- From World War II through the Cold War and into this century, the voice of America and its journalists demonstrated the strength and power of a free society and the weakness of America's enemies.

Now, this week's guest, a seasoned veteran of VOA, finds herself at the heart of a legal battle over the future existence of the Voice of America.

She's Patsy Widakuswara, this week, on "Story of the Public Square".

(upbeat music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square", where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And I'm joined this week by Patsy Widakuswara, a world class journalist for The Voice of America.

Her most recent assignment was as White House Bureau Chief.

Patsy, thank you so much for being with us today.

- My pleasure, Jim.

Thank you for having me.

- You know, I was excited to have you on, you were on the other podcast that I host, "The Active Measures Newsletter" podcast.

We had a great conversation a few months ago, but I wanted to bring you on here as well because there's so much happening in this space around VOA, the lawsuit's progressing.

We're gonna get into all of that, but for folks who maybe don't know what VOA is, could you give us maybe a little crash course and what the Voice of America is and does around the world?

- So we are an international broadcaster.

Most people think of us off just radio.

You know, they have this idea of VOA as, you know, the the radio that people huddle around during the Cold War era.

But we've actually had most of our audience, the lion share of our audience from television.

We broadcast in 49 languages around the world, and we reach a weekly audience of 360 million people.

I mean, imagine that, like what American broadcaster could even dream of having that kind of audience around the world?

And not only do we have their attention, we have their trust.

Survey after survey shows that these people around the world listen to VOA because we do not broadcast propaganda.

From our first broadcast, our promise to the world was, the news may be good, the news may be bad, we will bring you the truth.

And we have committed to that promise.

For 83 years, we have delivered impartial, factual, balanced, comprehensive news to people for 83 years.

And we are mandated to do so by Congress because Congress is the one who fund us.

So your taxpayer dollars are the ones that fund this independent journalism that supports US national interests around the world.

- And how, say a little bit more about how that, how the International Broadcasting supports US interests internationally.

- Well, this idea that a free press is foundational to a healthy democracy, right?

Like that this, this independent journalism helps people make informed choices about who they vote for, how they behave in society and so on.

That idea has been so foundational and crucial to this American ideals, right?

This is what we export, this is what we embody and what we export around the world, and this is what we believe in and our charter mandates us to do so, the VOA charter that says that we have to provide comprehensive, reliable, we have to be an authoritative source of news and reliable source of news to people around the world, particularly in places where freedom of the press is in short supply.

So we are directly related to that because, you know, we are part of what's called American Soft Power.

This ability to convince people of American ideals, not by force, but by persuasion.

- You know, so you mentioned origins in the Second World War 83 years ago, a long Cold War history.

Take us to 2025.

And now the President Donald Trump is back in office the second time.

Elon Musk calls for its closure, along with Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty.

And then on March 12th, 2025, you were personally rebuked by the president in a press conference in the Oval Office.

Take us back to that exchange.

What happened?

- Yeah, so I was at the Oval Office at that day because I was what's part of the radio pool.

So VOA is part of the White House pool rotation, and that was my time to be radio pool that day.

And it was the visit by the Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin.

And I knew that the Prime Minister was under a lot of pressure domestically to stand up against President Trump on the issue of Gaza, as you know, Ireland is one of the few states that supports Palestinian statehood.

So I had asked the Prime Minister a couple of questions, including whether he plans to discuss with President Trump, the president's plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza, which was something that the president had been, you know, openly talking about for the past few weeks before that exchange.

And before the Prime Minister could answer, the President said, "Nobody is expelling Palestinians from Gaza.

Who are you with?"

Right?

So this question of who are you with, is just something that we, white House Press Corps, we get a lot from the President and we're pretty much immune to it.

So, I mean, I've gotten it before, in the past in 2020, I believe it was over a question over COVID.

So I said, "I'm with Voice of America, sir."

And then the president sort of dismissed me saying, "Voice of America, no wonder."

And then two days later, he released an executive order, essentially dismantling our parent agency, the United States Agency for Global Media, or USAGM.

Now, I don't believe that that interaction was a thing that prompted him to release the order, because when you move back, if you look at Project 2025, they have a whole chapter on USAGM and VOA, and they wanted to restructure VOA, they wanted to change it or cut it, or it's not clear what they want, and it depends on who you're talking to.

So that was what happened.

And since then, since March 14th, since the EO came out, the next day, we got an email telling everybody basically that you are on administrative leave.

We are blocked from our newsrooms, we are blocked from our computers and our laptops.

And we have been in that sort of limbo since then.

But of course, you know, I and a couple of other colleagues went to court, we took the administration to court, and here we are.

