In Greek mythology, Cassandra’s fate was to prophesy the fall of Troy and to be ignored. Read in the final days of 2025, Kate Wright, Martin Scott, and Mel Bunce’s account of the first Trump administration’s attack on its own state-funded international broadcaster—Voice of America (VOA)—reads similarly. Today, VOA is silent. The worst has happened. But a book as carefully researched and crafted as this deserves to be considered in its own terms and not just for its value as tragic irony and a death foretold.
VoA had a history. In the run-up to its entry into the Second World War, the United States government decided to establish a state-funded radio international broadcaster of the kind already operated by most major powers of the day. In the weeks following the attack on Pearl Harbor, broadcasts began. They were eventually dubbed VoA. The service survived the war to become a key element in US Cold War “public diplomacy,” as the government’s overt approaches to world opinion became known. Its governance structures evolved. Following the end of the Cold War, VOA found itself under the “care” of a parent agency eventually known as the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). The USAGM was designed to keep political influence at bay, but insiders always suspected that, with the wrong people at the helm, it might lock political influence in. As the first Trump administration ran its course, it became apparent that VoA might indeed be under threat. The alarm bell was the appointment of an avowedly conservative documentary film producer—Michael Pack—to serve as the CEO of USAGM. Pundits feared that a Voice of Trump would soon follow. A small team of British media researchers—including an ex-BBC journalist turned professor (Wright)—honed in on the issue and began dissecting both the attacks on VOA’s editorial independence and what could be learned from them. This book is the result.
As their title suggests, Wright, Martin, and Bunce consider the crisis at VoA during the first Trump administration through the lens of state media capture. A major achievement of this book is to show how capture works. The reader should understand it not as a total absorption of the conquest variety, but rather the question of establishing a prevalence of influence, to such an extent that an entity comes to be dominated by a particular viewpoint. I see the process as akin to gravitational capture in astrophysics, whereby an asteroid or comet is pulled into a regular orbit around a planet as a moon.
Wright, Scott, and Bunce unpack their story in two ways. First, they reconstruct the history of VoA and show how controversial it has always been. The VOA charter, first articulated in 1960 and signed into law in 1976, required the Voice to be a balanced news source. But the charter did not prevent attempts at manipulation, the most serious of which occurred at the beginning of the Reagan period. Second, the authors set their stage by showing the phenomenon of state capture in other examples of public-service media around the world. Cases included the expected—Hungary, Slovakia, South Africa, and Turkey—and the less well-known like Japan, where Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK) found itself facing oversight from political appointees who denied the Nanking massacre and argued that all armies in the war had comfort women.
With the state capture playbook well established, Wright, Scott, and Bunce deliver a close reading of sources unique to this work: a trove of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. They chart moves to capture VOA by stacking its management with political allies and questioning its reportage with such vigor as to drive some journalists into self-censorship. But what they detail was something weirder than an attempt to turn VOA into a simple Trump mouthpiece. The archives show that CEO Michael Pack came to see VoA as a manifestation of a toxic and unelected globalist ideology: full of foreigners with little stake in America’s political identity and possibly already serving foreign interests. The book shows that criticism from the conservative blogosphere interacted with whistleblower testimony from inside the VOA to put the station high on the Trump agenda, not as a tool of outreach, but as a test case of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) crusade against the so-called “deep state.” This discovery explains the events that took place in late 2020 and since the book’s publication. In the final chapters, the authors describe how, in the aftermath of the 2020 election—when administrations have historically simply wound down their work before the transfer of power—VoA’s political managers kicked into ideological overdrive with politicized disciplinary measures against its White House correspondent and others. Test cases included VOA coverage of Trump’s denial of his election defeat and the Capitol riot/attempted coup of January 6, 2021.
The book ends with wise advice on how the management structures of VoA might be strengthened to safeguard the network and its peers around the world from still more determined attempts at state capture. The authors argue for clearer and more defined terms of reference, an explicit firewall between, and education for journalists on what state capture in the twenty-first century looks like.
Since this book’s writing, of course, history has moved on. First, Trump’s most ideologically charged backers—the authors of the famous Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership—identified VoA as top of a new Trump “to fix” list. Following Trump’s election victory, fears of a compromised media network returned. But VOA also faced a new foe that Wright, Scott, and Bunce did not predict: Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. Musk argued that there was no need for a VOA when the world had his social media platform, “X.” President Trump apparently agreed, and in mid-March 2025, he signed an executive order that reduced all US international broadcasting to a statutory minimum. VOA was silent in all languages but Farsi and Pashto. Its journalists were laid off, and the battle for the Voice became a legal rearguard action, hoping against hope for the network’s resurrection.
What then is the value of this foreshadowing of an institution’s end? VOA was not “captured” by some subtle stratagem of the kind identified in the book; it was crudely crushed. Yet with their account of the mounting disdain for VOA amid the end of the first Trump administration, the authors illuminate an emerging mentality on the radical right—frustrations, pet theories, and agendas that were so much worse than simply using VOA as a political megaphone. Moreover, this thoughtful, troubling book serves as a warning for the other public service broadcasters attempting to navigate the contemporary media landscape: if a broadcaster as storied as VOA can be snuffed out, who is safe? Today’s BBC is a case in point. This book should certainly inform any attempt to resurrect VOA in the future.
For this reader—a specialist not in journalism but in public diplomacy—I was haunted by a dimension beyond the scope of Wright, Scott, and Bunce’s analysis: what of its former audiences? What does it mean for the world that America’s gift of balanced news in 40+ languages has been suddenly withdrawn? Who fills the gap left? What comes next?
