Kari Lake, senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media — parent of the Voice of America — has made serious and deeply troubling accusations about the VOA’s Mandarin Service. Testifying to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in June, she said she wanted to “root out the Russian, Chinese, Iranian propaganda … at VOA.” In July, she told the website Just the News that members of the Chinese Communist Party had been “meeting regularly with VOA management to tell them how they should be covering China.” And in late August, she posted on X: “The CCP has infiltrated VOA and YOU are paying for it.”
The VOA described by Lake is not the VOA we know and to which we have all contributed. Though we share her concerns for media outlets that yield to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party, the Voice of America is not one of them. On the contrary, since it was established in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda, the VOA has been one of our most effective bulwarks against Beijing’s influence-seeking abroad, and an effective means of promoting accurate information and critical analysis to the world. During the Cold War, millions beyond the Iron Curtain risked arrest by listening to VOA broadcasts. The need for such a global, objective, multilingual American news source is as great today as it was then.
Lake’s criticisms, and her work leading to the near-total shutdown of VOA, are misguided and bad for our country — for several reasons.