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The veteran journalist Tamara Bralo was at home in the Washington, DC, area when she learned one Saturday morning in March that the Trump administration was trying, via executive order, to terminate funding for Radio Free Asia, an international broadcaster under the US Agency for Global Media—part of a broader attempt to gut USAGM, which also oversees outlets including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “First, I sat for fifteen minutes,” Bralo said. Then came the deep concern for the scores of vulnerable RFA journalists she was charged with defending as part of her job. “After the initial disbelief, I tried figuring out what it meant for the reporters, how much time they had, what their options were, whom to talk to, whom to convince that they needed to be protected,” Bralo said. More than two chaotic months have passed since then, and that concern has become a constant in Bralo’s life.
An alumna of CNN and Al Jazeera, Bralo joined RFA in 2022 as its first-ever head of journalist safety; she was responsible for assessing risk, responding to the digital harassment and other forms of transnational repression that RFA’s reporters have often faced, and advocating for the five RFA contributors currently imprisoned in Vietnam and Myanmar. “Given that I do risk assessment for a living, this was not entirely surprising,” Bralo said, of Trump’s move. “I hoped it wouldn’t happen, and I definitely didn’t think that it would happen that quickly.” Her immediate concern was for visa holders in DC. If they lost their jobs, some of them were at risk of being forced to return to countries, including Vietnam, whose governments have records of imprisoning journalists.
RFA was founded in 1996 and broadcast to a weekly audience of more than fifty-eight million people, according to a January estimate; the withholding of funding means that it has been forced to ax its services in the Burmese, Laotian, Tibetan, and Uighur languages and to place about 90 percent of its US-based staff on unpaid administrative leave. At-risk visa holders are being kept on for as long as possible for safety reasons, but all contractors abroad have been terminated, increasing their risk of detention. RFA is still fighting in court to secure its congressionally appropriated funding. On May 28, judges in Washington said that USAGM must continue disbursing funds to RFA while the lawsuit proceeds; the broadcaster has received its funding for May, but not for June, which, according to a spokesperson, would have been sent by now under normal circumstances. The outlet’s future remains uncertain, and if it ceases to operate, it’s unclear who will advocate for the contributors imprisoned in Vietnam and Myanmar.
After the cuts were announced, Bralo worked nonstop to do what she could to help her colleagues, including by lobbying the State Department, engaging with press freedom groups, and finding universities that could take on at-risk reporters as fellows. I caught up with her over the phone in late May; a few days after we spoke, she herself was placed on unpaid administrative leave. She told me that she hasn’t had much time to think about what’s next for her, but that she hopes to continue working on delivering news to countries where free speech is restricted—and to catch up on sleep. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
LS: I try not to ask this question anymore. But how have the past few months been for you?
TB: It’s been incredibly long hours. It’s been incredibly draining. It’s not just empathy. It’s dealing with deeply traumatized people; it’s difficult to remain calm when you’re dealing with this much trauma from every possible angle. You have to be creative on two hours of sleep and figure out who might be able to help and who might be able to assist, reaching out to different universities and asking for their help. The University of Missouri and the University of Michigan were absolutely stellar, helping out to take on some of the most vulnerable people that we have for fellowships. There was a lot of pressure. We would go in and ask the State Department every day what they suggest people do now that they’re at risk. The response was that they should apply for political asylum. Immigration lawyers don’t come cheap, so we were trying to find people willing to represent them, trying to find money to pay for that representation. A lot of it was juggling. But the journalism community responded remarkably well. We got quite organized quite quickly. There was a lot of goodwill and a lot of willingness to see what can be done.
You work for eighteen hours and then you get off the phone, and there’s no way you can quiet your thoughts sufficiently to go to sleep. I had one day off that I didn’t spend on the phone the entire time since the executive order. I have been a journalist for a very long time. You learn to postpone your reactions until the story is over. And that’s how I always dealt with crises, no matter what they were. You have to put thinking about it on hold and do what you can, and then think about it afterwards. I am going to be placed on leave on May 30, so I suppose there’s a lot of thinking to be done.
At-risk visa holders in Washington haven’t been furloughed yet. But the longer-term issue is what will happen if RFA no longer has funding and everyone loses their jobs. What would happen to those journalists at that point?
Everybody’s on borrowed time. It differs from one case to another. For a lot of Hong Kongers, for example, the association with RFA is something that could spell trouble down the line for them. With the Vietnamese and Cambodians, they just cannot go back. For any of them, it would be arrest upon arrival. That much is clear. When the news was announced, it was a huge blow to journalism, of course. But from where I sit, it was a huge blow to the journalists that have contributed to this organization. We have a duty to care for those who are willing to stand up to their own governments.
Can you tell me about the RFA journalists who remain imprisoned? Is the concern that if RFA no longer exists, then there won’t be anyone to advocate for them?
