Credit: Public domain.
One of the casualties of the Donald Trump administration’s cutting spree was the Voice of America, a US-state funded broadcaster that ended news reporting as of March 15 and shuttered as a practical matter on June 20. Established in 1942, VOA has operated in Korea since even before the country won independence from Imperial Japan in 1945. From the Korean War and the division of the Korean Peninsula onward, VOA acted as a mix of straight news reporting and information propaganda toward North Korea.
Until it was shut down, VOA broadcast radio and television signals into North Korea, giving the people living under communist dictatorship a window onto the outside world. It played a similar role in South Korea during the military rule of the 1980s. A recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review lamented VOA’s shutdown in Korea as “unilateral disarmament in the global information war.”
Others are not so sure - not celebrating VOA’s shutdown, but not mourning it either. When it comes to its South Korean operation, it was an open secret that as a practical matter, VOA was operating two siloed divisions: an English-language news service with professional journalists hewing to rigorous editorial standards, and a Korean-language service staffed with anti–North Korea ideologues focused on pushing out naked right-wing propaganda.
The English-language division had little control over the Korean-language division, which did hardly any independent reporting. Rather, VOA’s Korean-language division served to launder South Korean conservative talking points as independent international journalism, which then would be used by the Korean right-wing as a cudgel to attack their liberal opponents. In December 2024, the Democratic Party 민주당 publicly called out this practice, decrying VOA Korea’s characterization of Yoon Suk-yeol 윤석열’s impeachment as a potential danger to the US-South Korea alliance.