One of my earliest childhood memories was listening to the BBC during the evening on my father’s Grundig shortwave radio with him in 1963. It was quite fascinating to listen to the world news with a British accent, although there was often a fade-away, crackling sound from the speakers despite a multidirectional three-foot silver telescopic antenna. I was especially fascinated hearing about the American news, and I remember listening to the chime of Big Ben at the top of every hour with the distinct phrase, “This is London.”
I still enjoy watching BBC News America on PBS at 5:30 p.m. on weekdays. Today, I also often read and sometimes listen to my BBC app on my iPhone a few times a week, which makes shortwave radio nearly obsolete today.
Recently, I read a rather disheartening editorial in the New York Times on March 24 written by Serge Schmemann, who used to be the Moscow correspondent for the New York Times in the 1980s. The article’s unfortunate title was “The Voice Of America Falls Silent.”
The reason the Voice of America stopped broadcasting was because the Trump administration had decided to permanently defund The Voice Of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe (RFE), and Radio Free Asia (RFA) under a presidential decree to eliminate the “United States Agency for Global Media” (Sec. 2, ii). Unfortunately, the VOA, which started in 1942 to fight Joseph Goebbels’s pernicious, evil, and lying Nazi propaganda, once “counted approximately 360 million … people in nearly 50 languages, fell silent immediately” on March 15 at 11:56 a.m. (ET).
Schmemann wisely wrote, “stifling America’s voice around the world carries serious consequences: It strips the United States of one of its most venerable and effective instruments of soft power.”
The U.S. Agency for Global Media not only included the VOA, RFE, and RFA but also lesser-known radio stations such as the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. It especially included the “Open Technology Fund, formally started in 2019, which supports uncensored internet access to over two billion [my emphasis] people.”
Schmemann estimates that the U.S. Agency for Global Media collectively broadcasted to “more than 425 million listeners or viewers worldwide” where there was very little freedom of the press. That is a lot of “soft power” for people outside of the U.S., who are in need of objective news reporting unlike propagandistic Beijing and Moscow.
Many Americans naïvely think that internet access is ubiquitous throughout the world when in fact, it is indeed not. Much of the world, especially the destitute third world, still depend upon handheld radios or small shortwave radios, especially in Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, southeast Asia and many other remote areas of the world.
Schmemann also described how shortwave broadcasts from the U.S., Great Britain, and Germany had a great influence during the Cold War in the Soviet Union, which ended on December 25, 1991. Today, he stated that these broadcasts are especially valuable in reaching millions of people in “Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela, where access to information is jealously controlled by authoritarian regimes” …. and “for many Russians, Radio Liberty was the main source of reliable information about the war in Ukraine.”
Unfortunately, those days are over, thanks to Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk.
Schmemann especially stated that the VOA and Radio Liberty “were also a window into America and a Western culture of openness, democracy, press freedom and civil liberties” or … “‘soft power,’” the ability to influence the world and project American values without resorting to arms, threats, insults or punitive tariffs.” I could not have said it better myself.
It is painfully obvious that the Cold War did not end with the Soviet Union’s downfall in 1991. That is because China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Laos all remain Communist nations. Today, the U.S. faces a far much greater adversary than the Soviet Union because Communist China is both a military and economic superpower unlike the Soviet Union, which was only a military superpower.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media’s budget, which includes the VOA, for fiscal year 2025 was only $950 million (FY 2025), but it punched well above its dollar amount. President Trump needs to restore this agency’s budget as soon as possible because of its tremendous value in disseminating U.S. foreign policy and projecting both soft power and global influence. If Trump thinks that Global Media has a leftist perspective, then he needs to create an advisory board to make sure that their broadcasting reflects a more centrist view of American culture and society along with presenting a more balanced and moderate view of both domestic and international politics.
Surely, this can be done by the White House.
Both President Trump and Elon Musk must remember that the VOA and its sister stations should never be regarded as fraud, waste and abuse. Elon Musk‘s DOGE is not infallible, and its inevitable mistakes can be easily corrected by Trump or bipartisan Congressional hearings and public outcry.
Robert L. Maronic