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19-03-2025
BEIJING: Chinese state media has welcomed Donald Trump’s move to cut public funding for news outlets Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, which have long reported on authoritarian regimes.
The decision affects thousands of employees, some 1,300 staff have been put on paid leave at Voice of America (VOA) alone since Friday’s executive order.
Critics have called the move a setback for democracy but Beijing’s state newspaper Global Times denounced VOA for its “appalling track record” in reporting on China and said it has “now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag”.
The White House defended the move, saying it will “ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”.
Trump’s cuts target the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which is supported by Congress and funds the affected news outlets, such as VOA, Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Radio Free Europe.
They have won acclaim and international recognition for their reporting in places where press freedom is severely curtailed or non-existent, from China and Cambodia to Russia and North Korea.
Although authorities in some of these countries block the broadcasts, VOA, for instance, is banned in China – people can listen to them on shortwave radio, or get around the restrictions via VPNs.
RFA has often reported on the crackdown on human rights in Cambodia, whose former authoritarian ruler Hun Sen has hailed the cuts as a “big contribution to eliminating fake news”.
It was also among the first news outlets to report on China’s network of detention centres in Xinjiang, where the authorities are accused of locking up hundreds of thousands of Uyghur Muslims without trial. Beijing denies the claims, saying people willingly attend “re-education camps” which combat “terrorism and religious extremism”. VOA’s reporting on North Korean defectors and the Chinese Communist Party’s alleged cover-up of COVID fatalities has won awards.
VOA, primarily a radio outlet, which also broadcasts in Mandarin, was recognized last year for its podcast on rare protests in 2022 in China against COVID lockdowns but China’s Global Times welcomed the cuts, calling VOA a “lie factory”.
“As more Americans begin to break through their information cocoons and see a real world and a multi-dimensional China, the demonizing narratives propagated by VOA will ultimately become a laughing stock,” it said in an editorial published on Monday.
Hu Xijin, who was the Global Times’ former editor-in-chief, wrote: “Voice of America has been paralysed! And so has Radio Free Asia, which has been as vicious to China. This is such great news.”
Such responses “would have been easy to predict”, said Valdya Baraputri, a VOA journalist who lost her job over the weekend.
“Eliminating VOA, of course, allows channels that are the opposite of accurate and balanced reporting to thrive,” she told media.
The National Press Club, a leading representative group for US journalists, said the order “undermines America’s long-standing commitment to a free and independent press”. Founded during World War Two in part to counter Nazi propaganda, VOA reaches some 360 million people a week in nearly 50 languages. Over the years it has broadcast in China, North Korea, communist Cuba and the former Soviet Union. It’s also been a helpful tool for many Chinese people to learn English.
VOA’s director Michael Abramowitz said Trump’s order has hobbled VOA while “America’s adversaries, like Iran, China, and Russia, are sinking billions of dollars into creating false narratives to discredit the United States”. (Int’l News Desk)
