Voice of America’s Persian Service began airing in its current form in 1979, shortly after the Iranian Revolution toppled the Shah and installed the Islamist clerics who rule the country to this day. V.O.A. was created by the U.S. government to tell America’s story to the world, and, for decades, the Persian Service was one of its largest departments, producing news reports and talk shows that at times reached close to a quarter of Iran’s adults. In February, when the United States and Israel launched coördinated air strikes on Iran, the Persian Service had no journalists reporting in the region. Its programming was limited to an hour a day, several employees said. “Normally, we would have correspondents on the Iranian border, talking to people who were leaving the country, getting firsthand accounts,” a V.O.A. journalist who has worked closely with the Persian Service told me. “Now we barely do any of our own reporting. I’m here only to be here when we rebuild this place so that somebody is still here who knows what we used to be.” (A spokesman for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees V.O.A., said that the Persian Service had provided substantial original reporting at the start of the war.)

Soon after Donald Trump began his second term in the White House, he appointed Kari Lake, a former TV anchorwoman who had lost races in Arizona for governor and senator, to run America’s global media operations. Lake said that her mission was “to shut the entire agency down as per the instructions of President Trump.” In March, 2025, a day after Trump issued an executive order slashing V.O.A.’s parent agency to its legally required minimum, Lake put 1,042 of its 1,147 staffers on paid leave. The Persian Service, which had numbered more than a hundred employees before Trump returned to the White House, was down to a few dozen people at the start of the war. The service’s coverage reflected its paltry staffing. “Trump gave a speech, and Kari Lake asked us to carry it live,” the journalist said. (The U.S.A.G.M. spokesman said that Persian Service editors decided on their own to air the speech.)

On the first day of the war in Iran, a U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile struck a girls’ elementary school in Minab. For a couple of days, the Persian Service did not publish any articles about the incident, which Iranian officials said had killed more than a hundred and seventy people, most of them children. In V.O.A.’s newsroom in Washington, the journalist confronted a senior manager: “Are we North Korea now? This is going to be all over the news. We can’t just be silent about it.” The journalist didn’t receive a response until the next day, when the manager sent him a V.O.A. story recounting Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s comment that the United States “would not deliberately target a school.” The story said nothing about the worldwide outrage over the bombing. (The U.S.A.G.M. spokesman said that the Persian Service had reported on the strike as part of a live TV broadcast on the day it happened.) The Persian Service had previously made room, however, for a six-minute video report titled “Melania Trump: American’s Influential First Lady,” which began with fourteen seconds of the trailer for this year’s “Melania” documentary.

By then, Lake had brought in Ali Javanmardi, a former V.O.A. contractor, to oversee the Persian Service. Javanmardi was employed by the U.S.A.G.M., which, under federal law, is supposed to respect an editorial firewall that protects V.O.A. journalism from interference by political appointees. But Javanmardi—whose LinkedIn profile features a photo of Trump, standing bloodied and triumphant, after the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania, in 2024—breached that wall repeatedly, appearing frequently on V.O.A. videos. A Persian Service reporter told me that, when Javanmardi appeared as a commentator on V.O.A., he handed the anchor the questions to be asked.

In January, Javanmardi instructed his staff that, “effective immediately, all guest appearances—including live guests, pre-recorded guests, and guests whose soundbites are used in packages—must be approved by me in advance.” He gathered his staff in a circle each day and delivered his latest thoughts about the Persian Service’s coverage. “They’re marching orders,” the journalist said. “You only hear him talking, no one else.” One day, Javanmardi announced that V.O.A. videos, web stories, and social-media posts would not be permitted to use the phrase “Death to America” in reports about demonstrations on the streets of Iran. He also instructed his staff to avoid describing America’s attack on Iran as a war; rather, he said, they should use the term “military action.” V.O.A.’s Farsi newscasts “felt like someone’s one-man show,” the journalist said. “The firewall has burned down.”

