Following the most recent budget cuts made by the administration of US President Donald Trump, pro-China commentators and Chinese state media have welcomed the de facto closure of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) in Taipei, Taiwan.
Following Trump’s defunding of the news outlets, the Global Times published an editorial over the weekend claiming that “the so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.”
The daily paper described VOA as a “carefully crafted propaganda machine” whose “primary function is to serve Washington’s need to attack other nations based on ideological demands.”
Former Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin, who wrote a post on the microblogging website Weibo, echoed his remarks.
The “US propaganda operatives'” were toppled by Nury Vittachi, a writer from Hong Kong who has written for state-run newspapers like China Daily.
According to Vittachi, “These groups issue “news” in 62 languages to sway 350 million people around the world to adopt a pro-American slant and poison people’s minds against Chinese, Russians, Iranians, and other people Washington views as adversaries or “allies”,” they say in a statement on X.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Mao Ning described VOA as a “lie factory that stirs up conflict” with a “notorious track record in their China coverage,” while declining to comment directly on the Trump administration’s domestic policies.
The Chinese Communist Party has relied on VOA and RFA to provide commentary and news that challenged Beijing’s position on sensitive issues like Taiwan and the ethnic minority of the Uighur.
According to the parent company of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), China was one of VOA’s initial target audiences when it first launched in the middle of World War II.
The outlet’s coverage expanded to 49 languages over the years, eventually claiming a 361 million-person global audience.
The smaller RFA, which was established in 1996, relied on a network of on-the-ground contacts throughout Asia to bring attention to areas like Tibet and Xinjiang, which are off the radar of the majority of Western journalists.
According to Bethany Allen, head of the program for China investigations and analysis at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, “Both RFA and VOA do something that essentially nobody else does, which is reach audiences inside China via non-internet means.”
People who otherwise wouldn’t have access to independent information are reached by VoA TV broadcasts and RFA radio. Many censorship-hacking tools are now prohibited in China, making them dangerous to use, and they are also too complicated, according to Allen.
RFA’s Uighur-language service became the first news outlet to cover the widespread detention of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang’s so-called “vocational education and training centers,” which in 2017 made headlines.
In 2021 and 2022, BuzzFeed News and Business Insider published articles about how the Uighurs were treated.
According to David Bandurski, director of the Taiwan-based China Media Project, RFA has also been “exceptional” in “covering stories unfolding on the ground in China that are not otherwise covered.”
Bandurski claimed that VOA has had “a significant impact on its history.”
Over the past 20 years, I’ve met a number of Chinese journalists and editors who recall listening to VOA on their shortwaves in the 1980s.
Trump signed an executive order on Friday, directing it to be “to the maximum extent in accordance with applicable law.”
About 1,300 VOA employees, or nearly the entire organization’s workforce, were on leave as of Saturday.
The Middle East Broadcasting Network and the Open Technology Fund, which were both founded during World War II to counter Nazi propaganda, are expected to lose due to Trump’s gutting of USAGM, whose 2024 budget stands at $886.7 million.
Trump and his allies have long criticized VOA and other publicly funded US media, claiming that they promote liberal bias and covert coverage of American adversaries.
VOA and its sister networks have received criticism for their journalistic standards, despite the widely condemned order by press freedom organizations and mainstream journalists.
The outlet’s “wildly inconsistent journalistic acumen of the language services” was a statement made in 2013 by former VOA journalist Gary Thomas in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Some people have a lot of journalistic expertise, while others are woefully lacking, according to Thomas.
The disparity is merely due to the difficulty of finding fluent speakers of a given language and having done so in-depth journalism as VOA has traditionally required, the author says.
Former US-based VOA journalist Tracy Wen Liu stated in a post on X on Monday that some of the network’s “capable and ambitious” Chinese-language reporters had concerns internally about the “lack of professionalism” in the newsroom before being expelled from promotion.
