Washington Silences Its Own Voice
statute prohibits it from creating programming targeting US audiences. This has created an enormous messaging challenge for those hoping to defend the agency. How do you convince Americans of the value of something from which they, by design, do not directly benefit?
This dilemma is not unique to international broadcasting. USAID and other foreign assistance programs also faced existential funding cuts in part because voters do not immediately feel the impact, unlike, say, if Medicaid or social security were slashed. USAGM supporters must recognize this and calibrate a defense of the agency that appeals to Americans’ desire to support global democracy—a position with strong if waning public support—and to their self-interest. To accomplish that, the agency’s backers should make clear its benefits to the US public.
USAGM Is Still Needed
A common refrain from critics of US broadcasting is that its utility has dissipated since the end of the Cold War. While the internet has made it easier for people to access information across borders and harder for authoritarians to restrict it (with China’s great firewall serving as a notable exception), there remains a dearth of information tailored to certain audiences in partly free or unfree media environments and produced in their languages. USAGM has continued to prove its relevancy in those markets, filling a critical void that the private sector is unlikely to occupy since the target audiences cannot be monetized. In a study from the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) at GMF prior to Moldova’s 2024 elections—which were viewed as referendums on the country’s tilt toward the West—RFE/RL’s Moldovan and Romanian services ranked as the top two outlets in Romanian-language search results for research on a range of topics relevant to the votes. In Russian-language searches, multiple USAGM outlets, including its broadcast news outlet, Current Time, were among the top 20, directly competing with Kremlin-funded sources. Without USAGM, there would be limited or no Western media presence, meaning that audiences in contested regions would see geopolitics through a lens that is decidedly less favorable to US interests.
Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Venezuelan state media outlets may have a limited following in the United States, but they have significant audiences elsewhere, especially in the “Global South”. On social media, RT en Espanol, Russia’s primary vehicle for Spanish-language propaganda, consistently outperforms its English-language accounts and, prior to Meta’s decision to ban Russian state media outlets in 2024, it was the most followed Spanish-language media outlet on Facebook. In sub-Saharan Africa, China has established an expansive content-sharing network known as the Africa Link Union, which spreads pro-Beijing, and often pro-Moscow, messaging to at least 35 African news agencies. Regional outlets backed by the Venezuela and Iran, while not as prolific as those funded by Russia and China, reinforce anti-American messaging, often through the dissemination of content produced by Chinese and Russian state-backed outlets.
These media, even prior to the second Trump administration, were outspending US government-funded sources in parts of the world critical to American national security interests. USAGM’s shuttering would, therefore, give greater opportunity for Washington’s adversaries to shape public perceptions worldwide. Further evidence of that comes from RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan, who called the move to shutdown USAGM “awesome”.
Impossible to Replicate, Improbable to Rebuild
USAGM outlets have fought hard to gain the credibility that they deserve and earn the confidence of their audiences. Internal research suggests that “well over 80% of each network’s audience [finds] their content trustworthy”, one reason to explain why their radio and television broadcasts make up a core component of the information diet of many populations. No single or even group of international outlets could replicate this footprint, especially when broadcasting into many countries with severely restricted information spaces requires proxy tools and other workarounds.
The loss of USAGM outlets leaves Washington without a way to offer objective information, a particularly important goal in a crisis scenario, as Chernobyl demonstrated. And rebuilding them in the longer term would prove costly, a waste of decades of work and millions of dollars of investment.
Nana Gongadze is GMF Digital Communications Specialist at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Bret Schafer is Senior Fellow and Head, Information Manipulation Team, at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The article, originally postedto the website of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, is published here courtesy of the GMFUS.The views expressed in GMF publications and commentary are the views of the author alone.
