“Maduro did not close our office – Trump did it”: Voice of America Journalists speak | US messages

CArolina Valladares Pérez, a correspondent based in Washington, reported from the government of the international intelligence service Voice of America, has reported from places where press freedom is very limited to war zones and autocratic states in the Middle East and throughout Latin America. Investigation and threats to state officials were not unusual – but she always managed to get the story out.

For the first time in her career, Valladares Pérez said that she was silenced – not from a distant regime, but by the United States government.

“Nicolás Maduro did not close our office,” she said of Venezuela's authoritarian leader. “Donald Trump was closed. I think it's amazing.”

Valladares Pérez is one of hundreds of VOA journalists who are reducing their parent company, the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) almost two months after the signing of a late-evening executive regulation. The journalists were confident that they might be able to return to their programs this week – the VOA was even into the rotation of the news that covered the president at the Press Pool of the White House – but displeased court commands clouded their way forward.

“We have 3,500 partners all over the world – these are television stations, radio stations and digital partners who rely on our content,” said Patsy Widakuswara, the head of the White House of the VOA, who is the leading plaintiff in a complaint that questioned the authority of the president in order to question a agency chartered by the congress. “The emptiness is filled by our opponents – it's already.”

VOA's pro-democratic programming reaches hundreds of millions of people around the world and sends it into 47 languages. It is often the only alternative to state media in places where the freedom of the press is severely restricted, including in Russia, China and Iran. But the government disparaged the outcome as the “voice of the radical America” ​​and accused it of producing “propaganda”.

After Trump's March -Edict, VOA's show was dark for the first time since it was founded during the Second World War, initially to counteract Nazi propaganda. Some radio stations started to play music instead of the news. The VOA website remains frozen in time, the homepage dates to this Saturday morning. Up to 1,300 VOA employees were transferred to administrative leave.

The order also instructed Usagm to terminate the federal grants that support the sister outlets of VOA from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting networks. Without financing, these broadcasting organizers have difficulty remaining.

The Trump government has defended the decision to reduce the radio operators as part of their efforts, to reduce the federal government and to reduce what it described as “frivolous expenses that do not adapt to the American values ​​or address the needs of the American people”.

“Close them down,” said Trump Ally and consultant Elon Musk at the beginning of this year on X when his so -called “Department of Government Efficiency” began his work.

In response to the president's March command, Kari Lake, a violent Trump loyalist and prominent election, explained as a special advisor to the Global Media Agency of the US media that the Networks of the VOA were “not saving”. But it seems that the former local news anchor is now working on the unsuccessful Republican candidate to bring the news agency back up in any function.

In an explanation on Monday, Lake said: “In the plan it was always to have a meaningful, comprehensive and precise programming. However, this administration was hired in its traces by legal guidance, which prevented the implementation of urgently needed reforms at VOA.”

Last month, a federal judge blocked the efforts of the Trump administration, the VOA, Radio Free Asia and the Radio networks of the Middle East. However, the VOA employees and journalists remain on administrative leave while the legal proceedings are taking place.

The judge, the US district judge Royce Lamberth, later ordered the administration to restore the financing congress acquired for the Radio Free Europe, but the judgment was interrupted in the appeal procedure.

On Saturday, a shared committee of three judges from the court stuck in parts of the decision and ordered the Trump government to return the VOA employees to work. In a contradiction, Cornelia Pillard warned that the Federal Appeal of the Appeal of the Court of Appeal, that the stay “almost guarantees that the networks do not exist in any meaningful form” if legal disputes are resolved.

The lawyers who represented the VOA journalists have asked the full US call for calls for the DC circuit to repeat the case en banc.

The Trump government's attempt to reduce the largest and oldest international broadcaster in the United States is part of a more comprehensive approach to freedom of the press in the United States, journalists and experts say. At the end of April, the President also signed an executive order that aimed to reduce federal financing for NPR and PBS, and accused the news agencies of having spread the “radical Woke -Propaganda” similarly.

“The reason why we have such a large audience is that we are not propaganda,” said Widakuswara. “A large part of our audience lives in places where there are state propaganda, and they can smell a mile away. They turn to us because they trust us.”

Ilan Berman, Senior Vice President at the American Foreign Policy Council, said that VOA and his sister outlets were an “indispensable” capital in the information war, the anti-American stories and disinformation in unfree societies.

“Authoritarian regime understands very well that the control of information for the control of its population groups is essential,” wrote Berman, who is a member of the board of RFE/RL and MBN, in an e -mail when he was traveling in the Middle East, where he said, media that are hostile to the United States.

“Unfortunately, America and its allies have been playing defense for some time,” he added. “And the switching of our messaging outlets will only make these voices weaker.”

Widakuswara desperately to return to work has cited the indictment to raise awareness of the emergency of VOA and maintain the newsroom in the middle of the turbulence of the past few weeks. On May 4, the account @savevoanow from X, the platform of Musk, was suspended because it was supposedly “violated the rules of illegal accounts”. The report has been restored since then, but it is not annoyed by Widakuswara and her colleagues who swore.

“What we fight is not only for our job, but also for our continued editorial independence,” said the reporter of the White House.

A “reward for dictators and despots”

The silent circuit of the VOA has alarmed freedom of press freedom, but drew cheerful reactions from Chinese and Russian state media. “Unfortunately we couldn't close them, but America did this ourselves,” said Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the RT network supported by Kremlin, who cheered Trump's “great decision”.

The committee for the protection of journalists (CPJ), a prominent Press Freedom organization, described Trump's efforts to remove news agencies, a “reward for dictators and despots” and asked the congress to restore the agency that she created “before irreparable damage is done”.

“If a US President behaves in Germany, this creates a kind of permission structure for the world leaders of the world to treat the press in their home countries in the same way,” said Katherine Jacobsen, the coordinator of the CPJ program for Canada and Caribbean.

US foreign journalists, whose visas are now in danger due to the deposit of Usagam, say that deportation to their home countries would suspend the risk of repressing alia, prison sentence and possibly even death by authoritarian governments.

“In Burma, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, there were people who fought for freedom and democracy, and they came to work at RFA,” said Jaewoo Park, journalist for Radio Free Asia in Washington, recently to the Guardian. “It is very risky for you. Your life is in danger if radio -free Asia does not exist.”

According to the agency, 10 of its journalists remain detained or detained all over the world – in Myanmar, Vietnam, Russia, Belarus and Azerbaijan.

Eugene Daniels, President of the Organization, at the annual dinner of the correspondents of the White House, who expressed the solidarity of the VOA with VoA's journalists.

“For our friends at Voice of America, I can hardly wait until they are back on the property of the White House to continue to report important stories for the audience around the world, especially in countries in which the leaders suppress freedom of expression and the press,” he said during a speech that changed the punch line in favor of a robust defense of the first application and press freedom.

Valladares Pérez is also looking forward to this day.

“Our reporters want to go back to work. Our task is not to be at home, to be silent and not publish,” she said. “Our task is to take our microphones, to speak further, to reach our audience and to tell them what is happening in the United States. This is our mission.”