Trump Wants Voice Of America To Be His Personal ‘Truth Social’
During his first four years in office, trump tried to bastardize the storied Voice of America and turn it into his own propaganda organ and he nearly succeeded.
Undeterred and primed to begin a second term, trump is basck at it. He wants the new leader of Voice of America to be Kari Lake. In true Orwellian fashion, trump has nominated Lake to spread her conspiratorial, far right voice around the world as director of Voice of America, the mouthpiece of American democracy.
Yes, that Kari Lake, the loyal MAGA conspiracist who pushed trump’s errant and inflammatory claims that widespread voter fraud cost him the 2020 election. That Kari Lake who whined and refused to accept defeat first as a Republican running for governor and then a candidate for U.S. Senate from Arizona. Both times, Lake mimicked trump that voter fraud had cost her both defeats.
In announcing his choice of Lake, a former TV anchor, trump was more concerned with what he has called the “fake news media,” which he has uniformly blamed any time he has been defeated or criticized.
Voice of America (VOA) is part of the US Agency for Global Media, which also runs Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks and the Open Technology Fund. The task of the Open Technology Fund, launched in 2019, is to advance internet freedom, so journalists and audiences can have uncensored internet access. More than 2 billion people worldwide use the Open Technology Fund daily.
VOA and other networks that receive federal funding provide straight news for societies where independent news coverage is either repressed or financially unfeasible and offers models of the value of pluralistic political debate.
The Voice of America (VOA) went on the air in World War II. William Harlan Hale, a journalist and writer, began the VOA’s first radio show by saying “We bring you voices from America. Today, and daily from now on, we shall speak to you about America and the War. The news may be good for us. The news may be bad. But we shall tell you the truth.”
If approved, Lake would succeed Voice of America director Michael Abramowitz, who was appointed on June 24. Abramowitz is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and former president of Freedom House, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization providing research and analysis, advocacy, and direct support to journalists and human rights defenders.
Abramowitz previously directed the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Levine Institute for Holocaust Education and led the museum’s genocide prevention efforts.
For nearly 25 years, Abramowitz worked at The Washington Post, rising to national editor and then White House correspondent. At the Post, he won the Aldo Beckman award for excellence in White House coverage and led a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting about the post 9–11 war on terrorism.
A graduate of Harvard College, Abramowitz is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the George W. Bush Institute Advisory Council. He was formerly a Marshall Memorial fellow at the German Marshall Fund and Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
“For more than 80 years, the Voice of America has delivered trusted news and information to the world, especially for those living in closed societies and who have no other access to the truth,” Abramowitz said when he was sworn in on June 24, 2024. “This role could not be more important in an age when authoritarian regimes are spreading lies and propaganda with abandon. I look forward to working with VOA’s outstanding journalists and staff in fulfilling its unique mission.”
The current CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media is Amanda Bennett, who was confirmed by the Senate in September 2022. In 1987, Bennett shared a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for her work on how public health officials mischaracterized the AIDS epidemic in order to secure more public funding and financial support. She was director of Voice of America from 2016, until mid-June 2020, when she resigned after trump named Michael Park to run U.S. Agency for Global Media.
How does Lake compare?
Trump said Lake’s role will be to “ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.”
Lake has a Bachelor of Arts in communications and journalism from the University of Iowa. She had a 30 year career in journalism, from 1991 until she retired in 2021. She was a reporter and weathercaster and in 1999 she was named as an evening anchor for KSAZ-TV (Fox 10) in Phoenix, Ariz. Lake won her first Emmy Award for Outstanding News Anchor in 2012 and then again in 2013 for her work at Fox 10.
“I am honored that President Trump has asked me to lead the Voice of America,” Lake wrote in a statement on social media. “@VOANews is a vital international media outlet dedicated to advancing the interests of the United States by engaging directly with people across the globe and promoting democracy and truth. Under my leadership, the VOA will excel in its mission: chronicling America’s achievements worldwide.”
