Lights Out: U.S. Withdraws Support for Global Media
In the 12 years since Radio Rozana’s first broadcast, founder Lina Chawaf has worked tirelessly to expand the outlet’s coverage of her native Syria. She was forced to flee the country in 2011 after former President Bashar Assad began cracking down on independent media in the wake of the Arab Spring, yet still managed to broadcast from neighboring Turkey with the help of grants from several Western aid groups.
The outlet received a significant boost in 2024 when it was awarded a $120,000 grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). It allowed Chawaf’s small operation to nearly double its staff by hiring 10 reporters to help cover the country’s decade-old civil war at a critical juncture.
The joy was short-lived. One of President Donald Trump’s first acts in his second term was to sign an executive order freezing access to USAID’s funds, setting in motion a series of shocks throughout a global media ecosystem that is still struggling to adapt to a chaotic new reality. In March, Chawaf received an email saying USAID was pulling the plug on the majority of its projects.
“We are freaking out,” said Chawaf, a 2025 Nieman Fellow. “We’re now scrambling to fill this budget hole to keep this going. … We have been covering [Syria’s] most pressing problems and how to solve them. This could mean we cannot do that anymore.”
Chawaf’s operation is one of the hundreds of news outlets affected by Trump’s executive order in January. Since then, additional moves targeting the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) have signaled a dramatic reversal — and possible death knell — for decades-old U.S. programs supporting free speech and access to information around the world.
Historically, less than one-half of 1% of U.S. foreign aid has gone to supporting independent media, through USAID and related programs — yet the hundreds of millions of dollars that represents made it the largest public donor to media development in the world.
For half a century, the U.S. has pursued an often controversial policy of “democracy promotion,” one strain of which has included support for civil society initiatives such as independent newsrooms in places where free speech and access to outside information are forcibly curtailed. With the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID, USAGM, and NED in particular, the full scope of that support is just now coming into focus. In recent years, for example, USAID alone has helped support more than 6,000 journalists, 700 newsrooms and about 300 other media organizations across 30 or so countries, according to Reporters Without Borders.
The administration’s actions have had immediate consequences within the U.S. as well: With the freeze on USAGM’s funding in March, scores of Washington-based foreign reporters were suddenly left jobless or in limbo. Many of them had come to Washington not only to help report on the U.S. government for their home audiences, but also to use American free speech protections to report on corruption and repression in their own countries. Now, although Trump’s order faces numerous legal challenges, many worry their visas could be invalidated, leaving them vulnerable to deportation into the clutches of the oligarchs and autocrats they reported on.
“I know of at least another 50 journalists with visas tied to their jobs at VOA [Voice of America]. Many are from authoritarian governments and are at risk of being sent back,” said Liam Scott, who reported on global press freedom for the 80-year-old, USAGM-funded broadcast outlet before the funding freeze. He now authors the Press Freedom Report newsletter on Substack.
In addition to VOA, the USAGM oversees Radio Marti in Cuba, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Eastern Europe, Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks — several of which find themselves in crisis.
“We broadcast to some of the most censored places on Earth, where we model what a free press really looks like,” Scott said. “This covers huge swaths of the global population that will lose out on independent news. This is really important to a huge chunk of the world.”
Current events have reframed the issue, to a degree. After Israel launched a series of attacks on Iranian nuclear sites in June, the Trump administration ordered reporters back into the VOA’s Persian-language news service, which had been shuttered by Trump’s executive order in March.
A perilous time
On January 20, hours into his second presidency, Trump signed an executive order demanding the U.S. end all aid not “fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President.” This included $268 million allocated by Congress for “independent media and the free flow of information,” according to Reporters Without Borders. Days later, administrators at NED — which had also provided reporting grants around the world — lost access to $240 million in funds that Congress had appropriated. On March 14, Trump signed another executive order ending all federal programs he deemed “unnecessary,” including eliminating “to the maximum extent” allowed by law all USAGM operations.
In less than three months, under the direction of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, the administration effectively dismantled these organizations, leaving reporting projects gutted, abruptly canceled, or in limbo.
Each order has sparked a series of lawsuits that are still making their way through U.S. courts, but for many newsrooms operating on tight budgets, continuing through the delays will not be feasible. It is difficult to say just how many journalists have lost their jobs as a result, or how many newsrooms either have already shut down or will soon have to, but the freeze has hit outlets in Russia and Ukraine, in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, in Cameroon and Iran, and across Latin America and elsewhere, leaving them struggling to plug unexpected budget holes at a time of dramatic geopolitical change, shrinking global press freedoms, and rising authoritarianism.
