From the Washington Post, March 18, 2025
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From Dana Milbank’s column on Trump’s silencing of the government-funded broadcaster, which had been a continuous “voice of freedom” since it first went on the air eight weeks after Pearl Harbor. The president this week put virtually all VOA staff on administrative leave. As Dana points out, Hitler never managed to silence VOA. Neither did Stalin, Putin or anyone in between. Mao or the ayatollahs, neither. And they all certainly tried. It is unconscionable that America’s own leader is the one to silence the country’s message abroad. Of course, Dana writes, “the world’s autocrats are doing somersaults.”
That’s because, as the Editorial Board points out, no one is going to suffer more than those autocrats’ subjects. So much of VOA’s audience came from within closed societies, and for many of those people, VOA was the only source of non-propagandized truth that could reach them. | ||||||
