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In March, after the Trump administration outlined plans to gut the US Agency for Global Media, the entity that oversees state-funded international broadcasters, Jan Lipavský, the foreign minister of the Czech Republic, publicly called on the European Union to help save one of them: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which is based in Prague, the Czech capital, and aims to provide independent journalism to and about societies, in Eastern Europe and beyond, where it is restricted, in a range of languages. “We will try to do everything to keep this organization with seventy-five years of legacy afloat,” he said. Behind closed doors, Lipavský spurred a discussion about RFE/RL’s future with other EU foreign ministers, and reportedly found support for his stance from countries including Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; afterward, Kaja Kallas, a former Estonian prime minister who is now the EU’s top diplomat, said that the bloc would see what it could do, but warned that help for RFE/RL would not come “automatically.” A few weeks later, lawmakers in the European Parliament debated the matter; voices from across the traditional political spectrum called for the EU to give money, but right-wing populists dissented, suggesting that RFE/RL is “the absolute opposite of independent media” and that funding it would be tantamount to meddling in US affairs; there was no immediate resolution. At the beginning of this month, RFE/RL did land an outside funding pledge—from the American band REM, which said that it would reissue its 1981 debut single, “Radio Free Europe,” as a gesture of support, with proceeds going to the broadcaster. (“Decide yourself if radio’s gonna stay / Reason, it could polish up the gray.”)
Since then, European money has started to flow. On May 8, the government of Sweden said that it would send RFE/RL around two million US dollars. (As of last week, the funds had yet to reach RFE/RL.) Then, last week, the EU as a whole pledged just over six million. Kallas described the commitment as “short-term emergency funding designed as a safety net” for independent journalism, which, she said, is “more important than ever” at a time of “growing, unfiltered content.” Richard Stengel, a former US diplomat (and editor of Time magazine), told NPR’s David Folkenflik that the funding shows “how much the Europeans value the work that RFE does,” and suggested that it hinted at a sustainable long-term option for the broadcaster: “In so many ways, it was a post–World War II and Cold War initiative, which sought to help the European countries which came under the shadow of Soviet domination,” he said. “Now that they’re out from under that, why wouldn’t you even have a consortium of funding for RFE that is a combination of European and American funding?” Another former US diplomat, Mark Gitenstein, who served as ambassador to the EU under President Biden, situated the news more in the context of US disengagement, telling Jenny Gross, of the New York Times, that the commitment showed Europe beginning to “step up.” “The fact that they’re committing not only to security guarantees and additional weapons means they’re doing it on the hard side, but they also need to do it on the soft side,” he said.
European nations have recently filled other gaps left by the US retreat. In a press release announcing its investment in RFE/RL, Sweden noted that it recently decided to give seven million more dollars to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a prominent Europe-based investigative journalism organization that was heavily (and in some quarters controversially) backed by the US Agency for International Development, which has also been gutted by the Trump administration. Just last week, the BBC’s World Service, which performs a similar function to the broadcasters overseen by USAGM, but from the UK, said that it will soon debut a pilot offering in Polish—the first time it has launched a product in a new language in eight years, and its first ever to draw on AI translation tools—aimed, in part, at helping to “counter a wave of disinformation in the region,” and pitched as part of bigger plans “to pilot more non-English-language content where there is a demand for independent, impartial news as press freedom reduces globally.” Before that, the BBC’s existing Burmese service launched a direct-to-home satellite offering in Myanmar, in a bid to reach people affected by the devastating recent earthquake there—on a channel formerly used by Voice of America, RFE/RL’s sister broadcaster. Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, said recently that the World Service is hoping to eventually double its global reach, to one billion people.
And yet there are reasons to doubt the sustainability of relying on other countries to plug the holes left behind by Trump’s various cuts. Indeed, Myanmar is a good example of this dynamic: as I wrote in my recent book, What Is Journalism For?, the country’s independent media ecosystem became increasingly reliant on international aid following a brutal military coup in 2021, but over time, that funding stream began to falter; as I reported for CJR last month, the USAID cuts then hit that ecosystem particularly hard. At least for some outlets, European money served as a backstop—Aye Chan Naing, the chief editor of Democratic Voice of Burma, a major broadcaster that formally launched from exile in Norway in the nineties, during a prior period of military dictatorship, told me at the time that while US funding made up 15 to 20 percent of DVB’s budget, European funds meant that “we won’t fall apart.” And yet journalists from the country told me that they didn’t expect other donors to surge vastly more resources to fill the gap in the long term. Thin Lei Win, a cofounder of the respected news site Myanmar Now, told me that the country’s media was at risk from a “vicious cycle”: “no funding, no news, and therefore no interest.”
While the BBC World Service is talking in terms of expansion, it, too, has been under financial pressure for a long time; the British government previously funded its work directly, but in the 2010s, a coalition led by the right-wing Conservative Party shifted much of the burden onto payers of the license fee, the levy by which TV viewers have traditionally funded the BBC as a whole, amid a broader program of austerity; this led, inevitably, to cuts. In March, around the time that Trump was taking a hatchet to USAGM, The Guardian’s Michael Savage reported that BBC officials were preparing to make the case to the UK’s new center-left Labour government—which, since taking power last summer, had already increased the amount that it sends directly to the World Service by around a third—that it should resume shouldering the entire funding burden; recently, Davie made such a pitch publicly. And yet, despite the funding increase, the World Service said earlier this year that it would have to cut a hundred and thirty jobs, citing recent freezes to the license fee as well as increased operating costs—and The Guardian reported this month that the government is now asking the service to prepare for, at best, budgetary stagnation going forward, which would amount to a real-terms cut post-inflation. When the World Service announced its plans for a Polish-language service last week, it stressed that the money would come from existing budgets and that, in the future, such projects would be dependent “on the need for a long-term sustainable funding model.”
