Donald Trump has gone over the head of an international press agency to select his own nominee for its publicly funded flagship news network.
Trump wants Kari Lake — the failed Republican candidate for Arizona governor and U.S. Senate who pledged to be the media’s “worst nightmare” — to run Voice of America, the nation’s oldest international broadcaster, reaching millions of people around the world.
During his first administration, Trump and his allies were accused of trying to manipulate the network and the agency that runs it so he could use it as his own propaganda machine, turning outlets that promote the free flow of information around the world into built-in messaging platforms from the White House.
The director of Voice of America is selected by the appointed chief of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, an independently run diplomatic arm of the government that supervises state-supported outlets that broadcast in countries where press freedoms are limited and news is difficult to access.
By law, VOA’s director can only be appointed or removed by a majority vote of a bipartisan board that works alongside the chief of the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
But Trump announced he wants Lake to run the network before he even named a nominee for the agency. He said Lake “will” serve as the network’s director.
Lake will “ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media,” Trump announced on December 11.
Trump’s first administration marked a turbulent and toxic time for staff at the agency, which was overseen by Steve Bannon’s ally Michael Pack, who purged staff, dissolved advisory boards, replaced positions with Trump loyalists, refused to renew visas for foreign journalists, and reportedly interfered with news coverage.
Trump himself said of VOA in 2020: “The things they say are disgusting toward our country.”
An uncredited White House statement at the time accused VOA of amplifying “Beijing’s propaganda” for its coverage of Wuhan’s COVID-19 lockdown model, and claimed that “VOA too often speaks for America’s adversaries — not its citizens.”
Two months before President Joe Biden entered office, Pack replaced VOA’s acting chief Elez Biberaj — a journalist at the network for more than 40 years — with former diplomat Robert Reilly, who was intensely scrutinized for his views on LGBT+ people and Islam.
Reilly had also pushed for using VOA to promote U.S. policy rather than offer a platform for independent media for global audiences — as required under the law — drawing concerns that Trump and his allies were trying to turn the nation’s global news network into a propaganda wing for his administration.
VOA was first established in 1942 to transmit news, music and domestic programming across allied-captured territories during the Second World War, then expanded across Europe and around the globe with pro-democratic content to counter local propaganda and disinformation during the Cold War and into the digital age for a largely non-American audience.
With funding from the U.S. Agency for Global Media, VOA produces digital, radio and televised content in more than 40 languages, reaching more than 300 million people a week, the network reported in 2022.
Biden appointed Amanda Bennett as the agency’s current chief, and Michael Abramowitz was sworn in as VOA’s current director earlier this year.
If Abramowitz is fired and Lake is installed as VOA’s director, she will oversee a nearly $300 million budget with more than 2,000 global employees, including hundreds of journalists.
On the campaign trail, Lake has derided reporters as “monsters,” called outlets “fake news” and “repugnant,” and suggested journalists should be shipped out to Afghanistan. “Let’s defund the press, let’s defund the media,” she said during her campaign for governor.
When he took over the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Pack swiftly fired leadership and alleged without evidence that his predecessors “ignored common national security protocols and essential government human resources practices” that made the agency’s outlets vulnerable to espionage. He claimed that VOA is “a great place to put a foreign spy.”
VOA staff told The Independent at the time that Pack’s actions risk threatening journalists in countries where their lives could be in jeopardy, and that his focus on pursuing political power and personal vendettas was “bulldozing the firewall” designed to keep political operatives out of its newsrooms.
VOA’s “firewall” is enshrined in law under the U.S. International Broadcasting Act, and it “prohibits interference by any US government official in the objective, independent reporting of news.”
Employees later filed a lawsuit in federal court, seeking an injunction that prevented Pack from making personnel decisions. A judge granted the request, finding that the “First Amendment forbids Mr. Pack and his team from attempting to take control of these journalistic outlets, from investigating their journalists for purported ‘bias,’ and from attempting to influence or control their reporting content,” according to their lawyer Lee Crain.
A report from the Office of Special Counsel later found that Pack had illegally breached those editorial firewalls, abused his authority and engaged in gross mismanagement and abuse of funds.
Lake, meanwhile, was a television news anchor in Phoenix for nearly 30 years until 2021, when she left her job with a local Fox affiliate after a series of controversial statements on social media, including conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and accusing a campaign advocating for better pay for teachers as a front for marijuana legalization.
She ran for governor in 2022 against Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs, who defeated her Republican rival by roughly 17,000 votes. Lake refused to concede, echoing Trump’s election denialism and ultimately failing in court to overturn her loss.
Lake then lost a Senate race in 2024 against Democratic candidate Ruben Gallego, who defeated Lake by more than 80,000 votes.
