How Donald Trump Silenced the Voice of America

Voice of America’s Persian Service began airing in its current form in 1979, shortly after the Iranian Revolution toppled the Shah and installed the Islamist clerics who rule the country to this day. V.O.A. was created by the U.S. government to tell America’s story to the world, and, for decades, the Persian Service was one of its largest departments, producing news reports and talk shows that at times reached close to a quarter of Iran’s adults. In February, when the United States and Israel launched coördinated air strikes on Iran, the Persian Service had no journalists reporting in the region. Its programming was limited to an hour a day, several employees said. “Normally, we would have correspondents on the Iranian border, talking to people who were leaving the country, getting firsthand accounts,” a V.O.A. journalist who has worked closely with the Persian Service told me. “Now we barely do any of our own reporting. I’m here only to be here when we rebuild this place so that somebody is still here who knows what we used to be.” (A spokesman for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees V.O.A., said that the Persian Service had provided substantial original reporting at the start of the war.)Soon after Donald Trump began his second term in the White House, he appointed Kari Lake, a former TV anchorwoman who had lost races in Arizona for governor and senator, to run America’s global media operations. Lake said that her mission was “to shut the entire agency down as per the instructions of President Trump.” In March, 2025, a day after Trump issued an executive order slashing V.O.A.’s parent agency to its legally required minimum, Lake put 1,042 of its 1,147 staffers on paid leave. The Persian Service, which had numbered more than a hundred employees before Trump returned to the White House, was down to a few dozen people at the start of the war. The service’s coverage reflected its paltry staffing. “Trump gave a speech, and Kari Lake asked us to carry it live,” the journalist said. (The U.S.A.G.M. spokesman said that Persian Service editors decided on their own to air the speech.)On the first day of the war in Iran, a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile struck a girls’ elementary school in Minab. For a couple of days, the Persian Service did not publish any articles about the incident, which Iranian officials said had killed more than a hundred and seventy people, most of them children. In V.O.A.’s newsroom in Washington, the journalist confronted a senior manager: “Are we North Korea now? This is going to be all over the news. We can’t just be silent about it.” The journalist didn’t receive a response until the next day, when the manager sent him a V.O.A. story recounting Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s comment that the United States “would not deliberately target a school.” The story said nothing about the worldwide outrage over the bombing. (The U.S.A.G.M. spokesman said that the Persian Service had reported on the strike as part of a live TV broadcast on the day it happened.) The Persian Service had previously made room, however, for a six-minute video report titled “Melania Trump: American’s Influential First Lady,” which began with fourteen seconds of the trailer for this year’s “Melania” documentary.By then, Lake had brought in Ali Javanmardi, a former V.O.A. contractor, to oversee the Persian Service. Javanmardi was employed by the U.S.A.G.M., which, under federal law, is supposed to respect an editorial firewall that protects V.O.A. journalism from interference by political appointees. But Javanmardi—whose LinkedIn profile features a photo of Trump, standing bloodied and triumphant, after the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania, in 2024—breached that wall repeatedly, appearing frequently on V.O.A. videos. A Persian Service reporter told me that, when Javanmardi appeared as a commentator on V.O.A., he handed the anchor the questions to be asked.In January, Javanmardi instructed his staff that, “effective immediately, all guest appearances—including live guests, pre-recorded guests, and guests whose soundbites are used in packages—must be approved by me in advance.” He gathered his staff in a circle each day and delivered his latest thoughts about the Persian Service’s coverage. “They’re marching orders,” the journalist said. “You only hear him talking, no one else.” One day, Javanmardi announced that V.O.A. videos, web stories, and social-media posts would not be permitted to use the phrase “Death to America” in reports about demonstrations on the streets of Iran. He also instructed his staff to avoid describing America’s attack on Iran as a war; rather, he said, they should use the term “military action.” V.O.A.’s Farsi newscasts “felt like someone’s one-man show,” the journalist said. “The firewall has burned down.”The Persian Service’s content began to tilt sharply toward Javanmardi’s idiosyncratic perspective on Iran. Javanmardi, who is Kurdish Iranian, is a longtime critic of Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s late Shah, who lives in exile in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. A lawsuit filed by V.O.A. journalists and press-freedom organizations claims that Javanmardi refused to allow V.O.A. to use audio of protesters in Iran shouting Pahlavi’s name. He also barred the Persian Service’s staff and guests from talking about any possible restoration of Iran’s monarchy. When V.O.A. covered a street protest in Norway against the Islamic Republic, it muted the audio when demonstrators chanted “Javid Shah” (“Long live the Shah”), according to the lawsuit. A Persian Service journalist said that, when he refused to follow Javanmardi’s orders, he was fired. (Javanmardi and Lake did not respond to requests for comment, and the U.S.A.G.M. spokesman said that the agency would not comment on personnel matters. Lake has said that Pahlavi was invited to appear on V.O.A., and did not respond.)The U.S. has struggled to balance propaganda and independent news reporting since the Second World War, when it became clear that information was as vital a tool of combat as bombs and battleships. The Nazis and the Soviet Union led the way in leveraging propaganda, using sharply skewed information and entertainment to inspire their troops, rally the homeland, and win over—or confuse—enemy populations. Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf” that radio is “a terrible weapon in the hands of those who know how to make use of it.” The Soviet Union embraced Lenin’s concept of agitation—the use of emotional slogans and half-truths to influence the masses. By 1953, U.S. officials estimated that the the Soviet Union was spending two per cent of its gross national product on propaganda, at least twenty times the U.S. government’s information budget.America’s news effort was launched on February 1, 1942, when the playwright Robert E. Sherwood took to the mike to deliver V.O.A.’s first words: “Today, America has been at war for seventy-nine days. Daily at this time, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth.” Sherwood—along with other early V.O.A. leaders, such as Edward R. Murrow, of CBS, and John Chancellor, of NBC—believed in presenting the news straight, but the argument about the agency’s mission and methods remained fractious. Presidents often grew frustrated that America’s voice was not plainly on America’s side. In 1943, on the day after Mussolini was overthrown, a V.O.A. broadcast quoted a New York Post columnist calling the Italian monarch, Victor Emmanuel, “the moronic little King.” President Franklin Roosevelt, in turn, criticized V.O.A. for conducting its own foreign policy, and directed its programmers to stick to undermining enemy morale.A few years later, President Harry Truman, who saw no need for peacetime information programs, asserted that the private news business should be the primary “means of informing foreign peoples about this country.” But, once the Cold War erupted and American concern about Communism metastasized, Truman reversed course. In 1951, he established the Psychological Strategy Board to supervise the war of words with the Soviets and instructed V.O.A. to broadcast hard-hitting anti-Communist messages from new transmitters in Okinawa, Munich, several locations in the Philippines, and on a ship in the Mediterranean Sea. In 1952, V.O.A. programs were broadcast in forty-six languages, aimed mainly at Communist countries behind the Iron Curtain. Each language desk at V.O.A. headquarters met daily to go over “guidances” from the State Department—a few pages that didn’t mandate specific language to be used in newscasts but did give V.O.A. editors “the word for the day,” as Arthur Larson, the director of the U.S. Information Agency, which oversaw V.O.A. at the time, put it.In 1953, televised hearings of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in Room 318 of the U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan’s Foley Square, focussed on “mismanagement and subversion” at V.O.A. “There are some people in the Voice of America who are doing a rather effective job of sabotaging” U.S. foreign policy, Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin who led the nation on a frenzied anti-Communist search, declared. His chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who would go on to mentor a young Donald Trump, interviewed more than a hundred V.O.A. staffers. The hearings made for great TV. Employees of V.O.A. were accused of harboring an interest in collectivist nudist camps, softening scripts to downplay the Soviets’ antisemitism, and positioning V.O.A. transmitters where magnetic storms might make it difficult for signals to reach the Soviet bloc. In March, 1953, Raymond Kaplan, a V.O.A. engineer who had worked on the transmitters, walked in front of a truck in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leaving behind a suicide note that told his family that he’d wanted to spare them the pain of being dragged through McCarthy’s hearings. McCarthy, who referred to V.O.A. as “Voice of Moscow,” called the