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'Stuff of Parody': Trump Taps Election-Denying Ally Kari Lake to Run Voice of America
"Authoritarians love to control and instrumentalize media organizations, especially state-funded ones," journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote in response to the news.
Dec 12, 2024
President-elect Donald Trump said Wednesday that he has chosen Kari Lake, a far-right election denier and failed U.S. Senate candidate, to lead the federally funded international broadcast network Voice of America, a move that critics said underscores Trump's effort to transform government entities into vehicles to advance his own interests.
In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote that as director of VOA, Lake would "ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media."
Lake, a former television news anchor in Arizona who has echoed Trump's insidious attacks on journalists, wrote in response to the president-elect's announcement that she was "honored" to be asked to lead VOA, which she characterized as "a vital international media outlet dedicated to advancing the interests of the United States by engaging directly with people across the globe and promoting democracy and truth." VOA, which is supposed to have editorial independence, has long faced criticism for its coverage and treatment of employees.
Though the VOA's Charter states that the outlet will "present a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions," Lake made clear that she views the network as a propaganda channel for the United States.
"Under my leadership, the VOA will excel in its mission: chronicling America's achievements worldwide," Lake, an outspoken Trump loyalist, wrote Wednesday.
Hours after Trump's announcement that she's his pick to lead VOA, Lake applaudedTIME magazine for naming Trump its "Person of the Year" and gushed that he "should have been the Person of the Year every year for the last decade."
Journalists and watchdogs expressed a mixture of alarm and mockery in response to Trump's attempt to elevate Lake to VOA director.
"Kari Lake as (head of) Voice of America is the stuff of parody. Or tragedy," Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, wrote on social media. "VOA matters."
Zeteo's Mehdi Hasan added that "authoritarians love to control and instrumentalize media organizations, especially state-funded ones."
"Good luck to the VOA," he wrote.
VOA is the largest federally funded international broadcaster and is overseen by the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
It is not clear whether Trump will be able to easily install Lake as VOA director. The Washington Post noted that "under rules passed in 2020, the VOA director is appointed by a majority vote of a seven-member advisory board."
"Six members of the board are named by the president and require Senate consent, and the seventh member is the secretary of state," the Post explained.
During his first term in the White House, Trump's pick to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media worked aggressively to influence VOA coverage.
"In 2020, Mr. Trump appointed Michael Pack, an ally of his former aide Stephen K. Bannon, to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media," The New York Timessummarized on Thursday. "Mr. Pack was accused of trying to turn Voice of America into a mouthpiece for the Trump administration, and a federal judge ruled that Mr. Pack had violated the First Amendment rights of the outlet's journalists. A federal investigation later found that Mr. Pack had grossly mismanaged the U.S. Agency for Global Media, repeatedly abusing his power by sidelining executives he felt did not sufficiently support Mr. Trump."
The far-right Project 2025 agenda, which some members of the incoming Trump administration helped craft, includes a section that proposes placing the U.S. Agency for Global Media "under the supervision of the [White House National Security Council], the State Department, or both."
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The FCC as Trump's Right-Wing 'Speech Police'
Brendan Carr pretends to be a defender of free-speech rights when it suits his right-wing agenda but disappears into the ether when he should be protecting expression that doesn’t align with Trump’s authoritarian aims.
Dec 06, 2024
President-Elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the Federal Communications Commission has an on-again/off-again relationship with the First Amendment.
Brendan Carr pretends to be a defender of free-speech rights when it suits his right-wing agenda but disappears into the ether when he should be protecting expression that doesn’t align with Trump’s authoritarian aims.
His mind-bending inconsistencies on free-speech rights would sound alarms under normal circumstances, especially for someone tapped to lead the federal agency that oversees the media sector. But these aren’t normal times. And Carr’s dodgy doublespeak on government censorship seems designed to please an incoming president who’s intent on undermining the essential freedoms that flow from the First Amendment.
Carr vs. the facts
During a September hearing before the House of Representatives, Carr refused to speak out against Trump’s suggestion that ABC should lose its broadcast licenses because two of its journalists had fact checked the former president during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. Instead he told members of the House Commerce Committee that the law and the First Amendment guide all of his decisions — an assertion that doesn’t withstand even the slightest scrutiny.
Carr has already weaponized his future role as the government’s top media regulator by threatening to shut down the speech of anyone who questions Trump’s leadership.