In her last years as a TV anchor, Lake shared false information on social media, prompting criticism and acquiring a reputation as a provocateur.
She said on air that she was disgusted with the “sham election” of Joe Biden and that Democrats “have a demonic agenda.” At a rally, Lake said that her Democratic opponent for Arizona governor, Katie Hobbs, “should be locked up,” prompting the crowd to answer back in true trump fashion,
While still working for Fox, in July 2019, she defended her right to appear on the right-wing social media platform Parler, which critics accused of catering to anti-Semites, QAnon conspiracy theorists and other far-right figures. She also Tweeted a debunked COVID-19 conspiracy video in 2020 and, after Biden’s victory, Lake argued with producers over using phrases like “president-elect,” because she believed Biden’s election was illegitimate.
In April 2018 Lake apologized on air after tweeting that the #RedForEd campaign is a front for legalizing marijuana. #RedForEd is a nationwide campaign calling for strikes and demonstrations to raise teacher salaries.
“This is a big push to legalize pot and to make it more savory by tossing teachers a bone with a substantial raise,” Lake said.
In November 2018, Lake shared an unverified claim of voter fraud based on a tweet that a user received a mail ballot that was already filled out with votes for Democratic candidates.
In February 2020, Lake interviewed trump ahead of a rally in Phoenix. They talked about student loans, politics in Arizona, China and the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump said he was confident that China was trying hard to contain the virus and that numbers would “get progressively better.”
“I think it’s going to work out fine,” said trump whose beliefwas unchallenged by Lake.
In a broadcast in April 2020, in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lake shared a video of two California doctors incorrectly claiming COVID-19 was no worse than the flu. Lake later tweeted that the video was one of the most honest briefings on COVID-19 she had seen, The video was later removed by YouTube for violating its terms of service and it was condemned by the American Academy of Emergency Medicine and American College of Emergency Physicians as “misinformation,” “reckless” and “inconsistent with current science and epidemiology.”
After the video was pulled from YouTube, Lake posted it again, with a link on Facebook.
In March 2021, Lake resigned from Fox a day after she was seen at the far right, Conservative Political Action Conference (CDC) in Orlando, Fla.
Lake’s platform included opposing vaccine and mask mandates, finishing the U.S.-Mexico border wall and withholding state funds from local governments that defund their police departments, according to her campaign website.
In September 2021, trump endorsed Lake, calling her “a highly respected television anchor and journalist” and that, “few can take on the Fake News Media like Kari.”
A month later, Lake said she wouldn’t have certified Arizona’s election results because of “serious irregularities.” Arizona’s election results were certified by outgoing Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, and county audits found no evidence of irregularities or systemic voter fraud.
The VOA “prohibits interference by any US government official in the objective, independent reporting of news.” Trump has shown that he thinks the rules do not apply to him.
During his first administration, trump hired loyal sycophants at the U.S. Agency for Global Media which oversees the Voice of America. His new lead sycophant, Michael Pack, followed trump’s orders and soon had purged anyone who did not toe the trump line.
Pack ran the agency for around seven and a half months before Biden was elected and fired Park. Pack’s tenure reflected trump’s values, including contempt for the press and for the professional federal workforce that trump claims is the “Deep State.”
Upon his approval for the post, Pack quickly proceeded to punish executives who objected to the legality of his plans, interfered in journalistic independence and signed a no-bid contract with a private law firm to investigate employees he saw as opposed to trump. The law firm’s fees reached the seven figures for work typically done by attorneys who are federal employees.
At the time of his nomination, Pack told the right wing Federalist organization that he planned to “drain the swamp, to root out corruption and to deal with these issues of bias.”
It took the Senate two years to approve Pack who then hit the ground running. He fired the heads of multiple networks; loaded their boards with trump loyalists; interfered with news coverage; and brought in political appointees who investigated a VOA White House reporter for alleged anti-trump bias.
