Those contracts to other, larger news agencies famous for their loyalty to Democrats, were sold to VOA employees as necessary budget cuts to their agency. The reporters watched in horror as boilerplate stories from the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse replaced their original reporting from the field that, as a federal agency, had been specially tailored towards promoting U.S. interests abroad.

 

A lot of these reporters did good reporting and some won international awards for it.

 

I know one VOA reporter who told me how he snuck into North Korea for his job to report on how hellish it was on the ground -- and yeah, it was very dangerous -- the goons eventually came after him and he managed to escape into Red China. The story still gives me the shivers.

 

Well, the reporter's reporting was replaced by AP wire stories and worse still, French wire stories, as if some power that be from above viewed those news agencies as better at promoting the U.S. government position, as well as the Obama and Biden agendas, than they were. Many of these reporters have deeply resented this replacement of their own work for years, as their bosses claimed it was just necessary cost-cutting.

 

Actually, the outsourcing of the news at the VOA reporters' expense was very expensive, as Lake revealed in her post.

 

Now with the DOGE revelations that these huge and often unused subscriptions padding news agency profits were apparent bribes -- Politico, Reuters, and AP's names came up (not to mention, NewsGuard) -- presumably to keep these agencies afloat in return for positive coverage, the real game seems apparent. AP and other agency reporters looked the other way as Joe Biden's senility became obvious, they parroted White House talking points, they took official statistics, always to be revised, as gospel truth about the economy. They were all feeding at the Biden trough, and who takes the king's penny does the king's bidding. Ever wondered why there are so many pharmaceutical ads on television? Once you're an advertiser or big subscriber, you don't get quite the same negative coverage.

 

In VOA's case, these subscriptions actually came at their own reporters' expense, taking away their ability to cover thee news, same as outsourcing.

 

Why would the bosses let them cover news when they had an AFP story they could run on their site instead? Think of the irony of the whole thing -- an agency full of journalists needs to pay other news agencies to run news material on their site? You normally would do that if you didn't have a news agency to supply you the news, but these guys were a news agency.

 

Something was very wrong with this picture.

 

A lot of good journalism didn't get done because of these contracts. I absolutely know that reporters from that agency, even on the leftside, really hated those contracts.

 

The same kind of thinking seems to have involved the $1 billion building lease revelations, too -- which is a doozy of a story. The USAGM and Voice of America already have a huge building, all paid off. The new one doesn't even have television studios, a bizarre thing for a broadcast news agency not to have. The need for more office space is nil with tens of thousands of government workers working from home, the job now being to bring them back to the office in the largely empty building. Someone at that agency needed to lease another building?

 

It stinks of payoff, same as the news agency "cost-cutting" mega-contracts that replaced the reporters.

 

Here is one theory of what might have gone down:

 

This kind of garbage went on because Obama-era holdouts, many of them affiliated with the Washington Post and all of them cronies, refused to be dislodged from their perches at VOA and USAGM over the past several years. They openly defied Trump and would not go.

Lake stated that they had been busy as beavers entrenching themselves to "Trump-proof" the agency, which is why she's a "senior advisor" instead of boss of bosses:

Doesn't matter, she's still doing a heckuva job to expose waste, fraud, and abuse, and knock it out. The real journalists are cheering.

NPR, of course, "reports" that Lake is trying to starve those agencies of funds:

But it's pretty obvious that's the swamp thrashing back.

In reality, Lake is allowing reporters to report the news and forcing bribe money away from the agencies, refusing to allow it to corrupt their mission.

Who had it on their bingo card that Trump would be making journalism great again, too?

I wouldn't write this if I weren't hearing from people at VOA. Fact is, Kari Lake is kickin' it.

Image: Screen shot from X video.