Journalist Carolina Valladares Pérez has reported from countries with authoritarian governments and risks for press professionals, including Iraq and Venezuela. What she never imagined was that it would be in the United States where the government would silence her reporting.
“I cannot believe I went to the Middle East, struggled all of that, and now that I'm in America, I face the biggest repression to my freedom of speech,” Valladares Pérez said in an interview with the LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). “It cannot happen in America. You know, I didn't go through all of that just to be silenced.”
Valladares Pérez, Washington correspondent for the Spanish-language service of Voice of America, is among the more than 1,300 employees of the state media network placed on indefinite leave by Donald Trump’s administration. Among them, 550 contractors were subsequently notified that they were being terminated on March 31.
On March 14, the president issued an executive order mandating the elimination of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees VOA and other U.S. government media outlets, such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia. The measure was accompanied by a White House statement titled “The Voice of Radical America,” in which the administration accused the outlet of promoting “radical propaganda.” The statement cited an article by Dan Robinson, a retired VOA correspondent who worked at the agency for 34 years, accusing his former employer of leftist bias.
The government’s allegations frustrated VOA journalists interviewed by LJR, who defend their neutrality and professionalism. They say Voice of America follows strict objectivity standards and has an unusually balanced political coverage, governed by a strict legal rule that ensures contrasting political views receive equal space.
These principles support a service available in nearly 50 languages, which the broadcaster says reaches more than 350 million people every week. VOA produces content for the internet, television, and radio, distributed by more than 3,500 affiliate stations and broadcasters.
In Latin America, VOA served about 450 affiliates, including radio, TV, and online platforms, ranging from large audiences to local radio stations, Valladares Pérez said. The service covered the entire region, from the U.S.-Mexico border to Central America to the Southern Cone. The interruption of service left scores of listeners without access to U.S. news, such as Norte Stereo, in the city of Cúcuta, serving some 30,000 listeners in the Colombia-Venezuela border region. The station’s director recently wrote to VOA to credit its news stories for promoting a fight against misinformation and violence, Valladares Pérez said.
“It makes you realize how much every single viewer matters, especially in regions where they might not be so close to what's happening in the US”, she said. “For us, it's important to reach everyone in the continent, it doesn’t matter the size of the audience. But, as I'm talking to you right now, I'm not creating content for our affiliate channels.”
Carolina Valladares Pérez reporting from the White House for Voice of America before the service's shutdown (Photo: Carolina Valladares Pérez/VOA)
In Latin America, VOA prioritized coverage of migration, maintaining a strong team of correspondents and contractors in Washington, Texas, Arizona, Mexico, and the region of the Northern Triangle, Valladares Pérez said. Additionally, U.S. foreign policy was a central topic, covering relations with countries such as Canada and Mexico, trade issues, and the U.S. stance on conflicts like the war in Ukraine.
“When covering immigration or congressional hearings, we always included one voice from the Democratic Party and another from the Republican Party,” Valladares Pérez said. “I wouldn't start writing a story if I had three voices from one side but none from the other. I would only begin once I had an equal number of sources from both sides—one and one, two and two, three and three.”
This rule is tied to the organization’s structure. Voice of America was created in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda. Its mission was to promote American foreign policy through engagement with foreign audiences rather than diplomats.
In 1960, former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower established a charter for the broadcaster, but its implementation was challenging, especially during the Vietnam War, when the U.S. government wanted to prevent the dissemination of bad news. Former President Gerald Ford turned this charter into law in 1976.
The law requires VOA to present “a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions”while also ensuring a broad view of life in the U.S.A 1994 law established a “firewall” to protect the outlet’s independence.
“We have a very rigorous editorial workflow with multiple rounds of editing,” Jessica Jerreat, VOA’s press freedom editor, told LJR. “We also have what we call a Balance Editor, who not only ensures accuracy but also checks how we represent everything, whether we misrepresent something, and if we need another voice.”
Jerreat oversaw a sectionon the challenges and risks faced by news media worldwide. Coverage concentrated on countries with greater media repression, such as Nicaragua, Venezuela, Russia, Belarus, Hong Kong, and Myanmar. They reported on cases like the La Prensa newspaper in Nicaragua and the jailed editor José Rubén Zamora of elPeriodico in Guatemala.
Besides challenges, they also highlighted positive developments, such as initiatives in Ghana and Kenya to combat disinformation and the work of exiled journalists from Nicaragua, Myanmar, and Ukraine.
“It can be a depressing beat, right? We know that we're seeing these civil liberties roll back”, said Jerreat. “But there's also amazing work being done. We're always looking for those small wins.”
The work of exposing information inconvenient for authoritarian governments extended to various topics. VOA, for example, had a team in Venezuela that critically covered Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian regime.
“They were our correspondence in the field. They would give us news. They interviewed [presidential candidate] Edmundo González once before the elections. So we had access to the sources in the field,” Valladares Pérez said. “Maduro didn't shut down this team. This administration did. It's super important to say that.”
Liam Scott had been a reporter at VOA since 2023, covering press freedom. His main focus was on countries like Iran, China, and Russia. He says the key difference between VOA and media outlets from America's geopolitical rivals is its editorial independence.
“We're such an important component of American public diplomacy because we really represent and embody the country's commitment to democracy and to a free press,” Scott told LJR.
The logic behind ‘public diplomacy’
According to Nicholas Cull, a historian of public diplomacy and professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, this independence is a crucial element for the agency to fulfill its role in advancing American interests.
“Historically, VOA has been very helpful to American interests, and it's also been helpful to the things that America is supposed to stand for in the world, like helping people to discover their own free media,” Cull told LJR. “But to be credible, VOA cannot be connected to the government. Just like the BBC, its credibility comes from giving all sides of a story, criticizing governments that maybe aren't used to being criticized.”
It is precisely this difficulty in accepting criticism that makes Trump turn against the broadcaster, Kate Wright, co-author of Capturing News, Capturing Democracy, told LJR. The book examines the agency and the president during his first term.
"The timing of this announcement is interesting. There's a lot of things going on in the world, including bombings of Gaza, what's happening in Ukraine, a series of mass pro-democracy protests in Hungary, Serbia and Turkey. Voice of America needs to reflect a variety of different opinions about that, and that might include criticism of the current administration," Wright said. "I think Trump may find it troubling that these journalists are federally funded, and yet they can be critical of a sitting administration. I would argue that this is precisely their role as journalists."
On Friday, unions and six VOA journalists sued USAGM, its acting director Victor Morales, and special advisor Kari Lake, challenging the outlet’s shutdown. The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, argues the government’s actions violate their First Amendment rights, which protect freedom of expression, and usurp Congress’s control over federal budget authority.
“We call it a constituional emergency case, about the destruction of a media organization,” David Seide of the Government Accountability Project, one of the lead attorneys in the case, told LJR in an interview. ““What we want as a final objective is to reinstate all employees fired. We want VOA reinstated.”
For now, the most vulnerable employees are those from authoritarian countries, who may lose their work visas and be forced to return to places where their lives could be at risk, Scott said.
“Dozens of VOA staffers in Washington are on J-1 visas, and if they lose them, they may have to return to countries whose governments have a record of jailing critics,” Scott said. “Two Russian contractors on J-1 visas who are set to be officially terminated at the end of March are considered at significant risk of being imprisoned if they return to Russia.”
Meanwhile, unable to work, Valladares Pérez defends a principle that she said is at the core of the mission she carried out at VOA.
“We don’t speak on behalf of the government. We are not spokespersons. We are journalists,” she said. “It is not up to the White House to tell us what the American interest is.”
