Voice of America to Receive Feeds From Pro-Trump Network, Administration Says
Voice of America, a U.S.-funded international news broadcaster that was muted by the Trump administration in March, may sound quite different when it returns to the air.
Kari Lake, the former news anchor whom President Trump put in charge of overhauling Voice of America, said Tuesday that it would be fed with content from One America News Network, or OAN, a reliably pro-Trump television channel that has propagated falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election.
Ms. Lake, who in recent years mounted unsuccessful campaigns for governor and senator in Arizona, said OAN had offered to provide free news reports to Voice of America and another American-supported outlet, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. In a statement on social media, she called the arrangement “an enormous benefit to the American taxpayer.”
“I don’t have editorial control over the content of VOA and OCB programming, but I can ensure our outlets have reliable and credible options as they work to craft their reporting and news programs,” said Ms. Lake, using acronyms for Voice of America and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting.
Patsy Widakuswara, a former Voice of America White House bureau chief who was placed on leave, said she was concerned by the development.
“We’ve worked so hard to build trust for our brand,” she said. “This is 83 years of good journalism that’s going to be destroyed.”
Voice of America was created in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda, and has long brought news to corners of the globe where reliable journalism is scarce.
In March, Mr. Trump issued an executive order to dismantle the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the congressionally chartered agency that oversees Voice of America, effectively shuttering the news outlet. The president accused the broadcaster of harboring bias against him and branded it the “voice of radical America.” Voice of America’s roughly 1,300 workers were sent home.
The broadcaster’s journalists then sued, saying that Mr. Trump was not authorized to withdraw funding that had been approved by Congress.
A federal judge in Washington sided with the reporters, ordering the Trump administration to bring back programming.
An appeals panel seemed to complicate the matter over the weekend, reversing parts of the lower court’s order that required the Trump administration to restore funding. But the panel left the requirement that Voice of America revive programming.
It is not clear how many Voice of America reporters will return after the court decisions.
“Some have already returned,” Ms. Lake said in an email Tuesday evening. “Some will be returning in the future.”
She declined to comment further.
About 15 employees have been reinstated in recent days, said Ms. Widakuswara, who was not one of them.
Grant Turner, who served as chief executive of Voice of America’s parent agency during the first Trump administration, said that moves to add OAN content would violate a statutory requirement that the broadcaster be “accurate, objective, and comprehensive.”
He predicted that the OAN content would not land well with foreign audiences, either.
“They know what real fake news sounds like,” Mr. Turner said of Voice of America’s listeners, adding, “They want something that’s genuine.”