In an October Fox News interview, Carr came after CBS for airing an edited interview with Harris during 60 Minutes. Editing interviews is a standard practice of television journalism, but Carr suggested that CBS violated the FCC’s seldom-invoked news-distortion policy, adding that the government could punish the network. In particular, he said that the 60 Minutes interview could factor into the agency’s review of the Skydance-Paramount merger (Paramount is CBS’ parent company).
Carr then took to Twitter to attack NBC after Kamala Harris appeared on Saturday Night Live, wrongly calling it “a clear and blatant effort to evade the equal time rule” — even though NBC did provide Trump equal time later that same weekend. Carr suggested on a subsequent Fox News appearance that the FCC should “keep every remedy on the table,” including revoking the broadcast licenses of local television stations owned by NBC and Telemundo, subsidiaries of Comcast.
“The FCC traditionally avoids regulating broadcast radio and television content except in extremely narrow circumstances, such as indecency,” Free Press Co-CEO Jessica J. González wrote in a commentary for The Hill. “ … Carr has shown that he is willing to break with [this] longstanding and bipartisan FCC precedent to punish Trump’s detractors.”
America’s top censor
In November, Carr went on the attack again. In a letter addressed to the CEOs of the world’s largest technology platforms, he argues that they are facilitating “censorship” by allowing fact checking on their sites — something they as private companies have an unambiguous First Amendment right to do. In Carr’s distorted view, however, such fact checking violated Americans’ right to be misinformed.
Carr is “rushing to be America’s top censor,” Mike Masnick, a widely read champion of the First Amendment, wrote at Techdirt. “Threatening to revoke broadcast licenses over unfavorable coverage is a blatant First Amendment violation. The government cannot use its licensing power to control or punish the speech of private actors. Carr surely knows this but doesn’t seem to care.”
It’s hard to comprehend how anyone who’s read the 45 words of the First Amendment could come away with such a blatant misunderstanding of its intent. Carr’s recent actions have made it necessary to repeat the obvious: The First Amendment protects people from government censorship; it does not protect government actors like Trump and Carr from criticism and fact checking.
Turning the FCC into the ‘roving speech police’
Carr has already weaponized his future role as the government’s top media regulator by threatening to shut down the speech of anyone who questions Trump’s leadership.
But it wasn’t long ago that Carr was preaching from a different pulpit, although with the same aim: to silence opposing views and advance his highly partisan agenda.
In March 2020 — as the global pandemic set in — Free Press called on the FCC to offer guidance on its interpretation of the agency’s “broadcast-hoax rule.” At the time a number of licensed broadcasters had aired false and misleading information about the COVID-19 crisis without providing the kinds of context or disclaimers the rule suggests.
Rather than take up Free Press’ good-faith suggestion, Carr went on the attack, making the false claim that our media-democracy organization “want[ed] to turn the FCC into a roving speech police empowered to go after the left’s political opponents” (emphasis added).
In actuality, the Free Press petition merely asks the FCC to issue guidance on the broadcasting of disinformation about COVID-19 at a time when thousands of Americans had already succumbed to the disease.
Violating his First Amendment oath
Carr auditioned for the lead part at the FCC by repeatedly threatening to do what he once falsely accused Free Press of doing: turning the agency into the “roving speech police.” And his anti-free-speech stridency has captured the attention of Elon Musk, who has leveraged his control of X’s algorithms to amplify Carr’s tweets — while positioning his broadband access company Starlink to benefit from potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in government grants that flow through the FCC.
As Masnick wrote: “Carr is smart and he knows exactly what he’s doing here. He is couching his extreme censorial desires in the language of free speech, knowing that most people won’t know enough or understand the details and nuances to recognize what he’s doing.”
Free Press is tracking Carr’s First-Amendment flip flops very closely, and exercising our right to call out Trump’s pick to chair the FCC whenever he fails to honor his sworn oath “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Carr is duty bound to ensure that government forces don’t restrict the speech of private individuals and entities. As the recent past shows, however, he routinely fails to protect free speech with any consistency, preferring to wrap himself in dishonest rhetoric about the First Amendment as he pursues his — and Trump’s — desire to censor others.
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The World Knows Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza
And no amount of Israeli or U.S. government propaganda will change that.
Dec 05, 2024
The ongoing war and genocide in Gaza is unprecedented. Nothing that Israel and its supporters can say or do will avoid the historical accountability of the extermination of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
The above assertion is critical, both for ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine and achieving Palestinian freedom. This is why.
