On March 14, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order reducing “statutory functions of unnecessary governmental entities to what is required by law.”

Among other institutions, the order targets the United States Agency for Global Media and the broadcast media it operates and funds: Voice of America, Radio and Television Martí, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

At less than one 6,750th of last year’s $6.75 trillion federal spending, USAGM may seem like small potatoes, but as the late US Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL) reportedly said, “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” And good reasons for wadding up the agency and tossing it in the dustbin of history go far beyond the financial.

What are the agency and its outlets, really? In a word, propaganda.

Their entire purpose is and always has been to regale the world — especially that portion of its population ruled by non-US-approved governments — with the US government’s take on every event and every issue.

While that approach never seemed very much like what America advertises itself as, it may have made at least a little sense during the Cold War when Radio Moscow and China Radio International likewise spread their regimes’ messages via the airwaves.

Now, though, in addition to not reflecting supposed American values (you know, free speech and free press instead of government propaganda), those state-operated broadcast media are beyond redundant.

These days, US “mainstream private sector” media — print, radio, television, and Internet — go toe-to-toe with competitors (state-operated and “private sector” alike) worldwide, reaching far more people than their USAGM predecessors.

And, for the most part and in most respects,  those “private sector” platforms have long since brought their editorial lines into compliance with the US regime’s every whim.

Yes, American media tend to segregate along partisan lines, but they’re generally all MURKA! (as defined by Washington, DC) all the time, from Fox News on the “right” to MSNBC on the “left.” Each of those outlets, and many others, dispose of budgets several times that of USAGM while serving as, effectively, government stenographers without tax funding from Congress.

I’d personally prefer a more combative and inquisitive American press to “private sector” government propaganda mills, but that ship has sailed. Why continue paying government to do what it’s managed to cow the “private sector” into doing for it? Give USAGM the ax.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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