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Voice of America’s Persian-language operations are back up and running as the US government tries to beam information into Iran amid the widening conflict between Israel and Iran.
Voice of America and another US-funded international network, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, are promoting their programming — partly to persuade the Trump administration to keep the proverbial lights on.
“Iranians flocked to us for reliable news,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty editor in chief Nicola Natasha Careem said in a memo, crediting the network’s Persian language branch, Radio Farda, with reaching “audiences inside Iran despite every conceivable attempt to silence us.”
Three months ago, RFE/RL’s government funding was suddenly cut off when an executive order by President Donald Trump directed the government to stop supporting international broadcasting efforts that had historically enjoyed bipartisan support.
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Voice of America was essentially silenced, with hundreds of employees placed on paid leave. RFE/RE was forced into a defensive crouch. Trump’s termination orders were challenged in court, and several lawsuits are still pending.
Then Israel conducted unprecedented strikes inside Iran early Friday. In a matter of hours, dozens of VOA staffers were called back to work, including all of those who had worked on Farsi language programming for Iran.
Trump’s pick to run VOA, Kari Lake, confirmed to Fox News that VOA’s “Persian news service is rising to the occasion” to cover the conflict.
VOA staffers who are still being sidelined by Trump’s order said the U-turn was evidence that all the networks should be brought back online.
Michael Abramowitz, the director of VOA, said in a weekend memo to colleagues that he didn’t know what the Trump administration “has in mind” for the future, but he credited the staff with getting news coverage online and on the air quickly.
“However,” he wrote, “let’s be clear that the scope and breadth of VOA coverage for Iran is not comparable to what it used to be. VOA Persia is about a third of the size it was before all of Voice of America was silenced.”
Nicholas Burns, a former US ambassador and senior State Department official who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, wrote on X over the weekend that “the cavalier destruction of Voice of America has hurt us in China and now in Iran.” He called it “unilateral disarmament” and “deeply unwise.”
One Republican congressman, Don Bacon, also weighed in on the matter, saying that “it was shortsighted to cut all of these kinds of media that tell our American story and give light to the people living in these tyrannical regimes. The VOA is now needed for Iran.”
“And I would add for the rest of the world,” Abramowitz wrote in his memo after quoting Bacon.
RFE/RL’s Persian newsroom saw huge surges in digital traffic on Friday. Careem’s memo to the board, which was obtained by CNN’s Jake Tapper, called out Lake by name.
“If Kari Lake (or the Iranian regime) had their way, millions of Iranians would have been left in an information vacuum or at the mercy of state propaganda and rampant rumor yesterday,” she wrote Saturday. “Instead, in one day, Farda’s content was consumed in the millions — exceeding the audience of any messaging that the U.S. government itself could push out via official channels. Moments like this are why RFE/RL exists.”
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