Trump dismantles Voice of America with executive order - BBC News
Trump dismantles Voice of America with executive order - BBC News
More than 1,300 staff placed on administrative leave as White House accuses VOA of being anti-Trump, "radical" and "leftist".
US President Donald Trump has signed an order to strip back the federally-funded news organisation Voice of America, accusing it of being "anti-Trump" and "radical".
A White House statement said the order would "ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda", and included quotes from politicians and right-wing media railing against the "leftist", "partisan" VOA.
How is everything that is "anti-Trump" radical? You fucking dictator.
"If you smell shit everywhere you go it's probably because you're covered in it" Anon
I don't understand the naysayers here.
This is hilarious. Trump wants to simultaneously expand the American empire, while he dismantles the tools of it that he's too stupid to understand the importance of.
No matter their mission statement, or any tangible benefits they might have provided, both USAID and VOA, were tools of empire. These aren't mutually exclusive concepts.
Trump's mission is to weaken the US, NATO, and the EU. Eliminating VoA helps do that. Notice how he isn't threatening China with invasion, but Canada and Denmark instead.
Everything Trump does -- everything -- suddenly makes sense when viewed through the lens of "how does Putin benefit?"
That's an incredibly myopic take that confuses correlation with causation.
These moves may benefit Putin, but Russia isn't the only county to benefit. Infact, Russia is in a historically weak position to fill gaps left by a receding American empire.
I'd wager that China is likely to see much more geopolitical gains because they have the resources and capacity to take advantage of the situation.
I'm not saying Putin won't benefit, just pointing out how limiting it is to view Trump through a singular lens.
How does Netanyahu benefit as well.
Trump doesn't want to expand the American empire though. He makes noises about it, but words are cheap. Judging by his actions he wants to create chaos so oligarchs can profit.
The ultrawealthy have no national allegience.
I could see him loving the idea of expansion to manufacture a legacy. Jefferson may have been a philosopher or a slave-romancer but that's college academic stuff: every middle school student learns he bought Louisiana. McKinley got us as close to an on-paper empire as we got, and they put him on the $500 note for it.
Soft power will never fill the same goal. Being the cultural or moral lighthouse for the West is inherently different from actually raising a flag over their capitals.
We're talking about a guy whose business accumen is so poor he managed to run multiple casinos into the ground. His "successful businessman" schtick has always been propped up by a mountain of debt and crime. If he had so much as two brain cells to rub together, he would have stuck with Ivana because she was the only member of the Trump family to have even a shred of sense.
Not sure he could have kept Ivana anyway given she said at the time he raped her.
That's why we call him JDPON Don - this dumbass is going to dismantle the empire and usher in global proletarian revolution.
If we're lucky, we might avoid the World Wars which made many other revolutions possible.
See, the thing is, those tools of empire were government-funded. Congress allocated money and resources to those tools for them to do their jobs. The intent is to eventually replace those with privately owned, profit-motivated alternatives. Why do you think they cut NOAA and NWS funding and fired all their probies? So that private companies can fill the void. Then if you want life-saving weather information in the event of a tornado or hurricane, pay a monthly subscription fee to some billionaire's weather/disaster alert service.
This isn't fundamentally changing anything. It's about using different tools for the same goal.
America cannot dominate the world militarily, nor could that even serve the goals of its contemporary brand of neoimperialism.
Soft power i.e. culture, propaganda, and diplomatic/idealogical relationships, are the foundation upon which it's built.
Yes, military hard power plays a critical role, but it cannot replace soft power.
This isn't empire for the sake of raw nationalism, and nothing would accelerate the American collapse faster than dismantling the state's soft power tools. The end result will be attempts to maintain power by spending its military resources on peer, or near peer conflicts.
As an American, I would like to apologize that the idiots of this country re-elected Mango Mussolini. And I'm sorry that the rest of the world has to suffer because of this idiot and his cronies.
Waiting for you guys to actually use your second amendment.
It's a pretty scary idea when the odds are very high that we would just get murdered by police or secret service. And in this hypothetical, if we were to fail, Trump would just bring them hammer down even harder on everyone else, making future attempts much more difficult if not impossible. Until the people are organized on a large scale and collectively convinced this is the only option we have left, we have too much to lose with very little chance of success.
