Bulwark Takes - Trump Is Going To War With VOA. It's A Bigger Deal Than You Think.

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

Jim Swift and Steve Herman discuss VOA’s challenges amid a government funding freeze. With 1,350 staff on indefinite leave since mid-March—550 contractors at risk, including vulnerable J-1 visa holders—they stress how vital VOA’s balanced reporting is for regions lacking free media. The interview reviews VOA’s historical impact from WWII to its modern role, warning that the current hiatus may let rival state-sponsored broadcasters fill the void.

Hey everyone, Jim Swift, Senior Editor here at The Bulwark at the Cincinnati Bureau, joined by a fellow Cincinnatian, a Cincinnati native, Stephen Herman, who is the National Correspondent at Voice of America and author of Behind the White House Curtain. He has it. I have the book. You should go buy it and read it. It's a wonderful book. I think a whirlwind tour, not only of Stephen's multi-decade career where he has been all around the world with so many presidents, vice presidents, seen history, whether it was history in Japan where he spent a lot of his career, the Fukushima nuclear incident and the Trump first term where I kind of got introduced to him when I lived in Washington. So, Stephen, thanks for joining us.

It's my pleasure to be here. So VOA, which is your longtime employer, and your profile picture has you at the command center of the Bethany Relay Station, which is here in Cincinnati. I took one of my daughters there to go take this. Thankfully, it's a private museum, so there's no worries right now with all of the government issues with Doge and funding cuts and everything. But you've been with VOA for how long exactly? Well, I've been on staff nearly 20 years and I was a contract reporter for a number of years before that when I was living in Tokyo.

You were also there during the handover to Hong Kong. You experienced a lot of history, the subway bombing in Japan, and then you kind of came into VOA, back to Washington, where you were the White House bureau chief during Trump won, and it was pretty tumultuous, sort of a precursor of what we're seeing right now. Like almost every single agency out there, there's so much for people to focus on, but I want to spend some time kind of focusing on VOA and its importance. VOA is kind of its future is up in the air right now with Doge and its parent basically phasing out VOA. There are two lawsuits that I'm aware of, and there's a temporary stay with Radio Free Europe. Things are kind of up in the air right now. What are your colleagues doing? It's a situation that's quite perilous. There's

about 1,350 staff at The Voice of America. We've all, since mid-March, been placed on indefinite leave with pay, although about 550 of those are contractors and have been told that their contracts will be terminated at the end of the month. So they'll lose their jobs, lose their salaries, lose their health insurance. And it's extremely concerning for a number of those colleagues who are on J-1 visas and half a dozen or so face returning to countries where they would almost certainly be prosecuted and possibly put in prison. So we're very, very concerned about them and hoping to sort of stop that action from taking place. I can tell you that hundreds of my colleagues are keeping very busy in communication with each other. We have all sorts of different groups on apps to communicate and forming committees for publicity, for trying to save our archives.

And I spend half of my day now in Signal, although I haven't been in on any of the high level national security meetings yet on Signal. I was up at the relay station, just kind of taking in all of the history there. Just the voice of America being silenced is not a reality that I ever would have expected. I don't think any of us would have ever expected. And I was taken by, and I see the lovely, is that a Crosley radio behind you? Yes, it is, right.

But as I was touring this museum, you would see little radios that people had in the Soviet Union that the people in their town would mess with. So the one that they bought from the Soviets could pick up VOA. It would be easy to just modify this radio. Definitely very serious crime and illegal. And across from that, there's a little thing about World War Two, which VOA has a lot of history in from the War Information Department and, you know, giving the world true unfiltered news. Right. And that was that was the grand PR thing was like, well, if we're going to tell it to them straight and give them news, good or bad, that's trust building.

Which was novel at the time. Yes. And Hitler apparently called VOA the Zinzianati liars. Yes. And they have so many. And the important part is reaching people in their language, meeting people where they are. And you're talking about these J-1 folks. It would be like, and having these folks have to go back to those hostile regimes.