The Persian Service’s content began to tilt sharply toward Javanmardi’s idiosyncratic perspective on Iran. Javanmardi, who is Kurdish Iranian, is a longtime critic of Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s late Shah, who lives in exile in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. A lawsuit filed by V.O.A. journalists and press-freedom organizations claims that Javanmardi refused to allow V.O.A. to use audio of protesters in Iran shouting Pahlavi’s name. He also barred the Persian Service’s staff and guests from talking about any possible restoration of Iran’s monarchy. When V.O.A. covered a street protest in Norway against the Islamic Republic, it muted the audio when demonstrators chanted “Javid Shah” (“Long live the Shah”), according to the lawsuit. A Persian Service journalist said that, when he refused to follow Javanmardi’s orders, he was fired. (Javanmardi and Lake did not respond to requests for comment, and the U.S.A.G.M. spokesman said that the agency would not comment on personnel matters. Lake has said that Pahlavi was invited to appear on V.O.A., and did not respond.)

The U.S. has struggled to balance propaganda and independent news reporting since the Second World War, when it became clear that information was as vital a tool of combat as bombs and battleships. The Nazis and the Soviet Union led the way in leveraging propaganda, using sharply skewed information and entertainment to inspire their troops, rally the homeland, and win over—or confuse—enemy populations. Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf” that radio is “a terrible weapon in the hands of those who know how to make use of it.” The Soviet Union embraced Lenin’s concept of agitation—the use of emotional slogans and half-truths to influence the masses. By 1953, U.S. officials estimated that the the Soviet Union was spending two per cent of its gross national product on propaganda, at least twenty times the U.S. government’s information budget.

America’s news effort was launched on February 1, 1942, when the playwright Robert E. Sherwood took to the mike to deliver V.O.A.’s first words: “Today, America has been at war for seventy-nine days. Daily at this time, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth.” Sherwood—along with other early V.O.A. leaders, such as Edward R. Murrow, of CBS, and John Chancellor, of NBC—believed in presenting the news straight, but the argument about the agency’s mission and methods remained fractious. Presidents often grew frustrated that America’s voice was not plainly on America’s side. In 1943, on the day after Mussolini was overthrown, a V.O.A. broadcast quoted a New York Post columnist calling the Italian monarch, Victor Emmanuel, “the moronic little King.” President Franklin Roosevelt, in turn, criticized V.O.A. for conducting its own foreign policy, and directed its programmers to stick to undermining enemy morale.

A few years later, President Harry Truman, who saw no need for peacetime information programs, asserted that the private news business should be the primary “means of informing foreign peoples about this country.” But, once the Cold War erupted and American concern about Communism metastasized, Truman reversed course. In 1951, he established the Psychological Strategy Board to supervise the war of words with the Soviets and instructed V.O.A. to broadcast hard-hitting anti-Communist messages from new transmitters in Okinawa, Munich, several locations in the Philippines, and on a ship in the Mediterranean Sea. In 1952, V.O.A. programs were broadcast in forty-six languages, aimed mainly at Communist countries behind the Iron Curtain. Each language desk at V.O.A. headquarters met daily to go over “guidances” from the State Department—a few pages that didn’t mandate specific language to be used in newscasts but did give V.O.A. editors “the word for the day,” as Arthur Larson, the director of the U.S. Information Agency, which oversaw V.O.A. at the time, put it.

In 1953, televised hearings of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in Room 318 of the U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan’s Foley Square, focussed on “mismanagement and subversion” at V.O.A. “There are some people in the Voice of America who are doing a rather effective job of sabotaging” U.S. foreign policy, Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin who led the nation on a frenzied anti-Communist search, declared. His chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who would go on to mentor a young Donald Trump, interviewed more than a hundred V.O.A. staffers. The hearings made for great TV. Employees of V.O.A. were accused of harboring an interest in collectivist nudist camps, softening scripts to downplay the Soviets’ antisemitism, and positioning V.O.A. transmitters where magnetic storms might make it difficult for signals to reach the Soviet bloc. In March, 1953, Raymond Kaplan, a V.O.A. engineer who had worked on the transmitters, walked in front of a truck in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leaving behind a suicide note that told his family that he’d wanted to spare them the pain of being dragged through McCarthy’s hearings. McCarthy, who referred to V.O.A. as “Voice of Moscow,” called the suicide note fake news.

