Silencing the Voice of America

The White House quashes Radio Free Europe

I don’t recall now exactly where and when I first heard the words “Radio Free Europe” but I do remember that those words were stirring and hopeful even to a pre-teen in postwar America.

For me, it would have been no later than the early 1950s. My father was a military man who had a hand in the destruction of Nazi Germany and the Allied liberation of Europe, serving in the Army Air Corps, in World War II. Or I might have heard the words “Radio Free Europe” in a news report on television, possibly in remarks of President Eisenhower.

No matter. At its bedrock, “Radio Free Europe” together with its sister broadcasters (see below) have been a beacon of freedom, liberty and hope to people living under tyranny overseas. In devastated places, under extremist regimes, no other chance to find truthful news of the world, no straight news reports about their own oppressed countries across the oceans.

These memories have come back to me this past week, reading how the new Trump administration, among its various other swings of an administrative wrecking-ball, is aiming to collapse Voice of America and all its famous affiliates.

It is hard to see this unfolding now - this silencing of the VOA beacon - as anything other than the unthoughtful gesture of a weak leader, one further preposterous inducement by Trump hoping the leader of the Kremlin will say “Yes” to a narrow devil’s bargain of a ceasefire in Ukraine. (Important footnote: Putin did not agree on that bilateral phone call this week.)

Another personal link: In my graduate school year at the Medill School of Journalism (1974-75) in Washington and Evanston, Illinois, I got to know Sig Mickelson, who was then chairman of our editorial department, following a noble career in television journalism.

Sig Mickelson, Chairman of Medill and then Director of Voice of America

Earlier in his career, Sig had been the first President of CBS News, where he had hired Edward R. Murrow and also Walter Cronkite. Mickelson became the Director of Voice of America after he left Medill and Northwestern in 1975. VOA had been founded in 1942 and became the parent agency of RFE - all of it established, in the first place, to counter communism and to provide a counterbalance to the shuttering of straight news across Europe and beyond.

For RFE, Radio Liberty and its several sister broadcasters of freedom, the sinister hammer came down ten days ago, on a Friday. The next day, Mike Abromovitz, the VOA Director, said the order left VOA unable to carry out its "vital mission... especially critical today, when America's adversaries, like Iran, China, and Russia, are sinking billions of dollars into creating false narratives to discredit the United States".

Stephen Capus, the current CEO of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, called the move by the White House “a massive gift to America’s enemies.”

I then reached out to a former senior executive at VOA, a friend and himself a longtime observer of international broadcasting. He told me this:

“Well, the US president has managed to do what Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and a lot of other regimes could not do, despite repeated and expensive attempts over 83 years: Silence the Voice of America, RFE/RL, Radio Free Asi, Radio Farda and Radio Marti. Now we have done it to ourselves, for the dumbest of reasons and in the dumbest of ways.

“The toll on the listeners (and yes, they are still there — not everyone is spewing hot takes on X all day long) will be profound. The disgusting way that dedicated journalists, producers, technicians, engineers, administrators and sources from around the world have been treated will ring loudly and shamefully for a long time, and the cost to restart this - because we will have to one day - is going to be dear.”

Heaven help us all.

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