Capturing State Media: Trump Edition

The weaponization of Voice of America is a preview of a second Trump term

Authoritarian regimes tend to prioritize controlling certain institutions: bureaucracy, the legal system, and higher education. Trump has shown deep interest in all. They also seek to control the press. It is easy to assume this last threat does not apply to the US. The first amendment provides strong protections to private media (although conservatives are interested in eroding those protections). The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is vulnerable to right wing threats of defunding, but NPR and PBS have other sources of funding and play a less central role in American media than, for example, the BBC does in the UK. Conservatives have their own thriving media, have captured large areas of social media, including Twitter, and have been successful at working the ref when it comes to the mainstream media. It might therefore seem that there is little reason to worry about Trump further weaponizing the press.

But there are aspects of the media that the US government does directly control and fund. Americans don’t pay a lot of attention to it, because it does not broadcast to them, but it has an outsize global presence. This is the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America, and is the primary funder of several other regional broadcasting networks. It has a budget of about $1 billion and 4,000 employees. While it does not have the same brand recognition as other media, AGM has a vast global audience. It estimates that it reachers over 420 million people weekly in 64 different languages.

So, the US government is very much in the media business, and on a global scale. To understand how that media can be weaponized by an authoritarian in the future, we just need to look back at the final months of the Trump administration.

“Gross Mismanagement” by a Trump Appointee

The tensions between journalistic integrity and politicization exploded with the arrival of Michael Pack, the chief executive of AGM. In Spring of 2020, Trump falsely accused VOA of peddling Chinese propaganda over Covid, and then pushed Pack’s nomination, which had been stalled because of Senate concerns about his ideological leanings, and financial improprieties in his business dealings. Pack headed the Claremont Institute, which has pushed anti-democratic messaging via fellows like John Eastman. Pack had also worked on documentaries produced by Steve Bannon.

Pack perfectly reflected the paranoid style of that took hold in Trump’s last year in office. After his first impeachment, loyalty mattered above all else to Trump. Pack fit that agenda. He promised “to drain the swamp, to root out corruption, and to deal with these issues of bias” — an ethos that defines how Trumpworld is approaching a second term.

The scale of Pack’s abuses only became evident after he left the agency. He profiled his employees, speculating on their political leanings, and met with officials to prioritize which of these officials should be fired because of those political beliefs. He pushed out senior officials, putting some on administrative leave for daring to disagree with him. Pack hired a conservative law firm on a no-bid contract to investigate his own employees. It cost $1.6 million dollars. He revoked security clearances from journalists who complained about his practices. He sought to put in place unqualified appointees to oversee overseas media networks, and make their tenure permanent. His political appointees either had no experience in journalism, or were aligned with right-wing media outlets such as The Daily Caller.

Pack improperly tried to block funding for one unit, The Open Technology Fund, that Congress had appropriated. He froze the funding of other units, and blocked their recruitment efforts. Pack also created instability by removing senior officials leading parts of his organization — Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Office of Cuban Broadcasting, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and the Open Technology Fund.

The complaints made by whistleblowers about Pack were largely vindicated by an investigation by the Office of Special Counsel, which found that Pack had engaged violated journalistic independence, wrongful retaliation against employees, and “gross mismanagement and gross waste.” Investigations by media, judges, and Inspectors General confirmed this picture.

Michael Pack was a terrible manager, an overzealous political hack who did not care about the law or mission of the agency. In other words, he is the template for the second term Trump appointees. Pack went further than most in his efforts, and therefore offers a warning of what a second term would look like when the Trump administration is full of loyalists who act like Pack.

Undermining Organizational Effectiveness

Because AGM employees were reporters, it was impossible that many would not talk about politics. And their work was being evaluated by political appointees who themselves were highly partisan. This is an important point, because it reflects a fundamental tension between appointees and career staff. There are some occasions when appointees pursuing their ideological goals is not democratic responsiveness, but entirely at odds with the public interest.

An excellent new book by Kate Wright, Martin Scott and Mel Bunce, Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America, details Pack’s time in charge. Much of the specifics of what Pack did have been previously reported — it turns out that taking on an organization of journalists does not result in good press. But Capturing News, Capturing Democracy not only adds more detail, it also puts the case into the historic context of how AGM has been used in the past, as well as the comparative context of how state-funded media are governed in democratic, authoritarian, and hybrid states.¹ AGM employees saw themselves as serving a role like BBC World Service, but Pack wanted to make them operate more more like Russia Today, a direct tool of state propaganda.

Capturing News, Capturing Democracy describes one anecdote that reflects the tension between Pack’s vision of a Voice for Trump and basic journalistic ethics. Pack arranged for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to visit the network. Pompeo demanded that his speech be live-streamed by VOA. In this speech, he attacked VOA for being too critical of America; their job was to promote the US as “the greatest nation the world has ever known.” The speech took place five days after January 6th, a fact Pompeo did not address in his comments. The journalists present were not permitted to ask Pompeo about the insurrection. One journalist who did yell a question at Pompeo was reassigned to other duties. Several VOA journalists wrote a formal complaint that the incident reflected the Trump administration’s desire to uncritically report political propaganda supportive of the administration.

As soon as professionals are punished for doing their job, the quality of public services slips. In this respect, having a partisan hack define what constitutes good journalism is no different than having a partisan hack tell scientists what the science on climate change or vaccines should be. For a Trump supporter, factual reporting is enough to be deemed unfairly critical of Trump. So its not surprising that Pack told conservative journalists that “People need to suffer consequences. And I think I'm getting the Voice of America to do that now.” Pack sought to eliminate the firewall between the direction of political appointees and journalistic decisions, subjecting the agency to more direct political control over its content.

