March 15 is the date on the Roman calendar known for “the Ides of March,” an idea associated in Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar” with betrayal. Such is the feeling of many journalists at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and the Voice of America (VOA), both of which operate under the umbrella of the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM). That was the day this week that the outlets received notice that their U.S. government funding would be terminated (RFE/RL) or that staff (in the case of VOA) would be placed on administrative leave. In essence, these congressionally mandated platforms — these literal voices of America, though each in different ways — are being abruptly silenced.
Each outlet has its own storied history, its own unique structure and genesis, but each serves the same core purpose: to provide audiences around the world with editorially sound, unbiased journalism and information that they otherwise wouldn’t get because their domestic media outlets largely or entirely delivered State propaganda. Of all of the USAGM entities, including others such as Radio Free Asia and Radio and TV Marti for Cuba, the one I am most familiar with is RFE/RL. I worked at its Prague headquarters for six years until 2021 as the head of journalism training and development.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is the second-largest of these outlets, after VOA, and has bureaus across more than 20 countries. The fact that it is based in Prague is key to its story. Unlike VOA, which was established to broadcast news about the United States to specific countries around the world, RFE/RL was set up as a “surrogate” broadcaster, to provide news about those countries it sought to reach. The very first RFE broadcast was beamed into Czechoslovakia in 1950. During those early days of the Cold War, Czechoslovakia was navigating a new reality after surviving Nazi occupation and then, in 1948, underwent a Soviet-backed coup resulting in a Moscow-friendly communist government.
Fast forward to the end of the Cold War after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Czechoslovakia, along with Poland, Hungary, Romania, and a slew of Eastern European nations suddenly found themselves free of the now-defunct USSR. In the United States, this triumph over six decades of authoritarian oppression counting back to the Nazi era was celebrated, and Congress began pursuing a budgetary “peace dividend.”
In the minds of some, this meant possibly closing VOA and RFE/RL. That’s when the Czech dissident-turned-president Vaclav Havel stepped in. Along with other post-communist leaders such as Poland’s Lech Walesa, Havel cautioned that their freshly free nations, enthused by their embrace of democracy, lacked the expertise or democratic foundations to immediately navigate these responsibilities alone. They considered a free press to be vital during this critical period of transition.
In Washington, a tussle ensued over how — or even whether — support for building up these emergent institutions was necessary or worth the expense. Proposals to close these broadcast entities had emerged within weeks of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Initially, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), which then oversaw VOA, suggested closing or merging it with RFE/RL. An internal budget battle developed that proposed USIA on behalf of VOA taking over the RFE/RL office in Munich as well as RFE/RL’s $200 million budget. If Europe is free, USIA’s argument went, who needs Radio Free Europe?
Continuing Need for a Model
But the appetite for the service that Eastern and Central European countries had come to rely on only grew; after all, they had been broadcasting there for four decades. In 1991, RFE/RL opened a bureau in Moscow, an event celebrated by none other than Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Even before that and conscious of the congressional mood at the time, RFE/RL representatives met in 1990 with Havel, who argued that RFE/RL was still needed as a model for professional, ethical media in the fragile new democracies of Europe.
“You want a million signatures on a petition?” Havel asked, according to a friend who was in the room.
“No,” the RFE/RL officials said, “one signature, yours, on a letter to the President will do.”
“Fine,” Havel said. “You draft it, I’ll sign it.”
To demonstrate his country’s commitment, Havel, during a trip to the United States that year, offered a new home for the Munich-based broadcaster, Prague. He turned over the former communist-era parliament building for a dollar a year for 20 years. Thus, RFE/RL moved, resulting in U.S. taxpayers saving $105 million dollars out of a budget of $200 million in 1994.
From then until this week, RFE/RL has grown in scope and dimension. It ended its broadcasts to the now-Czech Republic and Slovakia, as well as to Poland and the Baltic nations that had grown their own independent media, while expanding to Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and to Iran. In 2016, as Russian President Vladimir Putin heightened his crackdown on opposition and two years after his 2014 capture of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and a swath of its eastern Donbas region, RFE/RL created Current Time TV, a Russian-language platform that reaches across the entirety of the former Soviet sphere, even those countries in Central Asia that are still dependent on Russia in some form or fashion.
Investigating Corruption
The more than 25 services of RFE/RL, similar to the organizational structure at VOA, are made up of journalists and support teams from the nations they cover. As an example of their on-the-ground work, the Ukrainian Service has been in the thick of the longest-running conflict in the region. It first boiled up with Russia’s Crimea invasion in 2014, not long after the Maidan demonstrations ousted Russia’s proxy leader in Kyiv, Viktor Yanukovych. In the wake of this tumultuous period, the service began broadcasting a weekly investigative program called, “Schemes.” This highly acclaimed series has dedicated itself to rooting out corruption in the Ukrainian political sphere, as the country’s government and society struggle against graft. Often producing their stories at great personal risk, these journalists nevertheless have been unrelenting in their investigations.
Similarly in Kyrgyzstan, that service has pursued numerous investigative projects that looked at the uninhibited looting of the Kyrgyz national treasury by various corrupt governments. At one point, some of their journalists had to go into hiding due to the intense pressure placed on them. When, following one investigation, they were shut down by the government — their Bishkek offices was shuttered and their internet access cut off — the streets outside the Kyrgyz Parliament were flooded with protestors demanding the service’s access be restored.
These are but two of many examples of the fearlessness of RFE/RL’s journalists as they operate in the name of U.S. democratic values. There have been tragedies and losses as well. One young Afghan man, a taxi driver-turned-journalist, was targeted and killed in a bombing, one of too many who have lost their lives at the alter of free speech. At one point recently, USAGM was tracking 11 cases of its journalists under threat and had logged at least 20 deaths.
