The shuttering of Voice of America hurts our ability to explain ourselves

The Voice of America is off the air for the first time in 83 years. The Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE did it.

I understand the impetus behind DOGE. The U.S. is in peril of financial collapse due to decades of deficit spending. Something radical needed to be done. Some indiscriminate damage was unavoidable.

However, the Declaration of Independence, the first public diplomacy document of the U.S., was addressed out of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” to the entire world. That decent respect is what VOA was designed to show. 

VOA is a creature born of war. It began in 1942 broadcasting in German, to explain to the German people what we were fighting for and against. It also gave Germans an accurate version of what was really happening in their totalitarian country.

Having lived and worked overseas, I am familiar with the distorted views of the U.S. that many people have formed, not only from foreign propaganda and disinformation, but from some American popular entertainment and the almost constant self-criticism in which the American people are engaged.

The latter is a sign of a healthy democracy and a source of our strength, but foreign audiences need to understand the broader framework within which this takes place. That is why the VOA Charter requires VOA to represent America in a balanced and comprehensive way. It is vitally important that VOA fosters an understanding of American institutions and the principles behind them. No less important is its essential charter obligation to “present the policies of the United States clearly and effectively.” 

I firmly believe that VOA should not be an echo chamber for American domestic media, which is already largely available overseas on the internet. This is the fault into which the newsroom fell. It has a different job. It should have been offering to audiences what was otherwise unavailable to them. Not operating under the constraints of commercial media, VOA can afford to tell the truth. That is its advantage.

The heart of VOA is not the newsroom, which has deserved the scathing criticism it has received from President Trump, but its 40 language services — the largest part of VOA that most people know nothing about.

Let me provide a small example of its hidden treasures. Harun Maruf is a member of VOA's Somali service. He has more than 170,000 followers on Twitter in Somalia. He co-authored the popular and powerful book, “Inside Al Shabaab, the Secret History of Al-Qaeda's Most Powerful Ally.” This is the kind of expertise the VOA language services employ — or rather employed. Harun was sent home. The Farsi service to Iran has also been shut,  just as the nuclear crisis heats up and as media censorship in that country increases. Isn’t now exactly when we most need to reach the Iranian people?

My earliest stint as VOA director was in 2001-2002, a time when the agency was alive with a sense of purpose after the attacks of 9/11. Just as in 1942, we all knew how to support our country in a time of peril. It was an exciting place to work. It hummed. 

Does anyone suppose that that was the last war for the United States? How will we reach our Chinese adversaries and our Asian allies when conflict breaks out there, as it is almost certain to do?

VOA’s mission is to give voice to America, explain our purposes in the world and the justifications for our actions. “VOA's job should be to advance the justice of the American cause, while simultaneously undermining our opponents’,” I wrote in a 2017 Wall Street Journal essay. 

The difference now, I’m sorry to say, is a loss of a sense of mission by certain elements of the agency, who have been led to believe that VOA is solely a news organization. It’s not, though news is an integral and essential part of it. It also has the obligation to disclose the character of the American people and their institutions in such a way as the underlying principles guiding American life are revealed. News is a means but not an end. 

Reliable news was always a part of U.S. broadcasting, but the mission has never been reduced to just that until recently. When the Dalai Lama called the VOA Tibet service “the bread of the Tibetan people,” and when Aun San Suu Kyi called the Burmese service “the hope of the Burmese people,” they were not just talking about the “news.” Hope is a theological virtue; it is not engendered by news alone. The Declaration of Independence was not a news bulletin. 

VOA’s foreign audiences must be puzzled as to why the VOA is no longer broadcasting to them. Some African listeners take national radio shutdowns as a telltale sign there has been a coup. Or perhaps, they might think, the U.S. no longer considers them worth reaching, or that it no longer has anything to say. Either answer is a self-inflicted public diplomacy disaster. What has happened to our “decent respect to the opinions of mankind”?

The U.S. has enduring interests in the world. We need to explain ourselves in the most persuasive way we can, and by the most effective means, particularly to those peoples and countries whose future is going to most affect ours. Destroying the Voice of America is not the way to do this.

Robert R. Reilly served as Voice of America director from (2001 to 2002) and from (2020-2021).