Making AGM a more explicitly partisan outlet would obviously undermine its reputation for providing quality journalism, undermining trust in the organization that is central for its ability to do its job. Its a clear example of how a more partisan operation reduces the quality of agency performance, and its ability to fulfill its mission. The mission of AGM “is to inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.” It is hard to do so if the agency is, itself, dancing to an authoritarian tune. One of the most striking passages of Capturing News, Capturing Democracy is of a VOA employee saying:

We were talking about—I don’t even remember the country—people who were under an authoritarian government, and they were scared, and they were using all these hidden communication methods. And that very morning, we all started to install [the encrypted app] Signal, and I realized, “Oh my God, the thing we are talking about is starting to feel like what we’re living

Political Appointees Combining Formal Power and Informal Intimidation to Target Career Officials

Reporters described a climate of fear and reprisal within the organization. This was partly because of the formal uses of power that Pack employed. which threatened the jobs and core professional values of employees. In a second Trump term, Pack and other appointees would have more formal powers and fewer constraints. Most crucially, he would have Schedule F at his disposal. Schedule F is the Trump-era executive order that allows appointees like Pack to reclassify career employees to remove their job protections, paving a way to fire them for failing to display requisite political loyalty. Removing those he deemed politically disloyal was Pack’s goal all along, and Schedule F would give him a legal framework to do us. What were obvious political abuses of power in the first Trump term will pale when compared to what will be routine management practices in a second term. Journalists clinging to some sense of professional ethics will be shown the door.

Pack also pioneered another strategy we could expect to see in a second term: using the right wing media to demean and attack his own employees. Other federal leaders could be critical of their own employees. For example, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke suggested that 30% of his employees were not “loyal to the flag.” Pack also criticized his own employees in broad terms, suggesting they were unprofessional, biased, and part of the deep state.

If this was not demoralizing enough, individual employees were also targeted. For example, Pack released dossiers of private investigations he had undertaken of his own employees with right wing reporters. Private emails of employees also turned up on the internet, leading to concerns about digital surveillance. (Not surprisingly, VOA employees were also leaking to the press about Pack’s actions). VOA employees described an increasing sense of paranoia and fear, of feeling “beaten down.”

We should assume that such actions would become standard in a second Trump administration. A smart piece by Greg Sargent describes what a soft version of state-directed intimidation of its own employees would look like, especially as the DOJ is directed to target Trump’s enemies. Even if people have done nothing wrong, a preliminary investigation can open them up to harassment or intimidation.

Investigators start calling that person’s associates and dig through his or her records. Nothing more materializes, but it puts the target through months or years of deeply unsettling, and expensive, precarity.

The strategic use of revoking security clearances employed by Pack would destroy careers for many, especially those working in national security. Sargent quotes a lawyer who represents federal employees and intelligence officials: “It would not take much to abuse the current system in an incredibly devastating way.”

Will A Dry Run for Politicized State Media Be Realized?

Pack’s actions eventually faced pushback. But before you assume the system worked to curtail partisan abuse of an agency, please consider the following:

• It was easy to inflict serious damage in a short space of time. Pack had removed many from their jobs, and fed patterns of self-censorship among journalists after just 8 months in office. This occurred in an independent agency even as journalists and executives at VOA used a variety of legal and whistleblower objections to direct attention to what was occurring, as well as slow-walking some orders.

• Trump appointees rejected accountability. Pack resisted outside investigations, suggesting, for example that the Office of Special Counsel investigation into him was “unconstitutional” and refused to initiate an investigation into whistleblower complaints. By the time the Office of Special Counsel report was released it was the middle of 2023. If Trump had remained in office, it is doubtful that the investigation would have occurred at all. Pack ignored a Congressional subpoena to testify. He refused to sit down with reputable media organizations, but was available for right wing news media.

• The Pack model of media politicization is the Project 2025 model for a Trump second term. Pack may have broken laws, but he has faced no meaningful punishment. In fact, he is celebrated. In Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, Pack is presented as a having “rapidly initiated long-overdue and necessary reforms.” The chapter on AGM was written by one of Pack’s appointees at AGM, who was central in compiling employee dossiers and had been named in whistleblower complaints. Indeed, Pack is listed as a contributor to Project 2025, which embraces his rejection of a firewall between journalists and political appointees.

Rather than treating Pack’s tumultuous months of leadership as a cautionary tale, we should recognize that it may also have been a dry run for a more politicized state-funded media, as well as a model for how Trump loyalists will mismanage federal agencies.

The authors of Capturing News, Capturing Democracy are based in the UK, and study media in an international context. This distance from the US is useful, allowing them to put VOA into a broader context of the role of public service media in democratic backsliding. Practices of state control of media in countries like Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and South Africa reflect a form of “government capture” that was echoed in Pack’s leadership. They note that Pack’s motivation was often explicitly partisan: he was concerned about criticism of Republicans, and how coverage might affect voting intentions in the US.

Currently, VOA does not directly broadcast to Americans, but Capturing News, Capturing Democracy points out that a President looking to create a form of domestic state media has few technical barriers to block him from doing so. The experience of AGM reflects how much the protections against politicization have been dependent on norms, rather than unambiguous rules. Since Congress can no longer assume such norms can hold, clearer rules constraining politicization are needed. The only problem is the party doing the politicization does not agree.

1. Scholars of the media use different terminology to signal the relationship between state-funded media and state control. “Public service media” typically operate in democracies and have a high measure of editorial independence. “State media” typically operate in authoritarian countries, lack editorial independence, and are more straightforwardly propaganda operations. In between the two poles are “captured media” which typically feature in countries undergoing democratic backsliding, like Turkey or Hungary, and where editorial independence is being whittled away. Using these terms, Pack followed the pattern of “capturing” a public service media, moving it closer to the “state media” category.