Longtime OPC member and former governor Steve Herman, chief national correspondent for Voice of America, is speaking out about the Trump administration’s gutting of the global news service. VOA staff members, along with Reporters Without Borders and other plaintiffs, have filed a lawsuit in federal court to restore the network.
Reflecting on the lawsuit on his Substack “The Newsguy” on March 21, Herman said “if VOA is not already dead, it’s in a deep coma.” Since writing this statement, a federal judge has blocked the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which runs the VOA, from firing more than 1,200 staff members. Judge James Paul Oetken called the effort to dismantle the VOA “a classic case of arbitrary and capricious decision making.”
Read a portion of Herman‘s statement below.
by Steve Herman
Since 1,350 of my colleagues were informed last Saturday (March 15) that they had been immediately placed on indefinite leave with pay there has been no new VOA news and information programming. Everyone was quickly cut off from the email server and all other internal communications. At that hour, the Voice of America began its death spiral and 550 contractors (reporters, editors, newscasters, videographers, engineers and technicians) were subsequently informed they were being terminated at the end of this month.
Automation allowed old newscasts to continue to repeat and a video loop promoting VOA’s mission replaced TV programming on most of our nearly 50 language services. For those systems with no dead man switch, there has been silence and stale web pages. Audiences have received no explanation. Program presenters, who are household names in many of their home countries, had no opportunity to say goodbye.
You might already be aware that I was suspended ahead of my other colleagues. Back on Feb. 28, I received an email from the human resources department of our parent entity, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, and signed by the second in command of Voice of America’s programming directorate informing me to stop work immediately indefinitely as I was under internal investigation for my social media activity. The notice cited President Donald Trump’s Feb. 12 executive order that, according to the White House, is intended to establish “one clear, unified voice for America’s foreign relations.” The text of the order states: “Failure to faithfully implement the President’s policy is grounds for professional discipline, including separation.” Even before this I had been subject to a separate USAGM investigation for alleged “speculation and analysis” for responses to questions I had made on a VOA radio news program and TV show during the transition period when Joe Biden was still president.
After my colleagues and all of our broadcasts were silenced I went public on Substack with a requiem for our network.
After Bloody Saturday, I consented to do on-the-record interviews conditionally: I would not criticize any government officials, rather focus on the actions; I would not engage in wider discussions about the state of the free press in my country and the political atmosphere. I did feel compelled to explain why the narrative, from the White House and others, that VOA disseminated “radical propaganda” is false.
After discussions with two expert attorneys and re-reading Judge Beryl Howard’s opinion in Turner v. USAGM (2020) regarding “unconstitutional prior restraint” by our parent agency on the free speech rights of me and my colleagues, I concluded consenting to interview requests on the record was the proper approach.
Some eagle-eyed readers of the new lawsuit might notice I’m not a named plaintiff and certainly not among the John Doe plaintiffs. However, I am a party to the case through my labor union, the American Foreign Service Association, and plan to speak about this case on AFSA’s behalf. (Full disclosure: I served on AFSA’s board of governors for eight years until a few months ago.)
I am active in the lawsuit and plan to file supporting documentation with the court. But since I had been singled out by USAGM earlier, my claims and this case do not entirely map to those of the other plaintiffs. Make no mistake, this legal action represents all of those at the Voice of America.
VOA, since its inception in 1942, has brought news to audiences around the world, including in countries where free speech is restricted or civil society is under threat.
The Voice of America is funded by American taxpayers, but our editorial independence is mandated by law – the 1976 VOA Charter. In many markets VOA operates in (sorry, it pains me to use past tense although that may be more accurate), Chinese and Russian state-backed media are producing misleading content that undermines the United States. VOA, until last week, was there to counter those false narratives.
For decades, radio listeners hung on to our programming’s every words until they would hear the Yankee Doodle tune and an announcer declaring, “This is the Voice of America signing off.”
But the audiences knew we would return the next day. Master control has now switched our fate to the courtroom where it will be determined if VOA has made its final sign-off.