The subcommittee’s final report, signed only by its Republican members—Democrats had walked out of the hearings and resigned from the subcommittee—charged V.O.A. with broadcasting “anti-American content” and employing people “not dedicated to the American way of life.” V.O.A. fired thirty-one employees “for security reasons,” but little else came of the subcommittee’s findings. Still, for decades, V.O.A.’s identity crisis persisted. In the nineteen-sixties, three V.O.A. directors complained of pressure to conform to Administration policies. One such director, Henry Loomis, quit in 1965, to protest meddling by political appointees from Lyndon Johnson’s White House. (Chancellor, of NBC, wrote that V.O.A.’s reporters faced too much “interference by policy officers.”) And another director, John Daly, resigned in 1968 to protest “undercutting” by V.O.A.’s parent agency.

Other Western democracies had established a measure of independence for their international broadcast services; the BBC and Germany’s Deutsche Welle, for example, are protected by rules that restrict political leaders from influencing programming. The U.S. Agency for Global Media was similarly created to provide V.O.A. with a buffer from government interference. V.O.A.’s 1976 charter mandates “accurate, objective and comprehensive” reporting; the 1994 U.S. International Broadcasting Act also created a firewall to protect its editors from a President’s predilections. That is the firewall that V.O.A. journalists now say has been burned to the ground.

For decades, the Voice of America enjoyed bipartisan support in Washington. Republican senators such as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham were among its most vocal advocates. But, in the final year of Trump’s first term, his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, began railing against the V.O.A. director Amanda Bennett, an Obama-era appointee, alleging that China had infiltrated the ranks of the agency’s journalists. Trump personally called Republicans in Congress to drum up support for his nominee to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Michael Pack, a conservative filmmaker who had made a fawning documentary about the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Seven months before Trump’s term ended, the Senate confirmed Pack in a party-line vote.

Pack promised to “drain the swamp” at V.O.A., but there was relatively little he could accomplish during his ultimately brief tenure. Steve Herman, V.O.A.’s White House bureau chief at the time, said that he and his colleagues had largely been able to resist pressure to parrot the Administration’s policy agenda. “We all knew that if we just hung on, and Trump lost in 2020, we could run out the clock on them and keep on doing our work,” Herman told me.

Trump’s inner circle used the years of the Biden Presidency to plan an unprecedented remaking of American institutions, including at V.O.A.’s parent agency. The chapter on U.S.A.G.M. in Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s second term, was written by Mora Namdar, who is now the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs. She accused V.O.A.’s parent agency of having a “general disdain for U.S. taxpayers.” Namdar, who did not respond to a request for comment, called out Herman for “posting content highly critical of, and personally insulting to, the U.S. President.” U.S.A.G.M., she wrote, had joined “the mainstream media’s anti-U.S. chorus . . . denigrating the American story—all in the name of so-called journalistic independence.” Her solution was to put V.O.A. under the authority of the National Security Council or the State Department, to insure it “tells America’s story.”

This was a bold plan, albeit one that failed to account for V.O.A.’s legally mandated governing structure. Right after Trump’s second Inauguration, he fired six of the seven members of the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, which approves the appointment of the head of V.O.A. He had announced his decision to appoint Lake as V.O.A.’s director in December. But now, with no board available to fire the current director, Michael Abramowitz, the Administration lacked the authority to install Lake in his place. Trump decided to give Lake a leadership role at U.S.A.G.M. instead. Under the law, the agency could be run temporarily by one of its senior officials. That person was Victor Morales, a senior policy adviser who had started his career as a V.O.A. journalist; he designated Lake to perform nearly all of “the functions and responsibilities” of his job.

For twenty-two years, Lake had been the face of Fox 10 News, in Phoenix, where she covered the usual mix of crime, severe weather, and goofy happenings around town. But in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she left the anchor chair because she believed that the news media was distorting the truth about how to combat the virus. “I just wasn’t willing to lie to the public,” she said last year. “I had to ask myself the question, ‘Was this huge paycheck that I was earning worth the cost of my soul?’ And the answer was no.” Before her failed runs for governor and the U.S. Senate, Lake had pivoted from Obama-supporting Buddhist to MAGA cheerleader who denounced Democrats’ “demonic agenda.” She dubbed herself “Trump in heels.”