Hell, most of them aren't even using their first ammendment yet.
I thank you for the sentiment, but save your words and don't spare the ammunition.
You don't have to self-identify as "American" if you don't want. You don't need to apologize for a system over which you have virtually no control. The first step to resisting an evil system is probably disavowal.
Under $300 million a year to spread US propaganda to over 300 million people. That's a fucking bargain man.
This is going to give up so, SO much soft power because of a snowflake's ego. This is a bad deal.
I guess this is better than making VoA voice of trump.
I'm wondering if it's going to be "rebuilt", personally.
It must also be weird for the sycophants who he just nominated to staff it too.
The equivalent of "Daddy got you a pink convertible and you get three minutes to drive it before the repo guy comes"
Oh no, his people will keep their jobs. He isn't getting rid of it, he's just firing anyone who does anything, and his people will come in and get paid to do nothing. It's very likely that he can't just do away with it, but he can just fire the people working there.
Isn't Voice of America like the USA's equivalent of Deutsche Welle?
Basically a vehicle for internationally transporting news from the US American perspective?
Trump really hates any and all soft power the USA have available.
Yes, it's one of the US's propaganda presses
They put out plenty of content about the US's flaws and failures
Soft is a no-no word around Trump. He wants rock hard power, gay porn hard power.
yeah totally him and not some other dipshit trying to get back to superpower status.
Maybe we'll get lucky and he'll move against the nuclear arsenal and the Army will finally give him the boot.
Is this sarcasm? They fired 350+ workers in charge of overseeing the nuclear stockpile before they even knew who they were firing, and nothing happened. To pretend that there is some line in the sand is, at this point, naive.
As someone who used to listen to a lot of shortwave radio, this just bums me out.
I know foreign people who listened to VoA, and now it won't be there anymore for them.
Makes me wonder who they'll listen to, who will fill the void, with the VoA being gone.
I know foreign people who listened to VoA, and now it won't be there anymore for them.
Stuff like this is a perfect example of how little Trump understands soft power. That was an outlet for American ideals (ok, propaganda) and American culture to diffuse across the world. Seeing how power abhors a vacuum, I won’t be surprised when China increasingly fills this void.
DW still does very limited shortwave in Africa, I guess they'll be happy to take over time/frequency slots but let's face it the amount of people that you can only reach via short wave is dwindling, they mostly switched to satellite. They rather feed into the local FM broadcast network, and of course you can stream over the internet.
but let’s face it the amount of people that you can only reach via short wave is dwindling, they mostly switched to satellite. They rather feed into the local FM broadcast network, and of course you can stream over the internet.
You would actually be surprised how many poor regions in Central and South America as well as in Africa and Central Asia actually rely on shortwave still.
A lot of it is Christian and right-wing broadcasts, but still, it's used more than you would think. Not everyone can afford expensive satellite rigs to receive.
Sooo... Weakening US influence around the world in order for Putin to fill the vacuum? What is Trump's Russian codename again?
Krasnov
Pee tape kovnik
It was mostly a propaganda machine against socialist movements. I’m glad it is gone, but it should have been gone way before Trump. Because he doesn’t deserve credit for shit.
What socialist movements?
Every single one of them since the end of World War 2. Voice of America, Radio for Europe, Radio Free Asia they're all arms of US imperialist propaganda.
The communist party of China.
The least communist communist party on the planet.
usagm is an independent agency. it and its predecessors, and voa, were created by congress. only congress can eliminate them
Yeah, the managers were told to limit programming to the minimum required by law
Yeah, those checks and balances will kick in any day now!
Yeap, any day now.
Leftist and partisan are not how I, an actual leftist, would describe the various propaganda outlets scattered around the world such as VOA.
It's a cia op. And literally always was. Since 1942 when it was established.
Does this mean Kari Lake is out of a job? As an Arizonian, I hope she come back here claiming to be our governor again.
What will the shills on Lemmy post now?
Per CNN (per US Agency for Global Media), number of regular listeners, in millions, of VoA...
- Indonesia 64.8
- Nigeria 37.4
- Mexico 37.1
- India 29.1
- Iran 12.2
- Peru 11.9
- Russia 10.1
- Ukraine 9.8
- Iraq 9.3
- Egypt 9.0