In all past wars and adjoining war crimes, Israel managed to push the reset button in its relationship with occupied Palestinians.
Following each war, the Israeli hasbara, propaganda machine, would start - utilizing the always-willing western mainstream media - to paint Palestinians in a negative light and to present Israel, a country that is supposedly in a permanent state of self-defense, as the victim, or even the lone defender of western civilization.
This campaign is always paralleled with the whitewashing of Israel in popular entertainment, from Hollywood movies to TV sit-coms, to magazine covers with such titles as “Gorgeous Photos Capture The Unseen Lives Of Female Soldiers In Israel”.
Generally, Western politicians of varied ideologies, along with intellectuals, news talking heads and church leaders all praise, in tandem, the miracle that is Israel.
At the beginning of Israel's genocidal war in October 2023, for example, British playwright Tom Stoppard said that “before we take up a position on what’s happening now, we should consider whether this is a fight over territory or a struggle between civilization and barbarism.” He, of course, leaned towards the latter.
This Israeli tactic always includes the demonization of Palestinians as well, where the victim becomes the ‘terrorist’ and those under siege become the besiegers. This last claim, in particular, was expressed in the words of former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright who said, in an interview with NBC in August 2000, that “the Israelis feel under siege from the Palestinian rock throwers and the various gangs that have been roaming around.”
Why will those same Israeli tactics fail this time? Indeed, they will fail, not due to Israel’s lack of trying. In fact, Israel is already bracing for the fight of a lifetime.
One new tactic that Israel is already employing in ‘friendly’ countries, like the United States, is the passing of laws to block the mere conversation on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, so that it will have exclusive access to the American public.
On November 14, the US House of Representatives passed two bills: H.R.6408 and H.R.9495. The latter, in particular, aimed at giving the Treasury Secretary the authorization to revoke an organization's tax-exempt status and decide when the designation would end.
Now, there can be no reset buttons. Rather, the global momentum of Palestine's liberation will accelerate in the coming months and years.
Once these bills pass the Senate and are approved by the president, the most democratic and peaceful expressions of rejecting the Israeli occupation of Palestine and demanding sensible US foreign policy will be equated to a direct violation of the law and, in some cases, to terrorism - as defined by the Department of Treasury, at the behest of the pro-Israeli lobby.
But even these desperate attempts will not quell the anger or distract from the conversation, for the following reasons:
One, not only did Israel commit genocide in the Gaza Strip, but this genocide and extermination are being investigated and are acknowledged by the world’s largest legal institutions, namely the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Two, unlike previous investigations, for example, the Goldstone Report probing the 2008-09 war on Gaza, the international community has already taken some practical steps to hold Israeli war criminals accountable, including an arrest warrant issued on November 21 against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Three, those who routinely come to Israel’s defense, the US and other Western governments, are now directly clashing with the very international law they helped articulate after World War II, depriving them of any credibility as ‘neutral’ parties in this conflict.
For example, Biden said that the warrants were “outrageous” while the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs claimed that Netanyahu and other ministers enjoy immunity since Israel is not a party to the ICC.
Four, despite the inherent bias of western media, Palestinian journalists, isolated and killed in large numbers, managed to communicate the genocide to the rest of the world, making it impossible for Israel to hide its crimes.
Five, the impact of the Israeli genocide on Gaza has already penetrated the various layers of public opinion, unprecedented in history.
Typically, the conversation on Palestine is confined to specific strata of society, reaching academics, social justice activists and other groups interested in politics and global issues.
Today, ordinary people have been made aware of the conversation, to the extent that it is widely believed that anger over Gaza has contributed in determining the outcome of the latest US elections.
In Africa, the growing political and public interest in the Palestinian struggle have re-enlivened the spirit of anti-colonial, liberation struggles on the continent, bringing many countries, from South Africa to Algeria, back to the frontlines of global solidarity.
No amount of Israeli propaganda, unjust laws, unfair categorizations of Palestinians or the hardly-clad models of the IDF, will ever succeed in reversing these realities.
Now, there can be no reset buttons. Rather, the global momentum of Palestine's liberation will accelerate in the coming months and years.
The price exacted from the Palestinian people for this earth-shattering moment has been high and painful, but the history of all national liberation struggles, Palestine included, demonstrates that the price for freedom is always high.
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