When President Donald Trump moved this weekend to dismantle Voice of America, the government-run news network long denounced by conservatives for liberal bias, MSNBC wrote that the move brought an end to "pro-democracy media outlets" countering "authoritarian propaganda" abroad. But VOA's liberal staffers have not only faced criticism for running a left-wing broadcaster similar to NPR; they’re also accused of operating with a pro-Iran bent, producing anti-Israel news coverage, and, in at least two cases, publishing Russian propagandists.
"There have been complaints that they've been very pro-Hamas, that they've refused to call a terrorist a terrorist," former Arizona news anchor Kari Lake told the Washington Free Beacon. Lake has been tapped by Trump to run VOA and is now a senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which houses VOA. After this weekend, though, it’s not clear what will be left for Lake to run. For now, she says she's focused on slashing "fraud" and "abuse" at the broader agency.
"I would love to be in that position as director [of VOA], but I'm not. That falls on the current director, who was appointed during the Biden administration," said Lake. "And if I were running VOA, I would do it differently than he's doing it, but it's up to him." That current director, Michael Abramowitz, apparently sees things differently, telling the journalist Mark Halperin that he considers himself "a caretaker" who is "happy to be helpful to [Lake] as she takes on these responsibilities." Abramowitz said roughly 1,300 agency employees are on administrative leave, including himself, and he's unsure if VOA will "survive."
Trump's executive order, unveiled on Friday, orders the agency to cease operations "to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law." The president can't unilaterally eliminate VOA, an 83-year-old organization whose charter was signed into law by former president Gerald Ford in 1976. But the blunt executive order is effectively a death warrant.
A White House fact sheet accompanying the executive order cited an assortment of reports, including those published in the Free Beacon, detailing VOA's left-wing biases and sympathies toward Tehran. It also took aim at past VOA contributors with ties to the Kremlin, including a "Russian anti-U.S. propagandist" who produced "videos with anti-U.S. and anti-Semitic themes."
VOA's liberal leanings—which became particularly pronounced during Trump's first term in office—run counter to the broadcaster's stated mission to "represent America" and "present the policies of the United States clearly and effectively." Instead, in many cases, it has advanced narratives preferred by America's adversaries and aligned itself with the anti-Trump left.
VOA reporters, for example, are instructed to be "fair, impartial and objective in all public spaces." In 2019, a collection of those reporters took to social media to trash the administration they were meant to highlight abroad.
This included Doug Bernard Johnson, a VOA editor, who maintained a Facebook page "littered with anti-Trump posts," according to a Daily Caller report.
Marissa Melton, a 23-year VOA veteran, repeatedly slammed Trump in several social media postings, including one that said, "America [is] screaming ‘GO AWAY.'" Melton still lists herself as an "international broadcaster" for VOA on her LinkedIn page.
A third VOA employee, Mil Arcega, described Trump as "incoherent, unprepared, rude" when he debated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential cycle. In another X posting from that time, Arcega responded to a post by Trump, saying, "Lie much? You really should check your sources."
Under the Biden administration, meanwhile, USAGM in 2023 spent $23,500 in taxpayer funds to teach reporters under its wing how to be "balanced and bias-free." The contract went to the Poynter Institute, a liberal journalism group that in 2019 released a "blacklist" of conservative news outlets, including the Free Beacon, which it deemed "unreliable." Under criticism, Poynter withdrew the list, which was put together with its partners at the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, which is notorious for labeling Christian conservative organizations as "hate groups."
Poynter is largely funded by wealthy Democratic donors, including George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, Bill Gates, and Tim Gill, an activist whose husband served as former president Joe Biden’s ambassador to Switzerland. Its PolitiFact "fact-checking" arm overwhelmingly attacks conservatives, a Free Beacon analysis found, and has also had to make a number of embarrassing retractions, including retracting its outright dismissal of the theory that COVID originated from a Chinese lab leak as "inaccurate and ridiculous."
USAGM also paid Poynter $20,100 in July 2021 to conduct at least four "balanced and bias" training sessions.
VOA shifted further left during the so-called racial reckoning in the spring of 2020. The White House on Friday pointed to one article, published a few weeks after the death of George Floyd, titled "What is White Privilege and Whom Does It Help?"
VOA, which is a tangle of different networks and partnerships around the world, many of which are not in English, has been accused of entrenched biases that extend far beyond U.S. domestic matters. Its Persian-language affiliate, which is supposed to beam unbiased news and American values into Iran, has been the subject of multiple congressional probes into pro-Iran bias and corruption. That affiliate, VOA’s Persian News Network, which broadcasts out of Washington, is known to ban prominent Iranian regime critics and pursue stories that paint the hardline Islamist regime in a favorable light.
