A Secret Program Allowed VOA to Broadcast Television into North Korea. Now It’s Gone.

The mission of Voice of America, to “tell America’s story to the world,” is hard to fulfill when you’re broadcasting into the void of North Korea. For decades, VOA’s Korean service struggled to meet its mandate, relying on shortwave radio beamed from towers throughout Asia, medium-wave signals broadcast from South Korean towers operated by a Christian religious organization in Texas, and videos circulated on social media accessed by North Koreans outside the country or along the border and able to connect to a Chinese cell network.

Then, in January of 2023, after a decade of difficult negotiations, VOA reached an agreement with the South Korean government to use state-controlled broadcast towers along the border to send a TV signal deep into the North. Suddenly, households in Pyongyang and throughout the country could watch Washington Talk, a twenty-five-minute panel show featuring US foreign policy experts, including former political officials. It aired four times a week. 

This effort to bring television from the United States into North Korea was a breakthrough—and, until now, had not been made public. It’s not clear whether those responsible for the decision to defund VOA—Kari Lake, who as Donald Trump’s senior adviser to the US Agency for Global Media has overseen VOA, and Elon Musk, in his DOGE role—were even aware of the program’s existence. (My messages to Lake, USAGM, Musk, and DOGE’s spokesperson went unanswered. In congressional testimony yesterday, Lake described VOA as a veritable den of spies and a “threat to national security.”)