The Power of Shortwave Radio. And, What Gets Lost with Voice of America?

On the Media

WNYC Studios

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4.6 • 8.7K Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Divided Dial, and the consequences of freezing funding for a global media network.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We are going to be slimming this agency down, way down. It's going on an ozempic diet.
0:09.1	The Trump administration has been gutting the Broadcasting Service, Voice of America.
0:14.3	From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
0:18.5	And I'm Michael Lowinger. But Republicans once wanted VOA to be as big
0:23.0	as possible. We're as far behind the Soviets and their allies in international broadcasting
0:27.9	today as we were in space when they launched Sputnik in 1957. Radio Free Europe also risks
0:34.4	losing funding. A journalist who spent time in a Russian prison for her work with it
0:39.2	grapples with the fallout.
0:41.3	I'll be talking to the families of our imprisoned journalists these days.
0:45.8	What am I going to tell them that their loved ones are imprisoned for nothing?
0:51.6	It's all coming up after this.
1:00.0	Music present for nothing. It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media.
1:03.7	I'm Michael Lowinger.
1:05.0	And I'm Brooke Gladstone.
1:06.3	The voice of America is still alive, but just barely.
1:15.0	This month, Michael Abramowitz, the director of the VOA, was fired after refusing to accept what he called an illegal reassignment to a lower position.
1:22.6	Abramowitz has been an outspoken critic of the Trump administration's moves to dismantle the government
1:28.2	broadcasting service. Leading those efforts has been Carrie Lake, the former TV host, now a special
1:35.4	advisor to the United States Agency for Global Media, which oversees the service.
1:41.1	We are going to be slimming this agency down, way down. It's going on an
1:47.3	ozempic diet. The rot is so bad, it's like having a rotten fish and trying to find a little
1:52.4	portion you can eat. It's unsalvageable right now. It's not the first time the VOA has been
	...

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