How Voice of America lost the plot

Last week, a reporter attending an Oval Office press availability asked President Trump about his “plan to expel Palestinians out of Gaza.” The president correctly denied there was any such a plan and asked the reporter who she was with.When she answered Voice of America, Trump rolled his eyes and said dismissively, “Oh, no wonder.”Two days later the reporter and everyone else at VOA were put on administrative leave.The timing was a coincidence, but VOA should have seen it coming.Fundamental change is desperately needed in America’s broken public diplomacy system.

Storied institutions that achieved critical success during the Cold War, such as VOA, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, are a shadow of their former selves.Now we have Persian-language broadcasts that promote the interests of the Iranian mullahs, partisan political messaging aimed at domestic US audiences and reporters who think that criticizing the president is their daily job.A series of reorganizations during the “end of history” euphoria in the 1990s detached the government information networks from their mission to support US national strategy and focused them on generic journalism with no clear objective.A complex system of oversight boards and a congressionally mandated firewall insulated the agencies from White House influence and oversight.The result was a steady slide into irrelevance.The agencies became plagued by low morale, security violations and budget waste.Foreign language services designed to promote American ideals in authoritarian countries instead echoed propaganda from the very regimes the US was seeking to undermine.Even then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2013 that the information agencies were “practically defunct in terms of [their] capacity to be able to tell a message around the world.”President Trump has tried to fix this problem once before.

Late in his first term he appointed filmmaker Mich...