While Donald Trump attempts to bypass Congress in cutting funding to NPR and PBS, his senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, perennial election loser Kari Lake, announced on X earlier this week that she’s struck a deal with One America News to “provide” the right-wing outlet’s “newsfeed services” to the government-funded outlets her agency oversees—Voice of America being the most prominent among them. Lake touted the deal as “an enormous benefit to the American taxpayer,” since OAN, which has a TV channel and website, agreed to provide its newsfeed “free of charge.” “We are grateful for their generosity,” she wrote. Yet the generosity might actually be flowing in the other direction, as Lake’s move will allow OAN to tap into VOA’s weekly audience of 360 million people around the world—and turn a once unbiased global beacon of American journalism into a Pravda for the Trump regime.
VOA was first created in 1942 to help combat fascism and Nazi disinformation. As it notes in its mission statement, “An essential guarantee of the journalistic credibility of Voice of America content is the ‘firewall’ enshrined in the 1994 U.S. International Broadcasting Act. The firewall prohibits interference by any U.S. government official in the objective, independent reporting of news, thereby safeguarding the ability of our journalists to develop content that reflects the highest professional standards of journalism, free of political interference.” That’s not exactly OAN’s approach to journalism. Scour its content (if you dare), and you’ll find stories that seem engineered for the White House’s new Drudge Report–style propaganda feed. Some merely put a MAGA spin on the news (“Trump April Jobs Report Shatters Expectations as Native-Born Workers Win Big”) or heap laughable praise on Dear Leader (“Trump is just as much of a lion as Churchill”), while others are pure fiction (“DOGE Team Exposes Millions of Illegal Aliens Voting in Elections”).
Worshipful coverage of the GOP has always been part of OAN’s DNA, but the network, which launched in 2013, hitched its wagon to MAGA as the movement descended (further) into conspiracy theories in the wake of the 2020 election. Founder Robert Herring insisted that anchors promote Trump’s claims of election fraud and barred them from referring to Biden as “president.” It was a poor business decision. YouTube suspended it for misinformation in 2020 (read all about it at VOA!), and in 2022 DirecTV dropped it entirely. Over the past two years, OAN has settled two defamation lawsuits related to its election denialism.
But perhaps nothing better explains OAN’s values these days than the fact that it gave a weeknight show to former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, who is so detestable that even many Republicans have distanced themselves from him. Trump nominated Gaetz for attorney general late last year, but Gaetz was forced to withdraw after a House ethics report—led by Republicans, mind you—found “substantial evidence” that during his time in Congress he had sex with a 17-year-old, paid women for sex, and accepted gifts exceeding congressional limits.
All of that doesn’t stop Gaetz from presenting false and misleading information and spewing xenophobic, anti-LGBTQ, and racist rants every night. In one recent segment, he claimed that, under Biden, “Democrats let around 20 million people into America—chaotically, illegally.” (There are about 11 million undocumented immigrants, and they have arrived over decades.) Gaetz, a lawyer, argued these people aren’t entitled to any due process, despite Supreme Court rulings stating otherwise, adding, “What due process did Americans get when our communities, hospitals, schools, and jails were overrun by the Third World?” He giddily described Trump’s $1,000 self-deportation offer (“It’s called America First, and if you don’t like it, you can self-deport too”) and then turned to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to an El Salvador prison. The show posted an image riffing on Shepard Fairey’s famous Obama Hope poster—but featuring Abrego Garcia with an Obama O on his shoulder and the label “MS-13,” despite spurious evidence that he was ever a member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang.
Another host, the oft-mendacious Dan Ball, frequently espouses conspiracy theories and has a regular “This Week in Woke America” segment that makes misleading charges against liberals like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whom he calls “champagne liberals.” He’s brought on disgraced doctor Robert Malone to defend Robert F. Kennedy’s unfounded claim that vaccines may be causing autism. He’s also welcomed Steven Friend, a former FBI agent who, before becoming an adviser to FBI Director Kash Patel, had his security clearance revoked after he refused to arrest anyone involved in the January 6 attack. In a segment on “Biden’s scheme to spy on Americans,” Friend claimed that the former president’s spying “laid the groundwork for them to debank people,” “coordinate with universities to repress free speech,” and alert the military that “pro-lifers were potentially terrorists.” Ball called it a form of “tyranny”—the kind, he said, that Democrats accuse Trump of doing, but “he’s not.”
It’s not just what you’ll find on OAN that’s the problem, though. It’s also what you won’t find: criticism of the president. The network observed Trump’s 100th day in office with a fawning piece titled, “Celebrating ‘100 Days’ In: Notable Accomplishments in the Second Trump Administration,” which credited Trump with a slight decline in inflation and decent jobs reports while failing to mention that the stock market has declined 5 percent since inauguration. It also praises toothless, culture-war executive orders such as “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” and “Restoring ‘Truth and Sanity’ to American History.”
OAN is unabashed about its mission, which has nothing to do with independent journalist that tells the truth, free of political interference. The network is literally independent, as a business entity, but figuratively it’s an arm of Trump’s propaganda network. OAN runs political interference on his behalf, and does such a good job of it that Trump himself, back in 2023, sent them a thank-you video. “To all of the great views and people of OAN, you’ve been my friend and I’ve been your friend for a long time,” he said. “These are brave people that are doing this. I want to just congratulate them.… I really believe we owe them a big debt of gratitude.” Now Trump is repaying that debt. Spreading OAN content via Voice of America might not cost U.S. taxpayers a dime, but it will impoverish the minds of anyone around the world who listens to it seeking the truth.