- You know, so there's a lot to unpack there.

So when they issue that executive order beginning to dismantle the US Agency for Global Media, the parent organization of VOA, what does that mean practically?

You mentioned that you were put on administrative leave.

Is that for everybody at VOA?

What actually happens across the organization?

- So since March 15th, everybody was put on leave, and then at that time they were saying all the contractors were fired.

So you can imagine the contractors were given two weeks.

Basically they were going to be fired by the end of March.

This impacts around about 500 contractors.

Now, obviously this is a shock to a lot of people.

You know, a lot of people depend on their livelihood from VOA.

I mean, I had somebody in my team who just, who gave birth two days after that, a contractor who gave birth two days after that, she gave birth to twins.

You know, they were premature, they were in NICU.

And so I thought this was something that I cannot stand for and I needed to do something about it.

But just to back up again, so the contractors were fired, the staff, the full-time employees, they were put on admin leave, which means we cannot work even though we're still being paid.

And basically everything is silence, right?

Like our broadcast stops.

If you look at viewingnews.com right now, it's suspended in time.

The last story was from March 15th.

My last story was from March 14th.

So that's effectively silencing VOA, silencing the information that we usually give out to our 360 million audiences around the world.

And since then, the administration has taken additional steps, including canceling all the transmissions and close and you know, the most recent one is closing foreign bureaus, telling us to bring back our equipment and a lot of other actions that really just goes against what the judges ordered, which was to continue to maintain BOA's operations.

- Well, so this is, this is sort of the central question as I've watched this admittedly from afar, this is money appropriated by Congress that the president is simply refusing to spend?

There seems to be a very fundamental constitutional issue here.

- Yeah, I mean, that's exactly what we're saying in our lawsuit.

Our lawsuit basically stands on two legal argument.

The first one is that, you know, we are mandated by Congress and we are funded by Congress.

So this, what the administration is trying to do is in effect executive overreach.

That's one angle of our lawsuit.

And the other angle is that what the President is doing with the White House, making very clear that our independent journalism does not align with the President's agenda.

What effectively they're doing is viewpoint discrimination, which is a violation of the First Amendment.

So yeah, you're absolutely right.

Congress has given us funding to spend for 2025, and that money is not being spent because they're not, I mean, they're paying us, but they're not paying us for doing for doing any kind of programming.

You know, we're not out there covering the news.

We're not going to, you know, presidential trips with the president to cover what he's doing.

And in effect, we are ceding our ability to fight, to promote the American voice on the global information space.

And if anything, I believe that is the real waste of money.

- You know, so I wanna get into sort of the, what we've lost in by silencing VOA.

But I wanna linger a little bit more on the legal issues, because there have been back and forths in courts for the last, I guess, nine months now.

Where do things stand?

We're taping this in the first part of December, 2025.

Where do things stand in the lawsuit as of this taping?

- Yeah, so just to give your viewers a little bit of a background.

In April, so we sued basically in less than a week after we were put on admin leave.

We have a great team of lawyers who are supporting us.

We have the backing the lawsuit that I'm plaintiff, Widakuswara V Lake, that's the name of the lawsuit because it's myself as the lead plaintiff and Kari Lake and other leadership in USAGM.

So it's myself and then the VOA press Freedom Editor, Jessica Jerreat and Kate Neeper who's a director of strategy in USAGM and four other journalists were John Does because, you know, these are the journalists who have J-1 Visa, so-called J-1 Visas, that's tied to their employment.

So if they are no longer employed by VOA, they have to be sent back home.

And some of them must be, must go back to countries that are hostile to VOA journalists where they will be in risk of harm.

We also have four other co-plaintiffs, the labor unions as well as Reporters Without Borders.

So we put together this lawsuit and all the plaintiffs got together in less than a week.

And then in the end of March, a judge gave us a temporary restraining order to the administration.

And then in April, another judge gave a preliminary injunction based on three things, basically, number one, to restore the jobs and employment status of all VOA employees and contractors.

Number two, restore the grants for our sister networks, Radio Free Asia, as well as Middle East Broadcasting Network.

And then number three is to restore VOA programming, resume VOA programming to its mandated as required by law.

So the government challenge number one and number two, but said that they are complying with number three.

They said that they are, you know, operating VOA according to the minimum required by law, because what they have done is brought back some of our colleagues, and they are broadcasting in like very, I mean, I wouldn't even call it journalism because, you know, this is just like a skeleton crew broadcasting in Mandarin, Farsi, Dari, and Pashto.

It's unclear why they picked those four languages.

And in fact, you know, they're not really producing any journalism, as I said, because we no longer have journalists out on the streets to do the reporting.

