Donald Trump has never made any secret of his hatred of the press, which he famously calls “the enemy of the people”. Press watchdogs are already raising the alarm about the ways in which he might use intimidation, lawsuits, and sham investigations to harm the free press in his second term. Independent media organizations certainly have a lot to fear from a second Trump presidency. But there’s another group of journalists we should be worried for, too – those who work directly for the US government.
The US government funds a variety of different public broadcasting outlets, primarily aimed at foreign audiences. The jewel in the crown in terms of reach and influence is Voice of America, but there are other important networks, too, including Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and Radio y Televisión Martí, which broadcasts to Cuba. The agency which oversees them, the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM), has a budget of nearly $1bn and reaches 420 million people weekly in over 100 countries – numbers that make America’s biggest domestic radio and TV networks look like small fry.
These outlets have long been a target for conservative critics who have felt that they are insufficiently patriotic or too kind to America’s adversaries. But during his first term, Trump attempted to weaponize the networks in an unprecedented way, turning them into propaganda outlets for his administration and its brand of far-right politics. And his recent nomination of former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake to head Voice of America suggests he wants to do it again.
Trump’s attack on the public broadcasters began in his first term when he sent conservative journalist Jeffrey Scott Shapiro to be a senior advisor to the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which oversees Radio y Televisión Martí. Shapiro accused the director of the office, the award-winning Puerto Rican journalist Maria Gonzalez, of being a Cuban spy and forced a spurious security investigation to be initiated against her. When Gonzalez later resigned her post, Martí’s coverage began to reflect far-right themes, including calling George Soros a “a non-believing Jew of flexible morals” and decrying the “Islamization” of Europe.
The same problems occurred on an even bigger scale when Trump appointed Michael Pack, an ally of far-right figure Steve Bannon, as the head of the entirety of USAGM. Pack forced out or initiated spurious loyalty investigations against journalists and executives, and he also sought to influence coverage in the newsroom in a pro-Trump direction. As a result, many journalists at Voice of America feared for their livelihoods and began to engage in self-censorship.
Like Shapiro, Pack also accused the journalists he oversaw of being spies, and during his tenure he refused to renew the visas of foreign reporters working at Voice of America. Because many of these journalists had reported critically on their own countries’ regimes, they faced persecution if forced to return home. But Pack shrugged off the idea that he had any responsibility for the safety of the brave journalists who made the existence of his agency possible.
None of this should be surprising. Trump’s appointees acted in line with the president’s own understanding of what the media should do – act as stenographers and cheerleaders for his glorious regime, not strive to provide a balanced portrayal of the world as it actually is. They also exemplified Trump’s nationalist paranoia, castigating their own employees as spies and traitors. These attitudes are corrosive to what America’s international broadcasters should be – a model of objective and inclusive journalism in a world which often sorely lacks both.
The pick of Lake to head Voice of America in Trump’s second term suggests that more of the same is coming. Lake has already suggested that she would see her role at the outlet as “chronicling America’s achievements worldwide”, and her embrace of unhinged conspiracy theories around Covid-19 and the 2020 election suggest she has difficulty separating fact from fiction. Even more concerning is her attitude towards journalists, whom she has described as “monsters” who ought to be “defunded”. In 2022, she told a gaggle of reporters that if she became governor of Arizona, she would be “your worst fricking nightmare”. She also famously hates immigrants, whose work is essential to Voice of America’s mission.
Lake is also known for her fanatical loyalty to Trump. As a result, she – and whoever Trump ultimately picks to head USAGM – might take inspiration from Project 2025, which suggested that American public broadcasters be placed directly at the command of either the state department or the White House national security council, turning them into little more than pro-administration propaganda outlets.
In Trump’s first term, his attempts to corrupt America’s public broadcasters were resisted by Congress, the courts and brave staff at the agencies themselves. This time around, we can hope that these same forces will marshal themselves in order to protect the public broadcasters. But with the increasingly Trumpified Republican party enjoying a majority in Congress and an activist conservative judiciary emboldened like never before, it’s not clear that they will.
Every petty tyrant in the world wants a state broadcaster to parrot his propaganda. Trump is no exception. If he gets his wish, it will be an unmistakable signal to the world, coming right over the airwaves, that the struggle for American democracy is faring poorly.
Andrew Gawthorpe is a historian of the United States at Leiden University and author of the newsletter America Explained