Of the various detentions and arrests — in Belarus, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, and even more often in Russia – a recent case was that of Alsu Kurmasheva, an RFE/RL journalist from the Tatar region of Russia, who was released after months of illegal detention. Her crime? Visiting her sick mother in Kazan and not registering as a so-called “foreign agent” under a notorious law forced through by Putin to suppress independent media and civil society. Putin and copycat dictators have wielded the law as a weapon to intimidate journalists across the region.
Today, a reporter from the Ukrainian Service, Vladislav Yesypenkois is being held in Russian-controlled Crimea. He was arrested in 2021, before the full invasion by Russia in 2022. In Belarus, RFE/RL journalist Ihar Losik has been detained for more than four years, and Andrey Kuznechyk, imprisoned since 2021, was just released last month. In Azerbaijan, Farid Mehralizada was put on trial in January after months of illegal detention. And last year, it was confirmed that Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshchyna had died while in Russian custody.
Attacks on RFE/RL
Today, RFE/RL is on an enemies list across the region it once served openly. It has been run out of a slew of countries, not the least of which is Russia. On Monday, Stanislav Aseyev, a RFE/RL journalist once detained and tortured by Russian authorities responded to the termination of RFE/RL’s grant, writing on Facebook:
I once received an electric shock during torture only for writing for Radio Liberty: I was told that it was “a CIA structure and an enemy of Russia”, and for that reason alone I was already guilty. Now, the “enemy of Russia” is being destroyed by America itself, and my torture seems doubly in vain.
These journalists are not names or faces that most people outside of these regions would know. What they share, however, is their unwavering commitment to journalistic integrity. My job was to assure that those journalists with whom we worked adhered to RFE/RL’s editorial values and standards, that they understood what it meant to represent an independent journalistic voice. I would often imagine some distant freelancer or reporter for one of the services at some perilous location on a map. How could I support them? I would imagine what they were facing just for doing their job — the isolation, the fragility, all backed by a distant promise that their work had value. They certainly weren’t in it for money. A freelancer in Pakistan might make $25 dollars per story. A staffer in Kyiv, always at risk, might earn $25,000 a year. Even in a challenging economic environment, this is below the median. These folks do this work because they believe in the potential impact that their efforts might have for the public they serve.
In the Prague office, I sat next to woman from Minsk. She was an editor for the Current Time social media platforms. She had not seen her family in three years — only because she worked as a journalist for RFE/RL and she and/or her family would be at risk if she visited. Words like “mission,” “values,” and “editorial standards” carry an extra measure of weight for these journalists. They know they are fighting repressive governments, but they also know that if their family, their friends, and their communities are going to learn about what is actually happening in the world, it will likely be because of the work they are doing. That is what democracy and free expression represents for them. And the organization as a whole has been made stronger by those who have devoted their careers to the twin pillars of democracy and the United States as equal values.
They are not naïve, nor are they blind to the stumbles of U.S. overreach or its missteps, even disasters, in international affairs. They have not shied away from reporting the difficult stories, either about the United States or its allies. They recognize that their audiences have been fed propaganda all of their lives. Their only hope for building trust with their audience is to tell the whole story, factually and without favor. Evidence that this is working can be seen in their audience measurements. Each week, they reach 47 million people in 23 countries and 27 languages.
A colleague once told me that her family in northern Russia fully believed the false Kremlin narrative that Ukraine was not a sovereign nation run by Nazis and was a threat to Russia, and that, by conquering Ukraine, Russia would be safer. Her family members refused to get their news from any other outlet that did not support that narrative. That is the stubborn fight these journalists face. I would often imagine someone in these countries who is hungry for the truth, trundling along in a dilapidated bus somewhere, exhausted by the challenges of living in a struggling, mostly impoverished society, yet viewing our websites or social media as they made their way home. Americans take for granted our easy access to information — a firehose of it reaches us every day. But in places like Osh, Kyrgyzstan, mobile data is expensive, not unlimited, yet every day people there invest in it so that they can know at least a little more about what is going in their country through what might be the only viable, reliable news source, RFE/RL.
Termination ‘A Massive Gift to America’s Enemies’
When news of Trump’s executive order was announced, RFE/RL President Steve Capus issued a statement:
The cancellation of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s grant agreement would be a massive gift to America’s enemies. The Iranian Ayatollahs, Chinese communist leaders, and autocrats in Moscow and Minsk would celebrate the demise of RFE/RL after 75 years. Handing our adversaries a win would make them stronger and America weaker.
The Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the other broadcast entities that make up USAGM are part of the once-heralded front line of America’s soft power. In conjunction with their work and that of other federally supported programs funded either directly by Congress or by the now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department, they have been the face and form of the United States as was expressed by these services, these outlets, these people.
In reaction to the news, there has been a move to find options for how the work of these people, this organization might continue. There have been murmurings in the European Union about some kind of support, with Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský suggesting the EU might adopt RFE/RL: “The institution is composed of people, processes, systems, and collaborations with other broadcasters. If that ends, then we can’t simply replace it. So, it’s imperative to discuss what we can do to preserve the institution if the US cuts funding.”
These journalists have abided by and advanced American values of democracy and its international priorities as they have been understood. If they are now unable to retain work visas for the Czech Republic, for example, they would face threats in their home countries, placed at risk of their lives, or be rendered stateless.
They have been vigorous advocates for the values that the United States once held dear as a nation. As a consequence of their work being halted, not only does the United States lose in the projection of “soft power” abroad, but many of these individuals also will face a worrying future and possibly dangerous days.