The Trump administration’s bureaucratic guillotine has claimed yet another institution — Voice of America (VOA), the US government-funded broadcaster that once served as Washington’s loudspeaker to the world.
Last week, employees found themselves locked out of their offices, marking the first time since its wartime inception in 1942 that the station has gone dark.
While its closure has sparked controversy, many see it as the dismantling of a decades-old propaganda apparatus that fuelled America’s soft power imperialism and manufactured consent over US foreign policies in more than 40 languages. Spared the “state-owned media” tag often used for Chinese or Russian outlets, VOA is now under fire from Trump’s White House for pushing “radical propaganda".
Alongside VOA, its sister networks — Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia — have also gone off the air, all of which were legally restricted to foreign audiences, with domestic dissemination barred by statute.
For most Americans, the VOA never existed.
The news agency was born out of wartime necessity but quickly outgrew its original mission. While its 1976 charter promised "accurate, objective, and comprehensive" news, it also mandated that the broadcaster "present the policies of the United States clearly and effectively”.
The contradiction — preaching journalistic integrity while also serving as a mouthpiece for Washington — was baked into its DNA from the start.
Successive administrations have exploited this paradox.
The notion that VOA’s chief purpose is to disseminate truth rather than further US government objectives is further undercut by its continued practice of publishing editorials under the longstanding label, “Reflecting the Views of the US Government as Broadcast on Voice of America”.
“Every administration has, at one time or another, peered over the shoulder of the VOA newswriter,” famous American commentator Ralph A. Uttaro noted in a 1982 law journal.
From Cuba to Iraq
During the Cold War’s infancy in the 1950s, Uttaro recounts, books by leftist authors were summarily purged from VOA libraries. Even VOA itself conceded that, in its early decades, it fell far short of playing fair with the news.
According to a VOA webpage, every radio script concerning the Cuban missile crisis had to pass muster with officers from the US Information Agency (VOA’s parent body at the time).
According to Gary D. Rawnsley, author of ‘Radio Diplomacy and Propaganda’, American international broadcasting was born out of wartime necessity. Unlike the BBC, it had no prior experience in independent peacetime broadcasting to lean on once World War II came to a close.
VOA’s coverage of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 fit neatly within Western ideological interests. The forceful rhetoric of the US news agency misled Hungarians into believing US military aid was forthcoming.
Rawnsley contends that the role played by Radio Free Europe (RFE) in the uprising remains the most infamous and extensively documented. "The debate concerning just how much influence RFE actually had in stimulating and maintaining the uprising is fierce; whether broadcasts did incite the Hungarians and promise American military intervention has never been satisfactorily proven."
Similarly, in Cuba, VOA broadcasts urged the public to overthrow Fidel Castro. However, the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion was a fiasco from start to finish, poorly planned and disastrously executed.
Later, when the truth about CIA involvement surfaced, VOA had to backpedal, retracting much of its earlier messaging.
Similarly, in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson, wary of a commercial press he believed was undercutting his Vietnam War policy, sought to turn VOA into “my own radio”.
Carl Rowan, a diplomat who led the USIA at the time, sought to rally the agency behind America’s growing entanglement in Vietnam. However, this required a firmer grip over VOA’s editorial direction.
In March 1965, VOA director Henry Loomis stepped down, stressing the need to shield the network from political meddling.
A sharply detailed piece by Mary McGrory in the Washington Evening Post laid bare Rowan’s efforts to steer VOA’s coverage of Vietnam. His inability to bring the broadcaster in line and sell the Vietnam narrative to the world infuriated President Johnson, who soon began searching for a replacement. Under relentless pressure from the White House, Rowan resigned in July 1965.
“During the final collapse of Vietnam and Cambodia, VOA reporters were told to tone down their accounts of the war to avoid panic in Southeast Asian countries,” the AP reported in 1977. During the Watergate saga, USIA officials pressured VOA journalists to cast President Richard Nixon in a more favourable light.
Even in the 21st century, the Cold War pattern persisted. In 2005, former VOA director and journalist Sanford J. Ungar detailed how political appointees under President George W. Bush sought to skew the agency’s coverage of the Iraq War and Middle Eastern affairs to align with White House messaging.
Political appointees
The BBG, which oversaw VOA, was created to insulate the broadcaster from political manipulation. However, as former Senator Richard Lugar observed in 2010, the board itself became a “political football,” packed with partisan appointees.
