The creation of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) provoked not surprise but irritation: an old propaganda tool simply got a new label and an even more aggressive tuning.
Enter USAGM: the same schoolyard bully, just with a new blazer. Formerly the Broadcasting Board of Governors, it sells itself as the U.S. voice to foreign audiences. In practice, critics say it’s just VOA repackaged — deep pockets, loud chest-thumping, and itching for a fight.
Pot calling the kettle black doesn’t begin to cover it!
I’m no defender of VOA — it’s under USAGM’s thumb — but the irony stings. Former VOA staff sued, and a federal judge recently found that Kari Lake, President Trump’s pick to lead USAGM, lacked the legal authority to carry out the sweeping moves that gutted VOA and led to mass layoffs of its journalists.
Modern propaganda is a craft, not a caricature. These days it often reads like polished journalism: largely true, carefully framed, and engineered to nudge audiences toward a chosen view rather than bludgeon them with outright lies. The real trick isn’t obvious falsehoods — it is pushing the stories that never make the cut, the angles that will be spun away, and the inconvenient truths quietly buried.
Truth in Effective Propaganda!
Let’s call it what it is: a familiar instrument in new clothes. Same tune, different bandleader — and the music still favors the house. “Propaganda, to be effective, must be believed — and to be believed, it must be credible. To be credible, it must be true,” as Hubert H. Humphrey said. The trouble is, USAGM trades credibility for spin. New democracies and indie outlets that cozy up think they’re just dodging CIA and USAID — they’ve walked into a web tied to deep-state adjacencies and last administration cronies.
USAGM sells polished narratives to foreign ears, often a notch away from the truth. It ducks accountability because its audience is overseas, and cloaks its aims in “national security.” Does it actually secure anything but influence? There should be no doubt, however, about the real question: exactly whose interests are these glossy so-called truthserving — and who’s cashing the checks?
Meanwhile, fledgling countries, sometimes democracies, and independent media outlets, need to understand that they just got into bed with people who are working outside of the official channels, tied to people close to the Deep State, as well as the last US administration and their gangs; they mistakenly thought that it was only the CIA and USAID that they were up against.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media is, more often than not, far from being truthful—it disgorges pure media spin. It gets away with it for the most part since its messages are targeted to a foreign audience. Whether it really achieves what it claims to achieve by way of national security is also questionable. But the media spin is not taken to heart by all. The question that, therefore, begs an answer, is, what exactly is the agenda of this new body?
Global Media’s predecessor – the Broadcasting Board of Governors.
Matt Novak, writing for the tech blog Gizmodo, described the BBG as the “propaganda arm” of the US government. He speculated that its alleged role in propagating this propaganda on behalf of the US government was a reason for the denied entry of Jeff Shell, its director, to Russia in July of 2016.
No shocker: the old outfit was legally barred from broadcasting on home soil — a firewall meant to keep government propaganda away from Americans. That wall exists for a reason: lawmakers feared that lifting it would let messaging stitched for foreign minds be repurposed against U.S. citizens.
Critics warned lifting the ban would turn foreign-targeted spin inward. Supporters argued the ban kept Americans blind to what their government was broadcasting abroad — it is difficult to critique what you can’t even see. Bottom line: one side fears domestic weaponization; the other frets about secrecy by omission. Either way, the debate peels back the curtain on who gets to hear the story — and who gets to write it.
Even as recently as August 2019, AP reported that the new law signed by Obama did not allow propaganda in the US. However, all these attempts to shield Americans from homegrown propaganda fail because they eventually get access to that same propaganda indirectly through the many websites that present the US-funded fake news pieces as legitimate news.
Effectively this means that US government-funded sites are lying, not only to an international audience but to the American people as well. There are many readers who may unknowingly access these sites while searching for alternative views outside of the MSM and take them at face value, as they are funded by the US government.
It should be agreed that American taxpayers shouldn’t be funding propaganda for American audiences, and especially that directed against US citizens, but they effectively are, under the guise of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012.
“USIA on steroids”
It is all about informational warfare — “information vs. disinformation.” Earlier, the lead organization involved in this battle was the United States Information Agency (USIA), the previous propaganda arm of the US government, which was dissolved in 1999.
The US is now trying to go back to Cold War tactics in the media war. This is understandable. American soft power has recently been in decline, yet public diplomacy was used as a key instrument of soft power during the Cold War decades.
It was James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, who most recently said that the US needed something like USIA again. Actually, he told Congress that there was a need for a “USIA on steroids.” There are more than just claims to be made as to how the media is being played. The process has been well documented by the Washington Post.
Wag the Dog
For example, Myth Detector is a website in Georgia that alleges it is a fact-checking portal of the Media Development Foundation (MDF), and is aimed at fighting anti-Western propaganda through providing fact-based information and enhancing media literacy. From 2016, MDF began cooperating with the EU’s East StratComTaskForce.
Myth Detector is also a partner of the Atlantic Council’s online DisinfoPortal. In 2019, MDF signed an affiliation and licensing agreement with the US Agency for Global Media.
In this case, it is easy to connect the dots. This media watchdog has the backing of some power hitters in the US spin doctor task force. The track record of the Atlantic Council is well known, especially to those involved in foreign policy. It acts as an agent of influence, even on the territory of US partner countries.
Joseph Goebbels would have been proud of the US Agency for Global Media, VOA, Radio Free Europe, and the Atlantic Council. It was he who said that, “the essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape from it.”
Many people would probably agree with the sentiment behind it—that there is so much misinformation, propaganda, spin, selective reporting, and conflicting narratives that it seems impossible to know what’s true anymore.
Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs
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