There were German speakers. People, I mean, Cincinnati has a big German history, but if someone was here on the equivalent of a J-1 visa working for VOA during World War II and Roosevelt or, you know, decided to do that, they'd be going back to Germany. I mean, this is really what that, I mean, not to be too hyperbolic. We're talking about people, thousands of people from many different, I would say, would you say it's fair to say that there are at least 50 plus countries represented in terms of national origin by VOA employees? I mean, it's more than that because we have with English and learning English, just about 50 language services at the Voice of America. I would walk into the building, the Cohen Federal Building, right near Capitol Hill.

And it was like the United Nations of broadcasting. It's just one of the most amazing places I've ever worked because of the diversity that existed there and everyone's commitment to the mission. And there are also people abroad. I mean, there are people who come here from foreign countries on these visas to help VOA in its mission, whose not only livelihoods, but lives are really potentially at stake if they have to go back to a hostile regime, unless they can find a country that will take them in the interim. But there are also American citizens who work for Voice of America, who have moved halfway across the world to far-flung places like you have over your career before you were based here in Washington. Those folks, you know, they're going to have to just move back. I mean, they're going to be,

if Trump gets his way and, you know, if they're contractors and they're terminated, there is a question about the firewall. I mean, this is an agency that was created by the U.S. Congress. They're supposed to be a firewall that prohibits such interference, and that is what is playing out in the courts right now. Do you know of any other court cases coming, or are we going to have to wait for more actions to have kind of standing, do you think? Well, there's a number of different cases that are going on right now, and we have some very initial encouraging signs with the RFE RL case, which is in Washington, where there are a couple of VOA cases, one in Washington, one in New York. With RFE RL, a judge said that the temporary funding should be restored.

And there's some positive developments with basically the parent agency, USAGM, backing off a bit and at least allowing RFERL to continue for a period of time. Radio Marti, which is under the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which is under USAGM, is back on the air, at least partially, after there was a lot of publicity with headlines like, Trump did what the Castros never could do. So those broadcasts to Cuba in Spanish have resumed at least for now. And we want the same thing to

happen for the voice of America. You know, we've been off the air essentially since mid-March, and it's a disaster because people are in the habit of watching a program at a certain time or listening to a stream or tuning in on the radio. And we've been gone now. And that void is going to be filled by the voices from Moscow and the voices from Beijing. The Chinese especially are spending a tremendous amount of power on a tremendous amount of money, I should say, which converts to soft power on international broadcasting. And the fact that the authorities in Moscow and the authorities in Beijing are cheering the destruction of Voice of America, I think, demonstrates the effectiveness of it.

Yeah. And when I heard that, it kind of tells you all you need to know. And Trump's foreign policy is pretty unprecedented. And while he has had, you know, kind of a more hawkish view of Cuba than his predecessor, Barack Obama, I mean, that's not really, in my view, that how VOA should be viewed as a tool, right? Like it isn't something that you're doing to pick on certain countries. The truth should be the truth. And we are a trusted place and VOA for decades has been able to report that. So yes, the Trump presidency's foreign policies are definitely decidedly different than that of Obama and Biden's. But, you know, you could just let that infrastructure go on and hum and do its job and not, you know, ramp it up.

I remember from the Nick Clooney narrated little welcome video at the museum. They were talking about what the shortwave situation was in the early days of World War Two. Germany had a ton of it. Japan had a ton of it. And we had practically none of it. And we ramped it up. And then now we're just kind of unilaterally disarming. I mean, I know a lot of it was changing. I mean, we are very first world here. We're used to tweets and Mastodon and all these social media networks and not as many people listen to over the air radio as you would in a third world country. Actually, very little of what VOA does these days has been shortwave radio. It's still there and it's effective for getting into places like North Korea and very remote parts of the world.

