Radio Heads

Via Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

From the open tabs:

I've been meaning to say something about the awfulness of Michael Pack, the new head of the US Agency for Global Media, which is the umbrella agency for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Voice of America, and other international news outlets widely recognized for the quality and independence of their work; a rightwing filmmaker (he produced the documentary Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words) and pal of another would-be Hollywood mogul, Stephen Bannon, we're told, who is in turn an inveterate enemy of VOA:

“VOA is a rotten fish from top to bottom,” Bannon, the former leader of the conservative Breitbart news site, said in an interview. “It’s now totally controlled by the deep-state apparatus.”

He has been pushing Trump to take control of the Voice of America since he served as chief White House strategist during Trump’s first seven months in office. Following his forced departure, Bannon has kept up the fight from the outside. (Los Angeles Times, December 2018)

Now he's sacked the heads of more or less all these outlets, in a clear effort to seize ideological control, and it's a plainly horrible thing from the standpoint of US prestige—like shutting down the Peace Corps or all the USIS libraries, among the few American things that rouse universal admiration in the flood of Trumpy embarrassments and war crimes memories—but I'm not hearing as much outrage as I'd expect.

Why? I have a feeling it's partly the outrage overload, and the fact that we don't generally watch/listen to VOA here in the states—they're not really meant for us (I should say I run into RFE written materials online all the time, and they're really well done, well sourced, good on complexities, and not tendentious), and we don't feel personally threatened by it.

And then we don't have a sense of why they'd want to destroy VOA and RFE, so it just seems more like garden-variety vandalism than anything important. For the very reason that Americans don't use them, how could they be used to further Trumpy ends? For propaganda? What's the value of propaganda that we never hear/

So, for a little paranoia, how about the following: It's not Trump that suffers from VOA and RFE and so on, but Trump's friends: Xi Jinping, Mohammad bin Salman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, and above all Bannon's Eurasianist Führer Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Some of whom have been known to provide Trump with a little election help (and Russia has been putting pressure on VOA and RFE/RL since the beginning of Trump's term, designating them as "foreign agents" back in December 2017).

Is Trump doing his friends a little favor, as friends do?