For more than 80 years, Voice of America has transferred the news to countries, many of them authoritarian, where reliable sources of information about the outside world were often difficult to find.
Now those broadcasts – long seen as an important part of the US efforts, are flickering to promote democracy and transparency abroad.
Hours after President Trump had signed an executive order on Friday in which was called for the dismantling of the federal agency that supervises Voice of America, hundreds of journalists, managers and other employees at the headquarters in Washington were told that they were paid leave. Employees said they have lost rapid access to their work email and other communication programs.
Much of the content of America is produced in Washington and then transferred to a network of affiliated companies worldwide. With the majority of the voice of the voice of America locked up, at least some of his radio frequencies in Asia, the middle -east and elsewhere they became dark or started to broadcast nothing but workers said.
In other cases, radio, television and digital points of sale remain online, but without contributions from the United States. Some of those affiliated companies also have content provided by Staatsmedia from countries such as Russia and China, which actually prevented the voice of America's programming.
“They have drawn the plug operational,” says David K. Seide, a lawyer at the government accountability project that defends federal whistleblowers and who represents a voice of American journalists.
Mr. Seide said that he is considering restoring the Voice of America journalists. The American Foreign Service Association, whose ranks include the employees of the Voice of America, said that it “will set up a powerful defense” of those employees.
The efforts of the Trump government to close the voice of America are part of a broader campaign to weaken the news media. For example, the White House has banned the Associated Press to cover certain events about the refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Mr. Trump and his allies have sued news costs, and his allies have said they are keeping an eye on more lawsuits.
Voice of America began to broadcast in 1942, part of a federal effort during the Second World War to combat Nazi propaganda in Latin -America and elsewhere. During the Cold War, the Kortegolf radio broadcasts behind the Iron Curtain were part of the US government's campaign to combat communism and promote freedom. Until this weekend, Voice of America transferred reports to tens of languages and reached hundreds of millions of listeners outside the United States, including in countries such as China and Iran, whose governments impose strict controls on external news sources.
Voice of America's Charter is designed to protect its editorial independence against which administration is in power. The mandate is to serve as a reliable news source, to present 'a balanced and extensive' portrait of America and 'to present the United States's policy clearly and effectively'.
In the first term of Mr. Trump repeatedly stuck the White House against what it saw as the voice of America's liberal bias. The efforts of the administration to coordinate the broadcaster financed by the taxpayer to Mr Trump's agenda, including by internal investigations of some of his journalists, were later deemed incorrect by federal researchers.
This year Mr. Trump quickly moved to calm the broadcaster. He tapped a right-wing former TV news anchor, Kari Lake, to run Voice of America. Even before she arrived, the broadcaster began to discourage his journalists to say or write things that could be interpreted as critically about Mr Trump – part of an attempt that her leaders hoped to help the attacks by the president.
The White House published a press release on Saturday in which it was denounced what it said was the role of the broadcaster in the distribution of “radical propaganda” and the accusing of its employees of deep -rooted left bias. It is the same criticism that Mr. Trump and his allies routinely about traditional media.
Steven Herman, an old voice of America Correspondent, was put on an extensive “apologized absence” this month, awaiting a study into human resources to his posts on social media about the Trump administration. On Saturday he published what he described as a “Requiem” for the broadcaster.
“The effective closing of the voice of America is to dim a beacon that has been clearly burned during some of the darkest hours since 1942,” wrote Mr. Herman.
