UPDATE
Lee Heidhues 3.20.2025
The reaction to Nazi Felon Trump’s dismantling of Voice of America has been Swift. Regrettably, Trump will get away with this blatant censorship. And there’s more to come.
Al Jazeera headline 3.18.2025
Chinese state media revel in demise of Voice of America, Radio Free Asia
Shutdown of US-funded news outlets ends more than 80 years of uncensored news broadcasts in China.
Lee Heidhues 3.15.2025
Step by step the felon Nazi Donald Trump is destroying the free press. Just like Adolf Hitler did in Germany shortly after he became Chancellor in 1933. Are books next?
On April 6, 1933, the Nazi German Student Association’s Main Office for Press and Propaganda announced a nationwide initiative “against the un-German spirit”, climaxing in a literary Säuberung, or cleansing, by fire.[2] Local chapters of the group were charged with the distribution of literary blacklists that included Jewish, Marxist, Socialist, anti-family, and anti-German literature and planned grand ceremonies for the public to gather and dispose of the objectionable material.[3]
In Berlin, the German Student Union organized the celebratory book burnings that took place on May 10, 1933, on a dreary, rainy evening.[2] 40,000 people crowded into the Opernplatz (as it was then known) as 5,000 German students proceeded past them, holding burning torches to ceremonially ignite the pile of books seized for the event.[4] Joseph Goebbels, Germany’s Reich Minister of Propaganda, spoke at the event, declaring that “the era of exaggerated Jewish intellectualism is now at an end… and the future German man will not just be a man of books… this late hour [I] entrust to the flames the intellectual garbage of the past.”[3][5] Thirty-four additional book burnings took place across Germany that month.[3]
Excerpted from France 24 3.15.2025
The head of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which started broadcasting into the Soviet bloc during the Cold War, called the cancellation of funding “a massive gift to America’s enemies.”
“The Iranian ayatollahs, Chinese communist leaders, and autocrats in Moscow and Minsk would celebrate the demise of RFE/RL after 75 years,” its president, Stephen Capus, said in a statement.
Hundreds of reporters and other staff at VOA, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe and other outlets received a weekend email saying they will be barred from their offices and should surrender press passes, office-issued telephones and other equipment.
Trump, who has already eviscerated the US aid agency and Education Department, on Friday issued an executive order listing the US Agency for Global Media as among “elements of the federal bureaucracy that the president has determined are unnecessary.”
Kari Lake, a firebrand Trump supporter and former Arizona news anchor who was put in charge of the media agency after she lost a US Senate bid, wrote — in an email to media outlets she supervises — that federal grant money “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”
A White House press official, Harrison Fields, took a much less legalistic tone in a post on X, simply writing “goodbye” in 20 languages, a sarcastic jab at VOA’s multilingual coverage.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250315-trump-freezes-voa-radio-free-asia-radio-free-europe
Top photo: President Dwight Eisenhower speaks on Voice of America – circa 1950’s
Lee's Perspective 