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The mission of Voice of America, to “tell America’s story to the world,” is hard to fulfill when you’re broadcasting into the void of North Korea. For decades, VOA’s Korean service struggled to meet its mandate, relying on shortwave radio beamed from towers throughout Asia, medium-wave signals broadcast from South Korean towers operated by a Christian religious organization in Texas, and videos circulated on social media accessed by North Koreans outside the country or along the border and able to connect to a Chinese cell network.
Then, in January of 2023, after a decade of difficult negotiations, VOA reached an agreement with the South Korean government to use state-controlled broadcast towers along the border to send a TV signal deep into the North. Suddenly, households in Pyongyang and throughout the country could watch Washington Talk, a twenty-five-minute panel show featuring US foreign policy experts, including former political officials. It aired four times a week.
This effort to bring television from the United States into North Korea was a breakthrough—and, until now, had not been made public. It’s not clear whether those responsible for the decision to defund VOA—Kari Lake, who as Donald Trump’s senior adviser to the US Agency for Global Media has overseen VOA, and Elon Musk, in his DOGE role—were even aware of the program’s existence. (My messages to Lake, USAGM, Musk, and DOGE’s spokesperson went unanswered. In congressional testimony yesterday, Lake described VOA as a veritable den of spies and a “threat to national security.”)
But the demise of VOA’s Korean service—along with the USAGM-funded Radio Free Asia, whose programming also targeted North Koreans—means that information-starved North Koreans now have less access to independent news about what is happening in their country and around the world. (I have also been told that, in April of 2024, RFA began broadcasting into North Korea via the television transmission program, airing a twenty-minute documentary four times a week. While VOA’s Korean service focused on US policy toward North Korea, RFA acted as “surrogate” media, relying on a network of journalists based mostly in Seoul to provide domestic coverage.)
In North Korea, television is far and away the most popular medium, though measuring the reach of news services can be difficult. Recent surveys backed by USAGM found that, among defectors and “travelers” outside North Korea, about 5 percent listened regularly to VOA, and 7.5 percent listened to RFA. “The audience was not very large, but it was important for the role it played and because a lot of information in North Korea travels by word of mouth, so you don’t necessarily need a large audience to spread what’s happening in the world,” Martyn Williams—a senior fellow at the Stimson Center’s 38 North program, which focuses on analysis of the country—told me.
Inside South Korea, the role of VOA and RFA is a topic of significant public debate, as I discovered during a visit in late May. The country was then preparing for an election to replace Yoon Suk Yeol, the former president, who, in December of 2024, had tried to impose martial law, sparking protests that led to his impeachment and removal from office.
Kim Hyun-kyung, a professor at Sogang University and a leading expert on North Korea, told me there is a range of news and cultural programming produced by South Korean media and broadcast into North Korea. Popular cultural fare—including K-dramas and K-pop—is circulated clandestinely via USB drives and microchips, though a severe crackdown by the Kim Jung Un regime has increased the risk of accessing it. According to a 2024 report from South Korea’s Ministry of Reunification, the North Korean government has banned the use of South Korean slang and, in some cases, made watching or distributing media from South Korea punishable by death.
Professor Kim recalled listening to VOA in the eighties, when South Korea was under military rule. (Between the Korean War and democracy, there was a long stretch of dictatorships and coups.) She trusted the coverage, feeling that it reflected an American ideal of freedom. But she believes VOA’s influence, reach, and credibility have faded of late. Consistent emphasis on the human rights situation in North Korea, she told me, emboldens conservatives who favor confrontation with Pyongyang.
Several academics and journalists with whom I spoke in Seoul were critical of what they view as a “crazy North Korea” bias in international media, including at VOA and RFA, that permits a relaxed reportorial skepticism and an overreliance on low-level North Korean defectors, who are incentivized to exaggerate in order to undermine the regime. A 2022 research paper from Soomin Seo, an associate professor of journalism at Sogang University, argued that such coverage is rationalized by a belief that “since North Korea is a despotic regime that defies most international politics and democracy, it is permissible for journalists to forgo usual journalistic standards as the benefits (alerting the world about the problems of the regime) outweigh the cost (false stories and loss of public trust).”
Journalists at both VOA and RFA rejected that criticism in conversations with me, defending their reporting in an exceedingly difficult environment. By charter, VOA is required to be “accurate, objective, and comprehensive,” and its reporters typically maintain that they hold no political agenda. Nadia Madjid, who directs VOA’s East Asian division, pointed to the Korean service’s groundbreaking stories on everything from the use of North Korean weapons in the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel to the mistreatment of Otto Warmbier, an American college student who was arrested in North Korea in 2016 on subversion charges and released a year later in a vegetative state. He died soon after.
South Korea’s new president, Lee Jae-myung, has promised more engagement with North Korea, in alignment with his Democratic Party platform. The Lee government has already shut down a loudspeaker program that blasted propaganda into North Korea. (The loudspeakers were introduced under Yoon, who also allowed South Koreans to launch balloons carrying anti-regime messages into North Korea. The North Koreans responded by sending balloons laden with bags of trash into South Korea.) It’s unclear whether South Korea’s efforts to broadcast television into North Korea will continue under Lee. Choi Soung-ah, a spokesperson for the presidency, told me that the administration is reviewing its policies. “At present, no additional measures have been implemented,” Choi said.
But one thing is certain: VOA and RFA are off the air. Following the latest round of cuts, all forty people on VOA’s Korean-language team are out of work. RFA has been pared back to the nub, left to produce only online coverage.
I asked Roberta Cohen, a former US human rights official and expert on North Korea, how the loss of VOA and RFA might be perceived by North Korean listeners. One of the most important functions of America’s broadcasting, Cohen told me, was to send a message to North Koreans that “you’re not alone in the world. We see you and know that you suffer a lot, and we think you’re worthwhile enough to want to be in connection.” Now, she said, “what we’re saying is we don’t really care about you very much.”
Beyond human connection, there was also the strategic benefit of ensuring that the US perspective was present in a complex information environment. “The US needs this function,” Michael Abramowitz, the director of VOA, told me. “It needs to have an ability to talk directly to people who live in unfree societies, which are growing around the world. And it needs an ability to combat propaganda from national security rivals with truthful information. That urgent need has not gone away.”
The shutdown of VOA and RFA represents unilateral disarmament in the global information war. While legal battles continue—and there was a surge in hope when employees of the Persian service were briefly called back to work to broadcast into Iran—VOA employees at every level acknowledged to me that the network is not coming back, at least in its latest form. That will leave to a future administration with a different view the task of rebuilding it, perhaps from scratch. There is certainly room for improvement, including possible consolidation, more efficient audience research, and a review of editorial standards. In the meantime, a decades-long effort to broadcast television into the homes of North Koreans is just another casualty of an administration that, through short-sighted and impulsive actions, has undermined its own strategic position.
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