Trump Nominates Kari Lake for VOA Director Pick – Here’s Why It’s Controversial

On December 13, 2024By Littum

Upper line

President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to tap Kari Lake to lead Voice of America, a federally funded foreign television organization that prides itself on political independence and objectivity, has sparked concerns among media watchers about how the organization can live up to its mission with Lake – a staunch pro-choice denier who often demonizes the media – at its helm.

Kari Lake speaks to the media outside the Mesa Convention Center polling place on Nov. 5, … (+) 2024 in Mesa, Arizona. (Photo: Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

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Key facts

Trump announced Lake, a former Fox 10 news anchor in Phoenix who recently lost the Arizona Senate, for the role Wednesday, writing at Truth Social, she will “ensure that the American values of freedom and liberty are broadcast around the world FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, contrary to the lies spread by the Fake News Media.”

Part of the US Agency for Global Media, Voice of America is designed to maintain objectivity and independence from the US government in its newsgathering and reporting activities and aims to ensure “the ability of our journalists to develop content that reflects the highest professional standards of journalism, free from political interference,” according to his website.

The US Global Media Agency is headed by an executive director who must be confirmed by the Senate, while the VOA director is appointed by majority vote of a seven-member advisory board consisting of six presidential appointees, who also require Senate confirmation, and the Secretary of State.

Lake has often advocated right-wing stances on the media that could threaten VOA’s core mission — she has called reporters “fake news” and “monsters” and accused the media of having “spent the last eight years lying about President Donald Trump. ” during a speech at the Republican National Convention.

Lake is also a key promoter of Trump’s false claims that he was the true winner of the 2020 election, refusing to admit her own election loss in the 2022 gubernatorial race and losing a series of court battles to contest the results.

Chief critic

Trump’s selection of Lake “is a blatant partisan attack on journalistic values that demonstrates the level of loyalty he expects from the press,” Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the left-leaning media watchdog nonprofit Media Matters for America, wrote in a column.

big number

354 million That is the number of weekly global VOA viewers.

Surprising facts

VOA was founded in 1942, less than two months after the United States entered World War II, to combat Nazi propaganda.

What to look for

Trump said in his Truth Social post Wednesday that he would nominate the next head of the US agency for global media “soon.”

What we don’t know

How long will it take for Lake to be confirmed. The terms of the six members of the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, other than the secretary of state, will not automatically end when Trump takes office, and the board must be split equally between Republicans and Democrats. For the board to confirm Lake, it must first approve removing its current director, Michael Abramowitz, a former longtime Washington Post editor President Joe Biden appointed in April. The board would then work with the head of VOA’s parent organization, the US Agency for Global Media, to select a new VOA director.

Key background

Trump’s previous pick to head the US agency for global media, Michael Pack – a documentary filmmaker and Steve Bannon ally – led to chaos, staff purges and accusations of financial mismanagement. Pack forced out senior executives who were not aligned with Trump politically, some who were later reinstated by the State Department’s Office of the Inspector General after an independent report commissioned by the federal government’s Office of Special Counsel found that Pack compromised the independence of news-gathering operations. blue. by attacking journalists he believed were not politically aligned with Trump. The report also alleges that Pack engaged in “gross mismanagement and gross waste” of VOA funds by hiring a politically connected law firm to investigate executives and compile dossiers on those the OSC determined violated privacy laws, NPR reported. Trump’s White House too repeatedly attacked VOA, including over its coverage of China and the COVID-19 pandemic.