President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to tap Kari Lake to lead Voice of America, a federally funded foreign broadcast organization that prides itself on political independence and objectivity, has sparked concern among media watchers about how the organization can adhere to its mission with Lake—a staunch election denier who frequently demonizes the media—at its helm.
Kari Lake speaks with the media outside the Mesa Convention Center polling place on November 05, ... [+]
Trump announced Lake, a former news anchor for Fox 10 in Phoenix who recently lost the Arizona Senate race, for the role Wednesday, writing on Truth Social she will “ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.”
Voice of America is part of the U.S. Agency for Global Media and is designed to maintain objectivity and independence from the U.S. government in its news gathering and reporting activities and aims to safeguard “the ability of our journalists to develop content that reflects the highest professional standards of journalism, free of political interference,” according to its website.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media is led by a CEO who must be confirmed by the Senate, while the VOA director is appointed by a majority vote of a seven-member advisory board consisting of six presidential appointees, who also require Senate confirmation, and the secretary of state.
Lake has often espoused right-wing views of the media that could threaten the VOA’s core mission—she has called journalists “fake news” and “monsters” and accused the media of having “spent the last eight years lying about President Donald Trump,” during a speech at the Republican National Convention.
Lake is also a chief promoter of Trump’s false claims that he was the true winner of the 2020 election and she refused to concede her own election loss in the 2022 gubernatorial race, losing a string of court battles to contest the results.
Trump’s selection of Lake “is a nakedly partisan attack on journalistic values that demonstrates the level of fealty he expects from the press,” Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the left-leaning media watchdog nonprofit Media Matters for America, wrote in a column.
354 million. That’s the number of weekly global VOA viewers.
VOA was founded in 1942, less than two months after the U.S. entered World War II, to combat Nazi propaganda.
Trump said in his Truth Social post Wednesday he would nominate the next head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media “soon.”
How long it will take for Lake to be confirmed. The terms of the six of the International Broadcasting Advisory Board members, aside from the secretary of state, do not automatically end once Trump takes office, and the board must be evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. In order for the board to confirm Lake, it must first approve removing its current director, Michael Abramowitz, a former longtime Washington Post editor President Joe Biden appointed in April. The board would then work with the head of the VOA’s parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, to choose a new VOA director.
Trump’s previous pick to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Michael Pack—a documentary filmmaker and Steve Bannon ally—led to chaos, a purging of staff and accusations of financial mismanagement. Pack forced out senior leaders who did not align with Trump politically, some who were later reinstalled by the State Department inspector general’s office following an independent report commissioned by the federal government’s Office of Special Counsel that found Pack compromised the independence of news gathering operations, including by targeting journalists he believed were not politically aligned with Trump. The report also alleges Pack engaged in “gross mismanagement and gross waste” of VOA funds by hiring a politically connected law firm to investigate executives and compile dossiers on them that the OSC determined violated privacy laws, NPR reported. Trump’s White House also repeatedly attacked the VOA, including over its coverage of China and the COVID-19 pandemic.
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