That is, for sure, the main concern. But it’s also the message that it sends. If they’re the ones in prison, and their governments end up being seen as [having] lasting power—not the journalists, not freedom of speech—then it convinces everyone that it’s wiser not to speak up.
What can you share about RFA’s engagement with the State Department on those cases?
The State Department is slowly moving away from advocating for human rights anywhere. I don’t think that’s controversial [to say]. I would still like to say that they are helping.
A devastating earthquake hit Myanmar in March, shortly after RFA was forced to cut its Burmese service. What did that crisis mean at RFA?
That’s when it hit us—what it means from the editorial point of view to have this big story and not be able to cover it. So in the end, we rehired people because they said they would go regardless, whether or not they were paid. They just said they would go and try to get to the hardest-hit areas. And so we rehired some of them for three days. And the Burmese service’s last big story was actually that tragedy.
In early May, a Voice of America contributor named Ulviyya Guliyeva was detained in Azerbaijan. Press freedom experts and some of her colleagues told me they believed that Trump’s war on VOA likely emboldened Azerbaijani authorities to target Guliyeva. Are you concerned that RFA’s current status could embolden other governments to target and imprison RFA reporters?
Of course. The hatred is so deep, and there’s a huge risk. I am worried that we’ll see more of that. There are some countries, like Cambodia, whose governments blame RFA for anyone who disagrees with anything the government says. They just label them “RFA.” One of the first themes that emerged on Chinese social media [after Trump’s order] was, Who’s going to protect you now? It was incredibly difficult to read those comments, mainly because they were true. People were left on their own. In most of these countries, we use pseudonyms out of necessity to protect our people. But ironically, that actually puts more people at risk, because the governments don’t necessarily need to prove anything in court. They just need to accuse you. In most of these countries, we were the last outlet that was still doing controversial news, that was still doing coverage that ran contrary to what the government was saying, that was covering corruption in the language that the entire country speaks. So the thing is, they won’t have anyone to work for anymore. That’s the saddest part.
Other notable stories:
- As was expected to happen sometime this week, the Trump administration yesterday sent Congress a so-called “rescissions package” asking lawmakers to claw back around nine billion dollars in funding that they already approved; most of that figure is concentrated in foreign aid spending, but the administration is also trying to scrap more than a billion dollars for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which passes through money to NPR, PBS, and local stations around the country. (The rescissions move is separate from Trump’s executive order aiming to defund NPR and PBS.) Public media executives warned that the effect of the package would be “immediate,” and would devastate stations in rural areas in particular. But it’s not clear that it will pass, with some Republican lawmakers already having expressed skepticism.
- According to Benjamin Mullin, of the New York Times, the Washington Post is working on a new program, known internally as “Ripple,” that would see the paper publish opinion articles from “other newspapers across America, writers on Substack and eventually nonprofessional writers,” the latter with help from an AI writing coach that will advise on “story strength”; the initiative is part of a plan to expand the Post’s audience beyond coastal elites, though two local papers that were reportedly being considered as partners told Mullin they aren’t interested. Meanwhile, Sara Fischer, of Axios, reports that a redecoration of the Post’s newsroom—out: historic headlines; in: the paper’s new mission statement—has “rattled” staffers.
- For CJR, Will Bunch profiled Journalism for All, a new initiative in New York that “has raised $3 million to train teachers in thirty high schools around the city to lead journalism classes and start student newspapers this fall.” The founders are “hoping the program will help jump-start the moribund state of high school journalism,” Bunch writes. “Student papers are declining for the same reasons that professional journalism is shrinking: smaller budgets, and audiences more interested in TikTok content than traditional journalism.” The new initiative is “making a case that the fact-finding and teamwork of a teenage newsroom might be a solution.”
- Over the weekend, a man in the South of France killed a neighbor from Tunisia, in what French authorities have described as a racist attack. Afterward, an anti-hate group decried the “poisonous climate” in which the killing took place, in part blaming the media for “complacency” toward the far right. Meanwhile, Le Monde dug into the alleged culprit’s social media history, noting that he appears to have consumed a diet of extreme and conspiratorial websites, from the French online fachosphère and beyond, and that he may have been radicalized by the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack.
- And Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, is on trial for defamation this week, in a case brought by a former staffer at Dominion Voting Systems whom Lindell baselessly accused of rigging the 2020 election. When Dominion sued Fox (in a case that was eventually settled), the network scarcely covered the story, but Lindell’s media company, Lindell TV, has gone “entirely in the other direction,” The Bulwark’s Will Sommer writes, presenting Lindell’s trial “as a sort of boxing match”—with ample reminders that his pillows “are so good, they could prejudice the jury pool.”
Update: This post has been updated to clarify the New York Times‘s reporting on Ripple and the Washington Post opinion section.
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