Most of what VOA has been doing for many years is on television. on the country and the language, our programming will be distributed, whether it's the TV news shows or radio or entertainment on apps. So if Facebook's big in a particular country, then that language service will be on Facebook. If it's WhatsApp, then they'll be on that particular app. So we're very flexible. Sometimes we're not at the leading edge of technology as quickly as I would like to be because we are working within a federal bureaucracy. But in this particular case, our destruction is coming at the hands of the federal bureaucracy. And I understand, and this has happened in previous administrations where they get frustrated with VOA. They wish it would sort of toe the line

of their particular foreign policy or domestic policy objectives. But we are mandated by law. We have a charter that says we shall present a very balanced view of American thought in institution. And so that means, you know, we do report if the president does something significant, we report that, but we're going to balance it by digging into it as any major journalistic organization would do that wants to be balanced. And if there are opposition members of Congress on Capitol Hill that have a say about this new government policy, we're going to interview them. We'll talk to people at think tanks, at NGOs. We may interview people if it's something of foreign policy.

We may interview some leaders or people on the street in that particular country that's going to be effective. So it's, you know, as you well know, it's not a propaganda vehicle. And by demonstrating fair and balanced journalism, we're representing what the American media is all about in the First Amendment as well. Unfortunately, I don't think Trump is going to backtrack. Like when he went after NATO in his first term, you know, his defenders would couch this by saying they're just trying to get Europe to do more, right? Like they just want Europe to increase their DOD budgets. But really, the underlying reality, the truth of it is Trump was very hostile towards NATO.

And I think in my view, we're seeing what play out now unvarnished in the second term, not burdened by having to run for election again, is a preview of what you saw and what you witnessed and a lot of what you wrote about in your book, which, again, everyone should go out and buy. I enjoyed it very much. I just finished it last night before we chatted. But we're seeing now, I mean, it's just a hostility towards Voice of America, which during the first Trump term, you were banned from Mike Pence's plane temporarily. You've been the subject of Elon Musk's kind of personal puppet mastering

at Twitter. You had a colleague who was pushed out at the White House by government folks. And for me, just something smells there. It doesn't add up. But it's nice to see that Europe is, knowing now that VOA is under attack by Iran administration, you've seen some reporting that with radar-free Europe, countries are thinking about trying to make sure if the worst happens, things continue. And while that's heartening, it doesn't need to happen. I think that's why it's so frustrating. Well, one thing is that this is U.S. government funded and we don't target Americans, but the American people are stakeholders in this. American tax dollars are paying for it. And VOA, it costs several hundred million dollars a year. But when

you divide that up between four dozen languages or so, it's not a lot of money for each service, plus the infrastructure to do television and radio. It's an immensely cheap investment. Well, it's less than the cost of two fighter jets is the way that I look at it. And we do not drop kinetic bombs. We drop truth bombs on countries. And it's meant to help. And we know that what we do with the Voice of America, it saves lives. It can prevent strife by getting information into places accurately and quickly, because as you know, when there's a vacuum of information, whether it's a natural disaster, a civil conflict, or an epidemic, there can be fear and panic and leading to all sorts of terrible things. And you mentioned about, you know, Hitler and the Cincinnati Liars.

German was our first language, Japanese the second. We do not broadcast anymore in German and Japanese. Our language mix depends on the geopolitical situation of the world. And so the places that are least apt to be uh, to be able to inform themselves because they're under an autocratic regime, or they just don't have the type of media infrastructure, uh, to, to do what we do. Those are the places we're serving like broadcasting, uh, to the Tibetans in Tibet and the Tibetan diaspora into Burma. We have special programs for the Rohingya in the refugee camps in Bangladesh. Horn of Africa is a big target for us as well as into the regions such as Sudan and other places where, you know, there's a lot of really bad things happening.

I think that really lays out the importance of VOA and why you guys as bulwark folks who are watching this need to make sure that among the many things that you're frustrated and angry about, I'm very angry about the attack on Voice of America. I think you should be, too. And if you're the kind of person who's always talking to your elected officials, work that into the mix because there's so much right now. Everything is under attack. And, you know, who would have thought that Canadian Bacon kind of was a satirical movie that turns out now that it might be a prophetic thing and maybe they can turn the CN Tower into Radio Free Canada because at some point in this slow burning constitutional crisis we have here, attacking neutral media that has done so much good, not only for us as a country as sort of a flag bearer of truth, it is telling to see what the reaction is of people who have not been historic allies, who are just over the moon at what's happening at the defenestration of VOA. And it's very sad. Stephen, thank you for joining us.

Thank you, Jim. And go Reds. Go Reds.