President Trump has named a fierce conservative critic of the mainstream media, L. Brent Bozell III, as his pick to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the parent agency of the Voice of America and other federally owned international broadcasters.
In a posting on Truth Social, Trump said that Bozell would bring much needed change to the agency, which was led by a veteran news editor, Amanda Bennett, herself a former director of the Voice of America.
She resigned along with other Biden appointees across government as Trump took office.
"Few understand the Global Media landscape in print, television, and online better than Brent," Trump wrote. "He and his family have fought for the American principles of Liberty, Freedom, Equality, and Justice for generations, and he will ensure that message is heard by Freedom-loving people around the World."
Bozell, 69, is the founder of the conservative nonprofit . For decades, it has critiqued the news media and pop culture from a strong right-of-center outlook.
"These are not dispassionate observers of the national scene," he wrote of journalists, in a characteristic commentary in 2018. "These are leftist partisans." (In recent years, his syndicated column has been written with Tim Graham, a colleague at the center who is also executive editor of its offshoot, 暗黑爆料Busters.)
Bozell comes from a family with strong links to conservative media. He is the nephew of National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., who collaborated in writing with his father.
In addition, Bozell's son, Leo Brent Bozell IV, was during the January 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol and sentenced to 45 months in prison. Trump's blanket pardon of almost all convicted January 6 rioters .
Before taking office, Trump announced he wanted to name , a former local newscaster in Arizona who unsuccessfully ran for governor and U.S. Senate on a strong pro-Trump platform, as director of Voice of America. Like Trump, Lake has attacked journalists as "fake news."
For now, Michael Abramowitz, the former Washington Post editor who served as chief of the human rights non-profit, Freedom House, remains the head of Voice of America.
For procedural reasons, the appointment of a new director for the network requires a new USAGM chief and for members of a bipartisan oversight board to be in place; it is not a presidentially appointed position. Yet Trump swept aside all the members of the agency's Congressionally appointed board 鈥擱epublican and Democrat 鈥� upon taking office.
Beyond Voice of America, USAGM networks also include Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio and Television Mart铆, and Middle Eastern Broadcasting Networks. The U.S.-funded international broadcasters are banned by law from beaming their reports to the U.S.
Their intent is to provide credible news coverage overseas for nations that do not have an independent or free press. That includes news about American political and social debates.
In so doing, the networks model American democratic values for an overseas audience that it says people across the world each week. (Those figures do not include people who watch, read or listen to its offerings in China or North Korea, as measuring those audiences did not prove possible, the agency reported.)
USAGM served as a for the final year of Trump's first term. Trump appointee Michael Pack won confirmation from the U.S. Senate in May 2020 after a two-year wait and spent his seven-plus months in office .
In office, Pack told the conservative Federalist that he saw his mission this way: "to drain the swamp, to root out corruption, and to deal with these issues of [anti-Trump] bias."
In practice, that meant he embraced conspiracy theories, accused senior executives of being security threats, and had senior political aides conduct reviews of Voice of America journalists for anti-Trump bias.
Pack also refused to allow visa extensions for his foreign journalists, many of whom had language skills hard to find in the Washington press corps. Several of his actions were later judged to have broken laws and, in the case of the bias reviews, .
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