In recent years, it has been criticised for being dominated by Democrats, with personnel drawn from networks like CNN, furthering allegations of ideological bias.
Former VOA journalists have spoken out about political interference.
Writing in Columbia Journalism Review, veteran VOA journalist Gary Thomas recalls being threatened with expulsion from Pakistan by a US diplomat for attempting to enter Soviet-controlled Afghanistan without Washington’s approval.
Another former director, Sanford Ungar, exposed efforts by VOA executives to shape coverage in favour of the Bush administration during the Iraq War.
Furthermore, VOA’s journalistic integrity has taken a hit due to its conflicting roles. Thomas lamented that board members have typically lacked newsroom experience, often hailing from corporate media leadership or diplomatic circles. Most hirings have been nepotistic in nature and without due process.
Former President Obama, for instance, appointed Ryan Crocker — a career diplomat with 37 years of service as an ambassador to Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait, Lebanon and Afghanistan.
“If a ‘broadcasting czar’ is to oversee the proposed combined operation, then he or she should be someone with an unimpeachable journalistic reputation, not someone who goes through the revolving door between government spokesman and working journalist,” Thomas advised.
The subtle art of propaganda
For years, VOA’s reporting has been accused of subtly legitimising US foreign policy objectives while disguising itself as neutral journalism.
A study by Valerie A. Cooper in Discourse & Society examines how VOA shapes the image of nations through its reporting. Using linguistic and discourse analysis, Cooper uncovers ideological framing that aligns with US foreign policy.
While allies are depicted positively, adversaries like China, Russia and Iran are portrayed as unstable, oppressive or corrupt. Reports frequently use terms like “regime”, “crackdown” and “authoritarian”. Human rights abuses in these nations are highlighted as “systemic failures”, while allies' violations are downplayed.
The wordplay was deliberate.
The study also points out the linguistic techniques reinforcing these distinctions. Economic crises in allies are seen as “external shocks”; in adversaries, as signs of “corruption and mismanagement”.
Meanwhile, reports on adversaries rely on dissident voices and Western analysts, while allies’ reports favour official government statements.
Similarly, writing in ‘Discourse, Media, and Conflict,’ Cooper draws an intriguing comparison between China’s CRI Today and VOA’s International Edition. She observes that CRI employed positive language that “generally downplayed conflict”.
For instance, North Korea’s missile launches were consistently framed as “the situation on the Korean peninsula” or “the issue on the Korean peninsula” — euphemisms that sidestepped blame and avoided direct acknowledgement of North Korean aggression.
Rather than focusing on Pyongyang’s military activities, CRI’s coverage centred on diplomatic manoeuvrings, such as reports of Chinese President Xi Jinping attending meetings where the “situation” was on the agenda, or trilateral discussions addressing the “issue”.
CRI was found to be adept at using positive language, even when casting blame. Instead of overtly accusing Japan of aggression, it employed vague phrases about unnamed countries “stirring up troubles and flexing their muscles” while repeatedly invoking “peace and stability” to criticise Japan.
Through statements like “Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said that the Chinese side would hope much more to benefit regional peace and stability instead of doing the opposite,” CRI simultaneously positioned China as a champion of peace and framed Japan as failing to uphold the same standard.
However, the analysis found that VOA took a markedly different approach, showing little inclination for linguistic restraint. In its portrayal of North Korea, VOA used starkly negative terms such as “defiant,” “angry,” “hates,” and even “masters of evasion”.
Moreover, it adopted an accusatory stance toward China, leaving little doubt about its alignment.
VOA’s framing of North Korea was also in line with what one might expect from an American media outlet — it championed “democracy” and “human rights” while casting “communism” in a negative light.
In doing so, VOA employed guilt by association, lumping together nations seen as adversarial to US interests without necessarily explaining why.
The pattern was particularly evident in a VOA editorial discussing human rights violations, where Syria, Iran, Burundi, South Sudan, North Korea and China were listed alongside Cuba and Russia.
“This method of association suggests that one country's sins are as bad as another's, without having to explain those human rights abuses. In this way, it's almost assumed to be ubiquitously understood and common-sensical that these countries are guilty of human rights abuses — which is precisely the goal of public diplomacy outlets such as VOA,” Cooper notes.