Before March 15, VOA was reaching 361 million people around the world each week and producing content across media platforms — radio, television and digital — in 49 languages.
Now, VOA is producing minimal content in four languages: Farsi, Mandarin, Dari and Pashto.
A federal district judge said Wednesday that the evidence suggests the Trump administration is ignoring statutory mandates from Congress about VOA, which he said had been “whittled down to a paucity of coverage.”
District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington ordered the Trump administration to provide a plan for how it will comply with his order to restore VOA programming to fulfill its statutory mandate that VOA “serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news.”
“Without more explanation, the Court is left to conclude that the defendants are simply trying to run out the clock on the fiscal year, without putting the money Congress appropriated toward the purposes Congress intended,” he wrote in an order giving the administration until August 13 to make its plans clear.
VOA articles published online per week
Opponents of the U.S. have cheered the virtual shutdown of VOA, while former U.S. military leaders, diplomats and policy experts have sounded the alarm, arguing that the closure of U.S. international media will likely help foreign governments to undermine U.S. policy.
The abandonment of VOA affiliate agreements with broadcast, online and mobile partners around the world has led U.S. adversaries, including China and Russia, to move to take over the media space that VOA is leaving behind.
Here is a look at how the output at VOA has declined since the U.S. Agency for Global Media’s senior adviser, Kari Lake, set out to shut down the organization beginning in mid-March, and the impact that VOA’s absence is having around the world.
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