The Trump administration has accomplished something that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and other dictators desired. It destroyed the Voice of America.
Until mid-March, VOA had been on the air continuously for 83 years. Starting in 1942 with shortwave broadcasts in German to counter Nazi propaganda, America’s external voice had expanded to nearly 50 languages, with a weekly combined audience of more than 350 million people worldwide, watching on TV, listening on radio, with a weekly combined audience of more than 350 million people around the world watching on TV, listening on radio or viewing its content online or through social media apps.
VOA was unique from the beginning. It vowed not to be a propaganda service. It would deliver news and information, whether it was good or bad. Over the decades, Congress passed and presidents signed legislation ensuring that VOA would not be the voice of the party, and presidents signed, legislation ensuring VOA would not be the voice of which political party was in power, nor would the White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department be able to censor its content. VOA had a mandate to be fair and balanced.
In my 20+ years reporting for the Voice of America, mainly from Asia, we always stressed accuracy over speed. As many as three editors would pour over our scripts and texts to ensure they were free from bias. No one ever asked me to spin a story a certain way.
Near the end of the first Trump administration, as one of VOA’s high-profile correspondents (I was White House bureau chief), political appointees targeted me for retaliation when I led colleagues in fighting attempts to breach our sacrosanct journalism firewall. Subsequent court rulings and investigations by the Office of Special Counsel and the State Department’s inspector general backed us up and concluded that the political appointees at our parent agency, U.S. Agency for Global Media, conducted an illegal witch hunt. (This is detailed in my book: Behind the White House Curtain: A Senior Journalists Story of Covering the President – and Why It Matters.).
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, written during the interregnum between the two Trump presidencies, unveiled a blueprint to bring VOA’s perceived liberals to heel. It suggested an end to VOA’s autonomy and having it placed under the State Department or the National Security Council.
Even before any of the Trump appointees returned to USAGM, incumbent management at VOA sought to appease the White House. Stories were spiked and headlines massaged. Those were subtle changes unnoticed externally. More overt pre-emptive obedience: suspending me from reporting as VOA’s chief national correspondent and removing Patsy Widakuswara from her position (she was my successor as White House bureau chief). Media critics noted that Patsy and I had been vociferous in opposing attempted partisan interference in VOA’s reporting in 2020 when the Trump appointees belatedly sought to tear up the broadcaster’s charter and tear down its firewall.
Just as Neville Chamberlain found out after 1938, appeasement is interpreted by enemies as weakness.
Firing the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, the president appointed as a USAGM “special advisor” a former TV broadcaster from Arizona who had twice failed to win statewide office, Kari Lake. She initially promised “reform” at VOA to eliminate the supposed radical left bias and remove imaginary internal security risks.
Lake herself, however, was big-footed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Two weeks after Patsy and I were sidelined, DOGE wiped out VOA. All 1,350 staffers were placed on leave with pay. Radio and TV broadcasts went silent. Our news websites were no longer updated. Leases for content distribution worldwide were canceled.
Patsy became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against Lake and USAGM figureheads to reverse what we contend were illegal actions, executive branch overreach, and viewpoint discrimination. It is possible we will ultimately prevail in federal court, but our audiences are already gone, with Chinese and Russian media outlets filling the void.
If the U.S. government is not mandated to restore international broadcasting or if Congress votes to eliminate such funding, what is the path forward?
At an annual cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, establishing a replacement VOA would drain the bank accounts of most potential philanthropists. Would benefactors even step forward to fund programming for a few geo-strategic languages in which the BBC does not broadcast, such as Khmer, Shona, or Tibetan?
It is also challenging to develop a commercial-driven structure for languages and others, such as Rohingya, for which VOA was the exclusive external source.
The likeliest replacement sponsors: other leading democracies. If not the British, perhaps Australia, Canada, or Japan – or the European Union? The EU has mulled funding Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Australia, Canada, and the UK, however, face domestic political pressure to reduce what remains of their foreign language services.
Lake, meanwhile, quickly changed her tune to support the DOGE's destructive acts. VOA could no longer be reformed. It was unsalvageable and a “rotten fish” spewing anti-American propaganda, an assertion that could be refuted by bothering to actually view, listen to and read VOA’s staid content, very similar in approach and tone to that of the Associated Press (which also became a Trump administration target for punishment for not accepting the White House’s unilateral move to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”)
Clearly, any entity not parroting administration talking points was now unacceptable. And it was unthinkable to have a government-funded independent media outlet, even if it had been an effective instrument of American soft power and public diplomacy over the decades and helped contribute to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Public broadcasters NPR and PBS would also come into the crosshairs with cuts to federal funding, while the Federal Communications Commission would be weaponized to bring domestic broadcasters into line by threatening to revoke their FCC licenses.
The actions resemble developments in other fragile democracies, including India, Hungary, the Philippines, Serbia, and Turkey, where press freedoms eroded under the guise of national security or so-called media reform, with aspiring authoritarians intimidating and discrediting journalists. To consolidate power, these leaders are compelled to control the narrative and minimize dissent. The casualties are accountability and democratic institutions.
Steve Herman retired as VOA’s chief national correspondent on June 30, 2025, to accept a position as the executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation at the University of Mississippi.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.