In 2022, Rep. Scott Perry (R., Pa.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, ordered the Persian News Network to turn over a litany of internal documents related to its Iran coverage and the rehiring of Setareh Derakhshesh Sieg, who was fired from VOA during Trump’s first term in office over allegations she misappropriated nearly $1 million in funds and turned the outlet into a source of pro-Tehran propaganda. VOA rehired Sieg during the Biden-Harris administration even while she remained under congressional investigation.
"Over the past few decades, a lack of congressional oversight over the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) has allowed for partisan actors to obstruct the integrity and mission of the agency," Perry told the Free Beacon at the time. "There's a lot of corruption that needs to be cleaned out immediately."
Perry subsequently accused VOA of obstructing his probe, saying the outlet would not comply with orders to turn over information related to what he said was its partisan advocacy in favor of Biden and the misuse of a visa program to "onboard foreign nationals."
Several years earlier, a group of nearly 100 Iranian dissidents petitioned Congress to investigate VOA Persia, claiming it was complicit in "clandestine efforts by the Islamic Republic to influence U.S. policy using a network of lobbyists and propaganda pieces placed in" the outlet.
Trump attempted to address the issue during his first term in office, implementing a series of "serious reforms" detailed in a 2020 Free Beacon report. USAGM and VOA largely resisted them until the Biden administration came into power.
In 2024, then-House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul (R., Texas) published a separate investigation into USAGM, VOA’s Persian affiliate, and Sieg. That probe also determined VOA intentionally obstructed Congress and that its advocates even privately pleaded with McCaul to end the probe as his investigators began to uncover what he said was widespread misconduct at the organization's highest levels.
Sieg, McCaul’s report found, was shielded from disciplinary action over allegations she "abused taxpayer dollars for lavish personal trips and contracts for friends" and made "shifting claims" about having a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne. McCaul also alleges that Sieg "cultivated a culture of fear and dysfunction."
When the Free Beacon published McCaul's report, VOA worked to discredit its findings. VOA executives allegedly threatened staffers who cooperated with congressional investigators.
"Unfortunately, when you have voices threatening VOA Persian whistleblowers, it makes talking more difficult," one staffer told the Free Beacon. Another added: "We were all dumbfounded by our leadership's reaction to the report. It takes a lot of chutzpah to dismiss the report out of hand instead of judging it on its merits."
As the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks ignited Israel’s war with Hamas, VOA engaged in similar behavior to that of private, anti-Israel, liberal news organizations such as CBS News. Top VOA editorial officials privately instructed staffers not to call Hamas and its members terrorists "except when quoting statements," according to National Review.
Lake, whom Trump intends to install as VOA director sometime this year after Brent Bozell, the president's nominee to run the USAGM, is confirmed, described the editorial policy as "shocking."
"When they're covering Oct. 7 and calling it, instead of a terrorist attack, an insurgence—they call them, instead of terrorists, insurgents, and insurgency rather than a terrorist attack," she told the Free Beacon. Speaking Monday night on Halperin’s podcast, Abramowitz, the holdover director of VOA, blamed the internal Hamas directive on an editorial standards editor "who’s a very good editor" but "said something in an email to the staff which really didn’t reflect what the official policy was, and that mistake has been killing us since then."
Abramowitz said VOA reporters consistently refer to Hamas as a terrorist group and that "Hamas are terrorists full stop."
VOA also found itself in hot water internationally in 2022 when it published writings from a freelance journalist who was later arrested on suspicion of being a Russian spy. Pablo Gonzalez, a contributor to the outlet, was arrested in Poland on spy charges, prompting VOA to "thoroughly review" his articles.
A second VOA reporter, Ilya Kolosov, was found in 2019 to have produced Russian propaganda videos that included anti-U.S. and anti-Semitic themes, according to the Daily Caller. Kolosov was employed as a "contractor with the VOA Russian language service TV team," the outlet confirmed.
Abramowitz, who has only been in charge of VOA for nine months, said the operation is a large and complex conglomerate of different media properties and affiliations and that a few inappropriate incidents have unfairly tarred the organization. But to Lake, VOA has fundamentally failed in its original mission.
"I know they talk a big game about being fair, but you could make an argument that they have not been living up to their charter," she said. "Their charter means that we should be telling America's story abroad. And you could argue that in many cases, we have been telling the story of our adversaries rather than America."