We no longer have the wires like AP, Reuters and AFP, and we really don't have any of the resources to do real journalism.

So that was back in April, and here we are in December, and the judge has repeatedly asked the government to share their plans about VOA, you know, to answer our questions, what are you planning to do with VOA?

Because so far we haven't seen any plans or any strategy moving forward, what they're going to do with this money that the Congress has already appropriated.

So the government has continuously denied giving, you know, rejected that request, not providing the information that the judge needed.

And in December, they have requested an extension and we have refused that.

And right now we are just waiting for the judge to determine, and it could come January or even sooner.

- It's a remarkable turn of events.

You mentioned your colleagues who contractors and direct employees of VOA who had their lives disrupted.

I'm also mindful of the fact that there are a number of individuals held in prisons and in captivity around the world because they were journalists working for VOA.

What happens to them amidst all of this lockdown on what VOA's activities are here in the United States?

- Yeah, this is the most sad and concerning thing I think that's coming out of this because these are journalists, as you said, who are, you know, who believe in America, who came here leaving their country, their family and their lives to work for us, for the Voice of America.

And suddenly their employment was taken away and therefore their visa status is also taken away.

And they have to return to countries that are, some of them hostile to the work where they may be jailed or even worse, you know, countries like Russia, China, Vietnam, Yanmar, Belarus and so on.

So we already have colleagues who are right now in detention in various places around the world that, there's about eight or nine of them, I believe.

And we've just had really great, amazing news just a couple of days ago that one of our colleagues, a contributor from the VOA Burmese service was released from detention as part of a mass amnesty by the Burmese government.

But there are still many others who are in jail.

And there are also this other group of VOA journalists who are now just sort of waiting to see what will happen to them.

And we're really trying to help them with, you know, immigration lawyers funding and so on to make sure that they are safe.

- Yeah.

How did you come to work for VOA, Patsy?

- So I came to VOA in 2003 working for the VOA Indonesian service, because that's where I came from.

I was born and raised in Indonesia, and you know, I've been in, with VOA since then for 2020, for 22 years.

And I was with the Indonesian service until 2018, a year after I became a citizen, and was able to apply for, you know, these so-called like central news positions and start reporting from the White House in English, not just in Indonesian.

So I came to VOA because I believed in the mission.

I believe that, you know, it's fascinating to be able to broadcast as a journalist without any kind of pressure, editorial pressure or financial, you know, commercial pressure.

And in fact, it was working for American outlets that inspired me to become a journalist in the first place.

It was back in 1998, I was a student at University of Indonesia, and at that time it was the ouster of Suharto, the Indonesian president who ruled for over 30 years.

And I was marching with my student activist friends, as well as working for American outlets who came to cover that.

And I was working as a fixer for Fox News and then for NBC news.

And I saw that these journalists were just amazing because they were just covering and reporting without fear or favor.

And I decided right then that's what I wanna do with the rest of my life.

I wanna do this.

So it's really mind boggling that 27 years later, I'll be suing, I'm actually suing the US government to defend that right to report freely.

- That's a remarkable story.

Where's Congress in all of this?

It's in the courts.

But you know, when I spent time up on the hill, there were conservative members of the US Senate and House of Representatives, legitimate members of the GOP, who would talk passionately about the need to improve international information capabilities.

Are there allies on both sides of the aisle supporting efforts to save VOA now?

- Well, we've always had bipartisan support, right?

Like this idea of exporting freedom of the press as something foundational to democracy was something embraced by both sides of the aisle until this year, essentially.

And so right now we do have a lot of support from Democrats, and we do have some support from, you know, congressional lawmakers who believe that VOA is a very important tool in American soft power, an arsenal in American public diplomacy, and needed to push back against the adversaries, propaganda and disinformation from, you know, from Moscow, from Beijing.

And just to underscore that fact, Moscow and Beijing are happy that we have been silenced.

I mean, you can see this from the statements for example, RT's executive editor or editor in chief who said that, you know, we've been trying to target them for years, and now they've been targeted by their own government.

So they are happy because they are filling in the void.

All those radio stations, television stations around the world, and there are thousands of them.

We have thousands of affiliates around the world who used to carry our programming, now carry content from RT or (speaking foreign language) or CGTN or Sputnik, because they must continue to keep their programmings on air.

- That's a remark, so broadcast time that had been dedicated to Voice of America has now been replaced with content from Russia Today and the Chinese State Broadcaster.

- Yeah, in many places around the world.

I mean, just as an example, I work, I used to work at an Indonesian national television station in Jakarta, broadcast in Indonesian, but they also had a segment, a program in Mandarin for Indonesian Chinese diaspora.