In May 2023, a federal investigation found that Park, as director of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, had repeatedly engaged in abuses of power and gross mismanagement. Just a day after he was confirmed for the post in June 2020, Park met with a career employee to consider which senior leaders at the agency and the Voice of America should be fired because their perceived political beliefs differed from trump’s.
The career employee reported about an employee who “hates Republicans,” and another who “openly despises Trump and Republicans.” A third “is not on the Trump team.” The comment from the career employee potentially violated the federal civil service law that bars firing someone because of political affiliation.
Pack soon fired suspect employees but they were reinstated and exonerated following an investigation by the inspector general’s office of the U.S. State Department. The inspector general’s report found that Pack had repeatedly abused the powers of his office for partisan ends, broke laws and regulations, and engaged in gross mismanagement.
Park’s appointment was held up by the Senate over concerns about his ideological approach and the finances of his personal production company. His production company ultimately agreed to transfer $210,000 back to a nonprofit that he also controls. The non-profit was subsequently forced to dissolve under a legal settlement that Park reached in 2023 with the D.C. Attorney General’s office.
Pack also hired Frank Wuco, a former conservative talk radio “shock jock” known for spreading conspiracy theories and calling President Barack Obama a “Kenyan.” Wuco served in multiple positions in the trump residency. He created a fictional character who supposedly is a former jihadist who now exposes aspects of Islam-inspired terrorism. From 2017 to November 2019, Wuco served as a senior White House advisor to the Department of Homeland Security.
Prior to serving in the trump Administration, Wuco hosted a talk radio show that promoted birtherism and criticized Islam. Wuco claimed on his radio show that Barack Obama’s memoir was ghostwritten by former radical left militant Bill Ayers, that former CIA director John Brennan was a Muslim and that former attorney general Eric Holder had been a member of the Black Panthers.
While serving in the Department of Homeland Security, Wuco, a former naval intelligence officer, suggested dropping nuclear bombs on Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. He was later assigned to work on arms control issues at the State Department.
Prior to his appointment, Pack was president and CEO from 2015 to 2017 of the Claremont Institute in Upland, Cali., and Publisher of its Claremont Review of Books. The conservative think tank was an early defender of trump. After Biden won the 2020 election and trump refused to concede, Claremont Institute senior fellow John Eastman was one of the leading architects of trump‘s failed attempts to overturn the election results. Eastman was later disbarred and was named as a co-conspirator in the federal indictment brought against trump over his attempts to subvert the 2020 election results and prevent the certification of Biden’s election.
Pack also has collaborated with Stephen Bannon, a former, convicted trump advisor and co-founder of the conservative website Breitbart News. In 2019, while his nomination was pending, Pack produced and directed a favorable documentary about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Pack’s hopes for confirmation were revived in spring 2020 when trump publicly alleged that the Voice of America had relayed Chinese propaganda about the nation’s efforts to combat the outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus.
Trump’s attacks on the Voice of America led to an inquiry into federal whistleblower complaints. The report concluded that Pack “exercised oversight (over the VOA) in a manner suggestive of political bias.” It also noted that Pack had retaliated against career executives by suspending their security clearances after they filed whistleblower complaints.
Pack also engaged in “gross mismanagement and gross waste” when he signed a confidential, no-bid contract with McGuireWoods, a politically-connected Virginia law firm. The firm was paid $1.6 million in agency money to investigate Pack executives. In 2022, Trump’s Save America political action committee paid McGuireWoods almost $900,000 in legal fees.
Pack also undermined the independence of several of the international networks, by stacking their boards with a full slate of ideological appointees. He also abused his powers in trying to make their tenures irrevocable except in the case of a felony conviction, the report concluded.
After trump left office and as a result of trump’s meddling, Congress installed what it hoped would be protective guardrails by creating the bi-partisan International Broadcasting Advisory Board. The new board works with the CEO of the U.S. Agency of Global Media. The guardrails also included a new law that the head of VOA can only be “appointed or removed” by a majority vote of the board.