For news operations like Chawaf’s Radio Rozana, the cuts come at a critical moment: Syria is just now emerging from more than a decade of civil war. Since Assad fled to Moscow in December, she said, independent journalism is more important than ever. “You cannot cede ground to radicals at a moment like this. You need media that is independent and able to inform people. You need credible information,” Chawaf said. “I’m worried — we don’t know where we are going right now.”
The U.S. has played a particularly outsized role in supporting non-state media in Myanmar, at least as early as 1988, when journalists fled military crackdowns on pro-democracy protests and established in exile what remain some of the country’s most prominent news outlets. That support continued during the country’s brief opening, between 2011 and 2021, and through its current crisis — an ongoing civil war sparked by a 2021 military coup. I helped cover that coup as editor of Frontier Myanmar, a locally owned English-language magazine that received a small USAID grant which helped us cover the 2020 election that preceded the military junta’s takeover.
Journalism in Myanmar was never lucrative, and many reporters there supplement their incomes with odd jobs. But the recent cuts have caused a ripple effect, and while many desperately want to continue reporting on their country, nearly all of them are struggling to find ways to do so.
“Many of the journalists who cover this country are now selling food or running little tea shops and things. Some of them did this before Trump, but now they are all doing it all the time,” said Yan Naing Aung, a fixer and freelance reporter and photographer who has worked with The Washington Post and Nikkei Asia, among other outlets. “The ones who have been in journalism a long time, or even some of those who became passionate about it after the coup — they will continue to report even if they don’t get paid. But many are walking away from [journalism] because they have to.”
Yan Naing Aung said he thinks the situation is also affecting coverage of Myanmar by international outlets. With less local reporting taking place, regional and international reporters and outlets stop paying attention to the country, he said. Even if they are paying attention, there are now fewer trained fixers and journalists whom they can reach out to for assistance.
According to an April report from the Singapore-based ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a majority of the country’s largest newsrooms have lost between 30% and 35% of their funding because of the cuts in U.S. support. For smaller outlets in the country and in exile, the impact has been even bigger, with U.S. programs having accounted for up to 45% of their funding. The Independent Press Council of Myanmar estimates that about 200 journalists in exile have been affected by the cuts.
The consequences have already been felt: On March 28, the largest earthquake to hit Myanmar in nearly a century struck its central heartlands, destroying buildings and infrastructure, killing more than 3,500 people, and injuring an estimated 5,000. While there was scant international coverage of the ensuing humanitarian situation, the crumbling of a half-built office tower in Bangkok — the capital of neighboring Thailand nearly 1,000 miles from the earthquake’s epicenter — was covered immediately and extensively.
Those who were able to report on the situation in Myanmar did so via news services like Radio Free Asia. I spoke to an RFA contributor originally from the Sagaing Region of Myanmar close to the epicenter, who asked not to be named as he is living and reporting from exile in northern Thailand where he fled after the 2021 coup.
When the earthquake struck, he was able to reach out to villagers from his hometown in Myanmar to report on the severity of the damage. In the pictures villagers shared with him, he even identified the corpse of his own brother, a detail he declined to add to his story.
But a little more than a month later, the RFA, facing cuts, terminated his role, leaving him stranded in Thailand without work and unable to return home for fear his media work has put him on the junta’s radar.
“I have been a journalist since 2013. I love being a journalist,” he said. “If I go back to Myanmar, I may have to change my career.”
USAID and NED grants have supported more than just reporting; they’ve also included “capacity building” initiatives in nations without robust support for a free press, including journalist training, technology and business model innovation, internet connectivity, and cross-border investigations of transnational crime, to name a few. Over the last few decades, the administration of such programs has shifted from Western-led initiatives to more locally driven projects. This has created a sprawling ecosystem of government agencies, international NGOs, contractors, and local reporters, editors, and technologists.
In Ukraine, for example, 2025 Nieman Fellow Kyrylo Beskorovainyi, co-founder of a science journalism outlet called Kunsht, had five different programs supported by funding from the U.S. before Trump took office.
Among them were initiatives to turn print-based science reporting done during the COVID-19 pandemic into radio features, and another that created video-based reports that were displayed on screens on intercity trains to increase public health awareness. Another core element of the outlet’s work included training Ukrainian scientists to better communicate their research and ideas to the public. Thirty scientists had enrolled in a communications training course that was set to begin earlier this year.
That program, along with the others, has been canceled, forcing Kunsht to terminate everyone involved.
“We are in a very tight spot, with funding for [only] the next few months, but then we’ll start burning our reserves,” Beskorovainyi said. “We did not plan for this. We are in crisis mode.”
Funding “a global campaign for freedom”
The drastic gutting of these programs presents a radical shift in attitude on the part of the U.S. government — under both Democratic and Republican administrations — toward funding initiatives that aim to export U.S.-style democracy around the world.
