Washington: The Trump Administration has abruptly suspended journalists in the United States, including Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, ordering them to leave their offices and deliver teams in a movement, critics say that the influence of the global media in the United States weakens.
Hundreds of reporters and other VOA personnel, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe and other media received a weekend email saying that they will be prohibited from their offices and should deliver press passes, telephones issued by the office and other equipment.
Trump, who has already eviscerated the Department of Aid and Education of the United States, issued an executive order that lists the US agency for global media as among the “elements of the federal bureaucracy that the president has determined that they are unnecessary.”
Kari Lake, a supporter from Firebrand Trump and former news presenter of Arizona who was put in charge of the media agency after she lost an offer from the United States Senate, wrote, in an email to the media that supervises, that the federal subsidy “no longer makes the priorities of the agency.”
Harrison Fields, a White House press official, took a much less legalistic tone in an X publication, simply writing “goodbye” in 20 languages, a sarcastic blow to VOA multilingual coverage.
The Chief of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, who began to be transmitted to the Soviet block during the Cold War, called the cancellation of the financing “a massive gift to the enemies of the United States.”
Gift to China?
“The Iranian Ayatolás, Chinese communist leaders and autocrats in Moscow and Minsk would celebrate the disappearance of RFE/RL after 75 years,” said its president, Stephen Capus, in a statement.
“Giving our adversaries a victory will make them stronger and more weak,” he said.
The media funded by the United States have been reoriented since the end of the Cold War, dropping much of the programming aimed at the new democratic countries of Central Europe and Eastern Europe and focusing on Russia and China.
Radio Free Asia, established in 1996, considers that its mission provides non -censorship reports in countries without free means, including China, Myanmar, North Korea and Vietnam.
The policy has angry some around Trump, who has long criticized the media and in his first period in office he had suggested that the points of sale financed by the United States government should promote their policies.