Initially, Lake spoke optimistically about V.O.A.’s future. “Sometimes the coverage has been incredible, and sometimes it’s been pitiful,” she told the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, 2025. Under her leadership, she said, V.O.A. “won’t become Trump TV, although I think the ratings would be very high. It won’t become Trump TV, but it sure as hell will not be TDS TV. You can find all the Trump Derangement Syndrome that you want over on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ‘60 Minutes,’ the Washington Post, and the New York Times.” V.O.A., she said, would still be a source of “soft power for America. . . . With a relatively small budget, along with honest reporting, we can spread the values of freedom all over the world and prevent trillion-dollar wars. I’m for that.”

After Trump was elected to a second term, Herman reported on what he saw as a devastating slashing of America’s capacity to tell its story abroad. On V.O.A., he said that Trump’s top reason for selecting Cabinet nominees seemed to be loyalty rather than experience. On X, he quoted the head of Democracy Forward, a progressive legal organization, saying that zeroing out the United States Agency for International Development, perhaps the most high-profile victim of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, would make Americans less safe at home and abroad. Ric Grenell, the President’s envoy for special missions, called Herman’s comment “treasonous.” “You don’t get to work against the official U.S. government policies while being paid by US taxpayers,” he posted on X. “You should be immediately fired.”

At the end of February, Herman was put on leave. A letter from management said that V.O.A. was investigating whether his “social media activity has undermined VOA’s audiences’ perceptions of the objectivity and/or credibility of VOA.” Grenell had said he wanted V.O.A. eliminated entirely. So did Musk, whose auxiliaries—the young tech wizards deployed to federal agencies to shut down access to computer systems, eliminate workers, and freeze operations—arrived at V.O.A. headquarters not long after. V.O.A., Musk said on X, was “just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”

On March 12th, during an Oval Office news conference with Trump and Micheál Martin, the Prime Minister of Ireland, V.O.A.’s White House bureau chief, Patsy Widakuswara, asked Martin if the leaders had discussed Trump’s suggestion that Palestinians be expelled from the Gaza coast, to make room for beach resorts. Trump, miffed, turned on the reporter: “Nobody is expelling any Palestinians . . . who are you with?”

“I’m with Voice of America, sir,” Widakuswara replied.

“Oh, no wonder,” Trump, who had called V.O.A. “a total, left wing disaster,” said, waving her off with a flip of his hand.

Two days later, Trump issued an executive order: V.O.A. and its parent agency were to be slashed “to the minimum presence and function required by law.” The White House justified the order with a news release titled “The Voice of Radical America,” which accused V.O.A. of producing “radical propaganda,” citing a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, a segment about transgender women from Honduras who sought asylum in the U.S., and an article with the headline “What Is ‘White Privilege’ and Whom Does It Help?” The next day, Lake sent the staff home, halted TV and radio broadcasts, and cancelled the lease for V.O.A.’s new headquarters. That morning, Widakuswara texted her attorney: “I received email that I’ve been put on admin leave.”

On March 17th, workers at V.O.A.’s transmitter sites were told to shut down all operations within two days, silencing the agency for the first time in eighty-three years. V.O.A., a U.S.A.G.M. news release said, harbored “spies and terrorist sympathizers” and wasted taxpayers’ money on a news service “that often parrots the talking-points of America’s adversaries.” Lake later alleged that agents of the Chinese Communist Party had met regularly with V.O.A. management to tell them how to cover China. “The rot is so bad,” she told a reporter, “it’s like having a rotten fish and trying to find the little portion you can eat. It’s unsalvageable right now.” The agency, she told Steve Bannon on his podcast, was “going on an Ozempic diet.”

On a sunny afternoon this March, several dozen Voice of America journalists gathered in the social hall of All Souls Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., for an event to raise money for former employees. V.O.A. had resumed some of its TV and radio operations. But, since last year’s cuts, its programming has been available in just seven languages—Farsi, Mandarin, Dari, Pashto, Korean, and two Kurdish dialects—rather than the forty-nine language services it previously provided to a weekly audience of more than three hundred and fifty million people worldwide. Hundreds of employees had been on leave for a year, being paid their regular salaries to do no work.