Much of the rhetoric around exporting democratic values can be traced to a speech by President Ronald Reagan, who took to the lectern in London’s Westminster Hall on June 8, 1982, to announce a new “global campaign for freedom.”
“The objective I propose is quite simple: to foster the infrastructure of democracy — the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities — which allows a people to choose their own way,” he said. To those who might call this cultural imperialism, Reagan added, it’s “cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy … [or] government propaganda handouts instead of independent newspapers.”
As critics have noted, however, much of what Reagan proposed — funding and training civic and political groups abroad, often selectively — was something the Central Intelligence Agency had been doing clandestinely for decades.
“The idea was a reworking of the CIA’s old 1950s policy,” writes Nicholas Cull in “The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945-1989.” “But this time the mechanism had to be overt.”
That meant getting congressional buy-in and being explicit about funding decisions and objectives. Congressional hearings following the Westminster Hall speech led directly to NED’s creation, as well as its granting institutions — representing the Democratic and Republican parties, labor unions, and private businesses.
The difference this time, Cull told me in a recent interview, was that the architects of Reagan’s “infrastructure of democracy” understood that “the journalism part of this would only work if it was seen as objective.”
“The covert funding was one part of that, but that also crucially depended on the reporting — they had to be able to be critical of the U.S. government,” Cull said. If a single story went against the interests of one administration, party, or foreign policy objective, Cull added, the broader goal of having independent journalists reporting on their governments around the world took precedence.
Reagan called on his allies to partner with him, and over the next decade, governments across Europe and East Asia added media support to existing aid programs, like USAID, or launched new ones, like NED. The United Kingdom, for example, created the Westminster Foundation for Democracy in 1992, which trained a generation of journalists across the former Yugoslavia.
For all the rhetoric about freedom and liberty, critics say these programs sometimes aligned too neatly with U.S. geopolitical interests. At Westminster Hall, Reagan spoke at least as much about countering communism as he did about bolstering democracy. USAID, launched in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, aimed not only to reduce global poverty, but to counter Soviet support for anticolonial movements across Africa and Asia.
Leftists critical of American imperialism have often found common ground with small-government conservatives worried about waste and overreach. When Trump first took aim at NED, in 2018, the socialist Jacobin Magazine urged readers not to mourn its demise. When Trump won reelection in 2024, The American Conservative magazine called on him to finish the job.
But such criticisms overlook the editorial independence the majority of these outlets achieved. Even the VOA — which was initially created as a tool of U.S. information warfare in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda — fought for and won its independence. By the 1950s, its journalists were already carving out editorial space independent from the U.S. government.
When VOA chief Robert Goldmann visited the BBC’s London office in 1958, he was “simply astonished by the absence of policy pressure from the British Foreign Office,” Cull writes. Back in Washington, Goldmann envisioned VOA becoming something similar, a broadcaster of “straight factual reporting without any propaganda.” In 1976, a VOA charter codified this independence into law.
While VOA and related USAGM programs may never have achieved the reach of the BBC, they are widely trusted where they operate. In Myanmar, Radio Free Asia is considered a highly credible newsroom, often hiring the country’s most accomplished journalists and paying above-average wages. When it appeared that the lights might go out for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the government of the Czech Republic, where it is based, pledged to take over financial support of the outlet if the U.S. withdrew, lest the public lose such a vital institution. Since then, the European Union has pledged 5.5 million euros ($6.3 million) in support.
What comes next?
Questions remain, not only about the future of the current system, but about what role, if any, the U.S. should play in funding foreign media. Patrick Boehler, an American journalist who has worked for several U.S. grantees in Asia, as well as larger outlets like The New York Times and the South China Morning Post, has criticized the system in his newsletter about global civic media called Re:filtered. In addition to bureaucratic grant processes that can be cumbersome to small news outlets already stretched thin, Boehler says the foreign aid system enables a universe of middlemen between grantors and recipients that siphon off meager funding.
Author Cull, although a supporter of Western funding for foreign media, agrees there was room for improvement.
“To be honest, it wasn’t an ideal system,” Cull said. “People trying to run truly free media in vulnerable places would say, ‘If we have to reapply for a grant every six months, how do we concentrate on the reporting?’ They felt they were on a kind of hamster wheel with tremendous uncertainty.”
While Boehler is hopeful that something better might emerge from the current crisis, he is sympathetic to the pain he’s watching journalists endure as they grapple with the abrupt end of a huge funding source.
“They are seeing that they’d been playing this game of chasing grants for so long, and now that it stopped, they’re saying, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’” Boehler said. “They’re asking how they can get real independence, and those are really great conversations to have.”
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