President-elect Donald Trump says he plans to nominate Firebrand supporter Kari Lake as the next director of the Voice of America.
Ari Shapiro, host:
President-elect Donald Trump says he plans to nominate Firebrand supporter Kari Lake as the next director of the Voice of America. First, there is the question of whether he is capable of doing such a thing. And second, it’s a smart choice for a federally owned news organization that broadcasts internationally and values independent journalism. NPR’s David Folkenflik covered Voice of America during the first Trump administration. Hi David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, SIGNED: Hi, Ari.
SHAPIRO: Lake Kali has been in the news for several years. Remind listeners of who she is.
Folkenflik: Of course. She has twice run for major Republican office in her home state of Arizona. She lost both times. She ran for governor. She ran for Senate this year, but donned a MAGA cloak and accepted lies that there was some kind of election fraud in her own campaign, which led to President-elect Trump losing to President Biden in 2020.
She is a former local television anchor. Interestingly, she publicly hugged Obama before getting tough on Trump. But the key element is that despite her professional background, she rhetorically advocated attacks on news organizations and, like President-elect Trump himself, accused them of providing fake news. I think that’s the case.
SHAPIRO: So tell us more about Voice of America and why Trump wants Lake to lead Voice of America.
Folkenflik: Of course. That is, the Voice of America is not very well known in this country, but it is very well known abroad. It is broadcast in approximately 50 languages around the world. An estimated 345-350 million people use it every week. It provides real news and frequently delivers news to places that don’t have a robust free press of their own. In other words, we model democracy, the small D, and the pluralistic values of democracy by providing real news and showing what a free press does. This means that it includes dissent and domestic debate, even if it does not reflect who is in charge of government at the time. The reason Mr. Trump wants Mr. Lake to take control of the Voice of America is to bring it to its knees.
SHAPIRO: So you reported on what happened with the Voice of America during President Trump’s first term. How did it change during that administration?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, what’s surprising is that even though this is a kind of soft diplomacy asset of the American government, President Trump has treated it as part of his reporting, especially in the last year of his presidency. They attacked him for reporting news. During the first few months of the pandemic, they attacked the Chinese Communist Party government as if it were some kind of propaganda on behalf of the government; Because I didn’t blame him.
Later that spring, after it was confirmed that a man named Michael Pack would be heading up the Voice of America’s parent company (called the U.S. Agency for Global Media), what you saw was later illegal. This is a series of acts that were found to be unconstitutional. They tried to fire a lot of executives. They introduced loyalty tests very low down for journalists. You know, in the weeds, we looked at their social media accounts to see if they were linking to negative articles about the Trump administration, and in another case the White House assigned a reporter, 2021 He had the courage to question then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the January 6, 2011 attack on the Capitol. So this was both a rhetorical attack on the independence of the press and an attack on the professionalism of civil servants who are not politically appointed.
SHAPIRO: Does the president actually have the authority to appoint the directors of VOA, which is part of a larger agency?
Folkenflik: Yes. So, in reality, that doesn’t seem to be the case under the reforms passed in 2020. It has to be done, as you know, with the consent and affirmation of the Director of the U.S. Agency for Global Media and a bipartisan board of directors. However, there are two things to keep in mind. One is that we don’t know what President Trump is going to do with the commission or what laws he’s going to ignore, as he did with the Voice of America at the end of his first term. That means no. And second, he explicitly opposes the idea of independence for the Voice of America and, by extension, for its sister networks operating internationally.
SHAPIRO: NPR Media correspondent David Folkenflik. thank you.
Folkenflik: That’s right.
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