At the front of the social hall, the attendees were greeted by a potluck spread featuring dishes from nations that V.O.A. had cut its services to: Indonesian salad, Indian chaat, Vietnamese banh mi, Colombian stew. A journalist who’d been called back to work after almost a year on leave said that the V.O.A. office was now like “the American Wild West, just people trying to survive.” He lamented the agency’s diminished state, but he preferred to tell stories about its better days. Before Trump, V.O.A. used to transmit extensive programs into remote areas of Afghanistan; its broadcasts informed people in West Africa on how they could protect themselves from polio; in Pakistan, street theatre was produced to combat disinformation about vaccinations.

A man who was working in the Ukrainian Service at the start of the Russian invasion recalled how V.O.A. had beefed up its staff to get video from the battlefields and on-the-scene accounts from reporters in the country to Ukrainian audiences. “Before Lake, we covered stories nobody else did, with reporters in Ukraine showing where American support was making a difference, combatting Russian propaganda,” the Ukrainian Service employee told me. “Now there’s nothing to balance it, nothing to correct it.” He spoke to his mother, who lives in Ukraine, every weekend. “It takes me half an hour to repair what she heard that week from Russian disinformation about America,” he told me.

A veteran of V.O.A.’s Latin American division said that, when U.S. forces toppled the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, in January, her relatives had assured her that she would soon be called back to work. V.O.A. had a long-standing plan for how to cover a sudden change in government, including beefed up daily TV newscasts and radio shows, weekly analysis programs, digital video reports, and hourly bulletins. But the call never came. Even as Russia and China expand their Latin American programming, with China offering free trips to local broadcasters, V.O.A.’s Spanish Service, which had the largest audience of all its language services, remains shuttered.

“Nothing exists anymore,” another reporter told me, describing his driftless days and sleepless nights. “Our identity was gone in one single second. It was a sudden questioning of my value. Who am I without all of this?” The reporter had applied for a job as a police officer—and received an offer—but he put it on hold in the hope that V.O.A. might call him back. “I had believed in America,” he told me. “I didn’t care if it was Trump or Biden.”

Many of V.O.A.’s employees found new gigs. A United Nations correspondent got her real-estate license and pivoted to selling New York City properties. Several former employees started driving for Uber or DoorDash. One reporter got a job at Newsmax, another at the Washington Post. Danila Galperovich, a correspondent at the Russian Service, now works at Trader Joe’s. The pay was significantly less than what he’d made at V.O.A., but, “after three years of writing about the killing of Ukrainian children, it’s like a Zen retreat,” he told me. “I never heard ‘thank you’ two hundred times a day in my press job. Now I do.”

When my wife and I visited the Soviet Union as tourists in 1984 we made stealth stops to deliver medicine to Jewish refuseniks, dissidents who had sought to leave the country but were denied permission by the Communist regime and subsequently lost their jobs. Our hosts, in their Moscow apartments, turned up the volume on their TVs to mask our conversation from the bugs they assumed the government had planted in their living rooms. This, they explained, was how they listened to Voice of America: TV blaring, while an illicit shortwave radio, with its volume raised to little more than a whisper, was held up to their ears so that they could hear the news or the jazz played by the legendary V.O.A. host Willis Conover, who often opened his episodes saying, in his gentle baritone, “The music of jazz parallels the freedom that we have in America, something that not every country has.”

Today, many of the V.O.A. journalists who lost their contracts also lost their legal right to remain in the United States. “You’ve come to this country to say things you can’t say at home,” Jessica Jerreat, who ran V.O.A.’s press-freedom desk, said. “Then, all of a sudden, you lose your visa and you’re told you have to go back.” At least a dozen V.O.A. journalists who’d been fired risked imprisonment or violence if they returned to their native countries. “The reply from U.S.A.G.M. was ‘What date would you like for your plane ticket?’ ” Jerreat recalled.

At least nine contributors to V.O.A. or its sister networks Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia are currently imprisoned in foreign countries. Le Anh Hung, a reporter and blogger in Vietnam who had reported on corruption within the country’s ruling party, was arrested in March and charged with “propagandizing against the state.” In Azerbaijan, Ulviyya Guliyeva, who had been reporting on political persecution, was arrested last May and charged with smuggling foreign currency, an allegation she denies. Guliyeva said that police officers had struck her seven times on the head and torn out her hair. She has been in prison ever since.

