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essentialsaltes said:

Voice of America brings back Farsi-speaking staff amid Israel-Iran conflict
It is a dramatic turn of events for the American government-funded broadcasting system that was shut down by the Trump administration in March.

This really is key to understanding the value of investing in all of these public goods constantly. Imagine if VOA had been gone for ten years, and suddenly, on a dime, we wanted to start transmitting messages to the people of Iran.

Maybe we'll find out in 10 years when the next situation is in Argentina or Pakistan or Bulgaria.

Click to expand...

Let's see how things are going now.

The New Yorker, Marc Fisher reports that “some Trump administration officials now seem to recognize that the silencing of VOA has left the country with a diminished capacity to push back against other countries’ disinformation efforts.”

The nominee (for US Agency for Global Media), Sarah Rogers, talked of careful “resuscitation” of some USAGM services at her confirmation hearing yesterday. Rogers also saidsome sidelined staffers will be reinstated: “We do need to reform and modernize, but we should see people coming back to work.”

(but what about our own disinformation?)

Fisher’s article conveys just how bad it’s been inside USAGM in recent months. Overall, he reports, VOA is broadcasting in just seven languages, down from 49 previously. And many staffers believe the product is not just paltry, it’s tainted.

He quotes one longtime journalist (on condition of anonymity) saying “we used to” do original reporting but “now we’re just rewriting press releases from the administration.” Another, who works for VOA’s Persian Service, says, “Before, I had the freedom to contrast what Trump did with what critics thought of it. Now I just say, ‘Trump said,’ ‘Trump said,’ ‘Trump said.’”

Fisher opens with an internal dispute about whether the Persian Service would report on the U.S. missile that struck an Iranian elementary school, killing nearly 200. He says a journalist in DC confronted a senior manager and said: “Are we North Korea now? This is going to be all over the news. We can’t just be silent about it.”