia. Myanmar, formerly Burma is a region that's seen a lot of political upheaval and human rights abuses. What role has RFA played there?
Japhet Quitzon:
RFA has played a significant role in reporting on the ever-changing conflict in Myanmar. If you look at the civil war, if you look at the current ongoing conflicts within the ethnic armed groups and the ruling junta, it's a very fluid situation and the lines of war can blur every day. Ceasefires can come into effect and out of effect within a day two or three, and RFA has been crucial to informing the people of Myanmar what's happening, what the lines are looking like and where things are going. It'll be especially crucial moving forward when they start to cover Myanmar's upcoming elections. The junta government is aiming toward legitimacy and pushing for elections throughout Myanmar, though it does not have official control over significant swaths of the country.
And even as a skeleton crew, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America were crucial to providing coverage in the recent earthquake that left quite a bit of devastation in its wake and caused quite a bit of communication blackouts. These outlets are still crucial to people figuring out what's happening and forming their opinion. I think RFA and VOA are still pulled by Southeast Asians, including people from Myanmar as a very reliable source of news. I believe it's still one of the top radio outlets within the region, the head of Sputnik.
Dana Taylor:
Japhet, as you've mentioned, one major criticism of these agencies has been leveraged by the Trump administration, has been their liberal bias. How do you respond?
Japhet Quitzon:
The Trump administration has been looking at a bunch of different outlets. We can even look at Trump one, where he already curtailed access to the press called people fake news, and you can look at it now in the way he switched out the press corps in the White House. He's certainly looking for a audience that is more friendly to his agenda and more flattering to his agenda, and liberal outlets surprise, surprise, tend to be a little more critical of what the president's agenda is looking like. Certainly there is a lot of concern about what this could look like for the country, especially with Donald Trump also on the attack on domestic news services like NPR, but I think keeping a free press is definitely within the country's interest, and I think the judges who have been looking at these cases are quite aware of that, thinking that this is a severe overreach, cutting into congressional power, and going against our division of government. I think it'll be very interesting to see how he will keep on pressing this moving forward.
Dana Taylor:
Sticking with NPR, Trump has also announced his intent to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or CPB, a separate organization that has a $1.1 billion annual budget. The CPB, in turn partially funds public media organizations such as NPR and PBS. What concerns you the most if this were to happen?
Japhet Quitzon:
The defunding of the CPB is really scary to me because I'm also thinking about the thousands of local media outlets that it is responsible for funding. If you look at local radio shows, local TV shows that serve a very specific community, these are bulwarks in their communities of providing accurate information, up-to-date information on what's going on. And without free discourse, without accurate information, it's really hard for us to continue functioning properly. It's very difficult for people to form proper opinions that aren't tinged with somebody else's. It's just going back to what I said, allowing people to make their own choices with unbiased information. With fewer and fewer sources in local areas, these are just going to get swept up by huge media conglomerates that might not be as sensitive to local issues and might not cover issues in depth like local media outlets today might. Of course, there's also severe danger to NPR, and that's also been a crucial outlet in getting out accurate information and putting on shows that really highlight significant issues of the time, and it's all quite scary.
Dana Taylor:
Japhet, thank you so much for joining me on The Excerpt.
Japhet Quitzon:
My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Dana Taylor:
And a quick update to our listeners, Kari Lake, a senior advisor to the US Agency for Global Media announced last night on X that VOA will be in partnership with the conservative One America Network, which will provide free programming. Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance, our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.