In March, 2025, a group of V.O.A. employees sued Lake, arguing that the Administration had illegally sought to quash the independent newsgathering mandated by Congress and protected by V.O.A.’s firewall. Michael Abramowitz, the V.O.A. director, sued separately, saying that Congress had repeatedly renewed funding for V.O.A. programs and that the executive branch could not defy Congress’s appropriations. “The law is quite clear about the approach V.O.A. must take,” he told me. “The charter says you’re supposed to explain U.S. policies and present responsible debate about them.”

Last summer, Lake tried to demote Abramowitz to a job at a remote site in North Carolina, which broadcasts to Cuba. V.O.A. had once used it to broadcast shortwave-radio programs to South America and Africa—services that Lake switched off. Abramowitz declined to report to that post, and U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, ruled that Lake had no power to dismiss him.

Lamberth is handling most of the V.O.A. cases, and so far his decisions have been resolutely supportive of the employees. He moved to void Lake’s dismantling of the agency, finding that she was “plainly ineligible to serve” as U.S.A.G.M.’s top official, because Trump lacked the authority to appoint her. He also declared that Lake’s failure to coöperate with the court had been a “Hallmark production in bad faith.” Lake criticized the judge on X. “We’ve been so effective over the last year that the Deep State has done everything they can to stop us,” she wrote. “A rotund DC District Court judge wants me OUT of the agency, but despite his absurd orders and rulings, I remain in the exact same position today as I was before.”

In May, Trump nominated Lake to be his Ambassador to Jamaica. While she awaits a confirmation vote in the Senate, she remains nominally at U.S.A.G.M., though V.O.A.’s journalists said that they never see her at their office. Earlier this year, there was speculation that she might run for a Senate seat in Iowa, where she grew up. Last November, a trust controlled by her family bought a two-bedroom condo in Davenport, near her former high school, for fifty-eight thousand dollars. “I love Iowa,” she told a local TV station. She said that the purchase had been about getting “closer to the values that shaped me.”

The House, meanwhile, in a rare bipartisan act of resistance, has voted to fund V.O.A. to the tune of $199.5 million for 2026—down from two hundred and sixty million dollars in 2024, but nonetheless part of an over-all international broadcasting appropriation four times larger than what the President had requested. In late March, Lamberth gave Lake and U.S.A.G.M. less than a week to bring back all of the employees who were still on paid leave. The Administration protested that that was impossible; the agency could only produce employee badges and process paperwork for seventy people a week. The judge approved that pace. But by late May, when U.S.A.G.M. finally submitted its reconstitution plan, the agency had only restored another forty-four employees to active work. In late June, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard testimony on Lake’s ambassadorial nomination, the Democratic senator Jeanne Shaheen, of New Hampshire, said that paying U.S.A.G.M. employees to sit at home had so far cost taxpayers around a hundred and forty million dollars.

Some Trump Administration officials now seem to recognize that the silencing of V.O.A. has left the country with a diminished capacity to push back against other countries’ disinformation efforts. In March, Marco Rubio ordered American diplomats to work with the military’s PsyOps unit to confront disinformation from Russia and China. (Chinese state media had celebrated the Trump Administration’s gutting of V.O.A., saying that it had “been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.”) A cable sent to U.S. embassies directed staffers to use “every tool in our diplomatic toolkit” in “telling America’s story.” In July, Javanmardi was effectively replaced as head of the Persian Service by a career V.O.A. journalist, Reza Nejat. The e-mail announcing the change said that the agency was expanding its “broadcasting hours while maintaining VOA’s strict standards of credibility and journalistic excellence.”

Before the war in Iran, Lake appeared on the Persian Service to praise Trump and to justify her downsizing of V.O.A. She contended that, even after the cuts, “we’re doing an incredible media product. . . . We are an incredible soft power.” But editors said that V.O.A.’s pro-Administration slant under Trump has undermined its credibility. “I don’t know why I’m here,” a longtime journalist who had been called back to the office told me. “We used to work with a number of reporters who covered Washington, and did original reporting, and now we’re just rewriting press releases from the Administration.” The Persian Service reporter told me, “Before, I had the freedom to contrast what Trump did with what critics thought of it. Now I just say, ‘Trump said,’ ‘Trump said,’ ‘Trump said.’ ” ♦