The Voice of America radio, that the administration of Donald Trump had started to dismantle mid-March, will finally be able to regain service next week, according to the Ministry of Justice and Reporters Without Borders on Saturday.
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“American lawyers for reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Coalition of Voice of America (VOA) learned, this Saturday, May 3, from an email from the Ministry of Justice that the teams of this emblematic media of American external audiovisual would be able to resume work in the coming hours,” said RSF in a statement.
In this message to RSF lawyers, the ministry notes that “earlier the accounts of 1406 USAGM employees and contract workers (the federal organization supervising several American media, editor’s note) and Voice of America were reactivated. All employees should now have access to the system. ” “USAGM anticipates a return from Voice of America programs next week.”
Two VOA employees told AFP that their email boxes, blocked for weeks, had been reopened, even if they had not yet received a formal notification that they could resume work.
In mid-March, the Trump administration had generally put journalists on leave and started to fire certain reporters from Voice of America, as well as several other public media. But American justice has opposed these measures: at the end of March, a federal magistrate sitting in New York had the first suspended the decision to put an end to the activities of these public media, then imitated by a Washington Federal Judge in April.
Necessary guarantees
“We greet this advance, but the erratic path of the Trump administration encourages caution: it is now essential that guarantees are made to the sustainability of funding allocated by the US Congress to all the USAGM media,” reacted Thibaut Bruttin, CEO of RSF. “The right to reliable information from tens of millions of listeners cannot depend on arbitrary political initiatives.”
Voice of America, created during the Second World War, Radio Free Europe, formed during the Cold War and Radio Free Asia, created in 1996, are intended to carry the “voice of America” around the world and especially in authoritarian countries.
Donald Trump had signed a decree in mid-March which ranked the USAGM government agency, which had 3,384 employees in 2023, among the “unnecessary elements of the federal bureaucracy”.
