Radio Free Asia announces mass dismissals in the midst of financing fight with Trump administration

Radio Free Asia lies About 90 percent of his staff and close many of his language services, with reference to the inability to continue to pay employees after the Trump administration had broken down its financing.

“We are in an uninhabitable situation,” said Bay Fang, President and CEO of RFA, in a statement. “Because we can no longer trust [the U.S. Agency for Global Media] To hide our funds as the congress meant, we must start with mass redundancies and let the entire language services in the coming week. “

Last March, President Trump ordered The American Bureau for Global Media (USAGM), the federal agency that divides money to RFA and other broadcasters funded by the government to relax their activities to the absolute minimum, in an attempt “to reduce unnecessary government entities”.

Since 1996, RFA has been broadcast in languages ​​such as Burmese, Cambodian and Mandarin to a weekly audience of around 60 million listeners.

The and the other broadcasters financed by the government were set up in the aftermath of the Second World War, to Reach Listeners and Readers Living in what the US regards as repressive or authoritarian societies and promoting democratic values.

Combined, these broadcasters reaches A weekly audience of more than 400 million people outside the US around the world. In the last decade, RFA has broken stories About the Chinese detention campaign about ethnic Oyghurs and continued to report on the spot in Myanmar in the middle of a civil war. Now only one employee of the Uyghur-Taaldienst of the broadcaster, Mamatjan Juma, the former deputy director of the Uyghur Language Service, said in an interview with NPR.

“This work is more than a job for me and so many of the people who are part of RFA. They are extremely proud to be part of this team and see it as their life’s work to shine a light in the dark corners of the countries we cover,” Fang told NPR on Friday. “So today was perhaps the most difficult in my career.”

After the Trump guideline in March, Kari Lake, a senior advisor to Trump who effectively runs usagm, ended Congress-applied subsidies to Radio Treed Free Asia and the other non-profit news broadcasts funded by the US government, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN). She also stopped the voice of America, which is part of the government.

More, one Former television -anchor WHO lost A senate race in Arizona last year, the agency has mentioned that she now has ‘unlikely’. “The rot is so bad. It’s like having a rotten fish and trying to find a small part that you can eat,” she said from Usagm in an interview of Nieuwsmax in March.

VOA and the office for Cuba Broadcasting, which carries out Spanish -speaking programs, were forced suspend More than 1,000 of their employees. RFA placed approximately three fourth of his staff with unpaid leave.

In April a federal judge in Washington DC ordered the administration repair The funds and employees of RFA and MBN, that the order of the White House to dismantle the broadcasters was “random and fickle”.

But this week a DC -Hof by profession granted an administrative stay that freezes that judicial order for RFA and MBN.

The next day, on Friday, RFA formally dismissed many of its employees who were already on unpaid leave. RFA’s Fang says that there is still a skeleton team to update RFA’s frequent back programming.