The reported government requests for belt-tightening at the World Service come after Keir Starmer, the prime minister, moved in February to slash Britain’s overseas aid budget in order to increase defense spending, itself a clear consequence of the return of Trump, the specter of US disengagement, and concerns about European security in the face of Russian aggression—and proof that plugging US-left gaps in international media provision isn’t as straightforward a task as just writing a check, given all the other gaps the US is leaving as well. This isn’t to say that it shouldn’t be a priority, however—as Gitenstein suggested, in the modern age of information warfare, soft power is of huge importance. Russia and China certainly seem to think so: Savage noted in March that their state media apparatuses spend billions of dollars a year, dwarfing the World Service’s annual budget of around five hundred million dollars—and that, when the latter made cuts to its Arabic radio service in Lebanon a few years ago, the Russian state outlet Sputnik took over the frequency. Davie said recently that the UK has “got to make a decision as a country: Are we in this game or not?”
It’s not just the UK that’s faced with this decision, of course: its neighbors in the EU are, too, especially those uncomfortably close to Russia and its war in Ukraine, for whom the threat of state-sponsored propaganda feels immediate, and countering it with factual journalism seems a clear matter of national interest. The EU’s recent commitment to RFE/RL served as recognition of this. And yet the amount in question was relatively small, amounting to only around half of the broadcaster’s congressionally approved funding for the month of April, which it recently, finally received amid a protracted and complicated court fight; per the Times, Kallas acknowledged that the EU could not make up RFE/RL’s entire shortfall, while Stephen Capus, the broadcaster’s president, expressed gratitude but also noted the short-term nature of the fix, stressing that RFE/RL’s future remains at risk as long as its US funds are withheld. Any help is valuable, of course—but EU processes are cumbersome, and the bloc is itself grappling with surging right-wing populism and budgetary pressures. And at least for now, the idea of even a shared funding model for RFE/RL seems like a pipe dream: Kari Lake, the hard-right former news anchor Trump has tapped to execute his plans for USAGM, recently said that “if Radio Free Europe is important for Europe, they can pay for it.” Someone, at some point, might have to do much more if radio’s gonna stay.
Other notable stories:
- Last week, the Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into Media Matters for America, the liberal watchdog group, focusing on supposed unlawful collusion with advertisers, according to the New York Times; X, the platform owned by the billionaire turned Trump adviser Elon Musk, was already suing the group on the grounds that it coordinated an advertiser boycott, linked to a 2023 report investigating anti-Semitic content on the platform. (Andrew Ferguson, Trump’s head of the FTC, has spoken out against advertiser boycotts generally.) “Right-wing media figures holding key posts and abusing government power to target critics are two hallmarks of the Trump administration,” Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, said in a statement. “Threats won’t work, our mission continues.”
- Shortly after Trump took office, the Pentagon, now under the leadership of the former Fox host Pete Hegseth, caused consternation among the press corps that covers it by rotating major mainstream news organizations out of their dedicated workspaces in the building, in favor of mostly right-wing outlets. (The former CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr wrote about the move for CJR at the time.) Late last week, Hegseth announced further restrictions on the media, including a ban on entering previously accessible parts of the building without an official escort, and a requirement for reporters to sign a form committing to protect sensitive information. Hegseth cited national security, but Pentagon reporters accused him of an attack on press freedom.
- In media-business and -jobs news, Steve Herman, a high-profile journalist at Voice of America, announced that he is leaving the broadcaster, from which he had already been on leave due to Trump’s attempted gutting, to become the inaugural executive director of a center for journalism advocacy and innovation at Ole Miss. Elsewhere, Kimi Yoshino, the editor in chief of the nonprofit Baltimore Banner, is joining the Washington Post as a managing editor. And, after Britain’s government indicated that it would soften laws against foreign state ownership of newspapers, RedBird, a US investment firm, finally acquired the Telegraph, with some support from the UAE.
- Derek Guy, best known as the “menswear guy” on X, dug into the past writings on that topic of Michael Anton, a conservative intellectual turned Trump national security official. Anton’s work is “instructive if you share his aesthetic preferences,” per Guy. “He possesses a meticulous eye and an encyclopedic command of long-forgotten texts, such as Apparel Arts, a 1930s trade publication that functioned as an illustrated style manual for the American upper class. But his aesthetics tend toward binary judgments: firm distinctions between what is correct and what is corrupt.”
- And Emma Goldberg, of the Times, profiled Sam Freedman, who taught a famous seminar on book-writing at Columbia Journalism School, and has just retired. The class began, in 1991, “as something of an experiment, testing whether students could, in the course of a semester, produce a book proposal to sell and hopefully publish,” Goldberg writes. “The results have proved his hunch: The class has led to 113 book contracts and 95 published books, out of some 675 people who have taken it.”
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