President-elect Donald Trump says he plans to appoint a firebrand supporter, Kari Lake, to be the next head of the Voice of America.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
President-elect Donald Trump says he plans to appoint a firebrand supporter, Kari Lake, to be the next head of the Voice of America. First, there’s a question whether he can even do that. And second, it’s a pointed choice for the federally owned news outlet, which broadcasts internationally and prizes its independent journalism. NPR’s David Folkenflik covered the Voice of America during the first Trump administration. Hi, David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Hey, Ari.
SHAPIRO: Kari Lake’s been in the news for several years now. Remind listeners who she is.
FOLKENFLIK: Sure. She’s a two-time Republican candidate for major office back in her home state of Arizona. She lost both times. She ran for governor. She ran this year for senator – wrapped herself in the MAGA mantle, embraced the lies that there had somehow been election frauds in her race, in the race for – that President-elect Trump lost to President Biden back in 2020.
She’s a former local TV anchor. Interestingly, she embraced Obama publicly before she made this hard swing to Trump. But I think a key element is that she has rhetorically been, despite her professional background, on the attack against the press and condemned it as offering – much like President-elect Trump himself – fake news.
SHAPIRO: So tell us more about Voice of America and why Trump might want Lake to lead it.
FOLKENFLIK: Sure. So the Voice of America is not well-known in this country, but it’s really well-known abroad. It broadcasts in nearly 50 languages across the globe. It reaches its – an estimated 345-350 million people each week. It provides real news, and it’s providing it often to places that don’t have a robust and free press operating itself. So it’s modeling democratic – small D – democratic pluralistic values by providing real news and showing what a free press does, which is it includes dissent and domestic debate even when it doesn’t reflect great on whoever’s in government at that moment. Why Trump wants Lake to lead the Voice of America is to bring it to heel.
SHAPIRO: And you covered what happened to Voice of America during Trump’s first term. How did it change during that administration?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, the amazing thing is, although it’s, you know, an asset of the American government’s sort of soft diplomacy, Trump viewed it as part of the press and attacked it as doing fake news, particularly in his last year during – in the first months of the pandemic – attacking it as somehow doing propaganda on behalf of the Chinese Communist government, for not, in those early months, more directly blaming the Chinese government for the outbreak of COVID-19.
What you then saw later that spring, after a guy named Michael Pack was confirmed to lead Voice of America’s parent agency – it’s called the U.S. Agency for Global Media – was a series of acts that were later found to be illegal and even, in one case, found to be unconstitutional. They tried to dismiss a bunch of executives. They instituted loyalty tests for journalists way down in the – you know, in the weeds, going through their social media accounts to see if they had even just linked to stories that were negative about the Trump administration and in another case, assigning a White House reporter who had the temerity to ask then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the January 6, 2021 assault on Congress. So it was a – both an attack rhetorically on the independence of it as a news outlet and on the professionalism of the civil service of people who aren’t political appointees.
SHAPIRO: Does the president actually have the power to name VOA’s director? It’s part of a larger agency.
FOLKENFLIK: Right. So actually, under reforms passed in 2020, it appears not. It’s got to be done with the, you know, assent and affirmation of the head of that U.S. Agency for Global Media and a bipartisan board. But two things to point out. One is we don’t know what Trump’s going to try to do to that board or what laws he’s going to try to ignore, as he did at the end of his first term when it came to the Voice of America. And secondly, he’s offering a clear broadside against the idea of the independence of Voice of America and, by extension, its sister networks operating internationally.
SHAPIRO: That’s NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. Thank you.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
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