Now, when we were still broadcasting, we used to have a segment coming out of the White House given by somebody from my team, our Mandarin correspondent, since March, because we can no longer provide that content.

Guess whose content they're taking?

And they're taking CGTN and this is happening all around the world.

We see this in Latin America, we see this in Africa.

I mean, in the African content, there was research that came out recently from the Council of European Foreign Relations that said that Russia is massively expanding its presence in the African continent.

They are training journalists, they're taking them to Russian occupied territories in Ukraine.

And you know, they're creating this industry basically of ensuring that influencers and journalists parrot Russian propaganda.

And of course, China is doing the same thing.

- You know, and with this news, just the day before we taped this episode, that the Voice of America was going to shutter its international news bureaus and some marketing offices around the world, one of the things that the administration was claiming in their report to Congress on this was that the reporting would continue and they would just, they would call in contractors as needed, as events warranted.

And they were trying to cover some breaking news in some part of the world.

Why is that not sufficient?

- Well, I think I commented in that report by saying that that is a really absurd idea.

It's like calling in meteorologists only when it rains, right?

I mean, you know, that's not how a newsroom works, right?

I mean, we have to be ready when news breaks.

We can't be like, oh, news break, let's hire contractors.

And then two weeks later, oh, we have some contractors, and then two weeks later, oh, those contractors are onboarded.

The news would've gone.

Right?

I mean, it just doesn't make any sense.

So this idea of just hiring people when we need them, maybe in other industries, but certainly not in the news industry, - Is VOA prohibitively or is the US Agency for Global media more generally, are any of these international information activities super expensive?

I mean, what, what kind of money are we talking about saving with the shutdown of these programs?

- So last year our budget was $260 million.

That's about one fifth of a Patriot missile battery.

You know, it's about, what, $50 million less than the White House, the new White House ballroom.

And if you calculate it per American taxpayer, it's a $1.60 per year.

- Wow.

- So for the price of a third of your cappuccino, you are supporting American soft power.

You are providing independent journalism to 360 million people around the world.

And we have given up.

Why, why are we giving that up?

Why are we, as one commentator put it, why are we unilaterally disarming ourselves in the global information space?

And something that I would like to know as well.

- Yeah, it's a legitimate question.

What do international audiences lose with the silencing of VOA?

- They lose independent journalism that shows them facts about the United States and about the world, and they lose a source that is credible and authoritative, and they lose something that's not propaganda.

And what they're getting right now is either propaganda from their own government or propaganda from us adversaries.

Right?

And there's been, there's been some discussion about why, about, you know, how VOA should just be an outlet that broadcast something that's more aligned to American foreign policy, for example.

I also think that's not a good idea because for one, American foreign policy and priorities changes with administrations, right?

And so we can't, we can't have the trust of audiences when we say something, we say, you know, we say we believe in this doctrine this year, and then completely different in four years from now.

So it's really important to keep that kind of balance factual and non-biased news, because that is what the audience want.

Audiences who live in these places without press freedom, they can spot propaganda a mile away.

And that's why they trust VOA.

- In previous administrations, have you felt editorial pressure, for lack of a better term, have you felt, I don't know if in the, when you first started working for VOA in the first decade of this century, America was neck deep in the war on terror.

Are there editorial decisions that, like the White House wants us focused on Islamic extremism, right?

- Yeah.

- And is that the same as what we're seeing now out of the Trump administration?

- No, you're absolutely right.

I mean, each administration does wanna put its own stamp, right?

Because we are technically a federal agency, even though we are protected by laws to be independent, we are still part of the federal agency.

And, you know, administrations in the past have tried to put in their own stamp of what we should do.

As you mentioned under the Obama administration, there was a big push for us to produce more content that would counter extremist, violent extremism, for example.

So yes, of course we opened up a countering violent extremism desk.

We focus on those kinds of stories.

But, you know, in terms of the editorial independence, we are very protective of that.

And we ensure that there is no interference from anyone.

And in fact, that's what the VOA charter and the VOA firewall is all about.

Like executive or anybody outside of VOA cannot mandate what we broadcast to the world.

They can say, we would like you to produce more content of this kind, and we can consider that.

But in terms of editorial balance, it is our purview, and that is protected by law.

What is different between this administration and previous administration is that, to my recalling, there has never been an administration that just downright doesn't believe in the principle that VOA should produce independent journalism, and that is of value to the American people.

- Patsy Widakuswara, we could talk to you for another week.

Thank you so much for your work and for everything you're doing with VOA, That's all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square", you can find the show on social media or visit salve.edu/pellCenter where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

Thank you for joining us.

I'm Jim Ludes, inviting you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square".

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