Voice of America, an international news station financed by the United States that was silenced by the Trump administration in March, may sound very different when it returns to the air.
Kari Lake, former news presenter whom President Trump was in charge of reviewing Voice of America, said Tuesday that he would feed with the content of One America News Network, or OAN, a television channel reliably Pro Trump that has proposed falsehoods on the 2020 presidential elections.
Mrs. Lake, who in recent years set up failed campaigns for governor and senator in Arizona, said Oan had sacrificed to provide free news reports to Voice of America and another outlet backed by Americans, the Cuba Transmission Office. In a statement on social networks, he described the agreement as “a huge benefit to the American taxpayer.”
“I have no editorial control over the content of the VOA and OCB programming, but I can make sure that our points of sale have reliable and credible options while working to create their reports and news programs,” Mrs. Lake said, using acronyms for Voice of America and the Cuba Transmission Office.
Patsy Widakuswara, a former head of the White House of Voice of America who was put on permission, said she was worried about development.
“We have worked very hard to generate confidence for our brand,” he said. “These are 83 years of good journalism that will be destroyed.”
Voice of America was created in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda, and for a long time he has brought news to the corners of the world where reliable journalism is scarce.
In March, Trump issued an executive order to dismantle the US agency for global media, the Autonomous Agency of Congress that supervises Voice of America, closing the media. The president accused the station of housing the bias against him and described him with the “voice of radical America.” Voice of the approximately 1,300 workers in the United States were sent home.
The journalists of the station then thirst, saying that Trump was not authorized to withdraw funds that had approved the leg by Congress.
A federal judge in Washington put on the side of journalists, ordering the Trump administration to recover the program.
An appeal panel seemed to complicate the matter during the weekend, reversing parts of the order of the lower court that required the Trump administration to restore the funds. But the panel left the requirement that Voice of America revives the programming.
It is not clear how many Voice of America reporters will return after judicial decisions.
“Some have already returned,” Lake said in an email on Tuesday night. “Some will return in the future.”
She declined to make more comments.
Some 15 employees have been reinstated in recent days, said Mrs. Widakuswara, who was not one of them.
Grant Turner, who served as executive director of the duration of the Voice of America Maternal Agency, the Trump’s first administration, said the movements to add OAN content would violate a legal requirement that the station is “precise, objective and component.”
He predicted that Oan’s content would not land well with the foreign public.
“They know how the true false news sounds,” Turner said about the voice of the United States listeners, he added: “They want something genuine.”