By Helen Coster
NEW YORK (Reuters) -The far-right One America News Network will provide “newsfeed services” to Voice of America and other U.S. government-funded media outlets, according to Kari Lake, senior advisor to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, VOA’s parent company.
In a post on X on Tuesday, Lake said the network, which features content that is consistently supportive of President Donald Trump, would provide its news and video service free of charge.
The OAN partnership has angered VOA journalists, many of whom have been terminated after Trump began his second term in January as part of his administration’s efforts to shrink the federal payroll and silence any perceived criticism of his policies.
“What they have done, in effect, is replace our 83-year legacy of producing reliable, authoritative news with the hard work and commitment of countless journalists with a contract to outsource our news-gathering to a source that is clearly partisan,” said Voice of America White House bureau chief Patsy Widakuswara, who is on indefinite leave.
OAN, owned by San Diego-based Herring Networks, was the target of defamation lawsuits over its false claims that Trump won the 2020 presidential election. Since his election in 2024, Trump has continued to make such claims.
Representatives for the USAGM and OAN did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In March, Trump ordered the gutting of USAGM and Lake placed nearly all VOA employees on leave. She said the agency was “irretrievably broken” and biased against Trump, with a “product that often parrots the talking-points of America’s adversaries.”
Lake, a former television news anchor who was an unsuccessful Republican candidate for Arizona governor and U.S. senator, has moved to cancel contracts with wire services including Reuters, the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse, according to a March 13 X post.
At the time, she wrote that the agency should produce its own news content rather than pay outside companies.
Widakuswara and a group of VOA employees sued Lake and the Trump administration, claiming that by terminating and threatening to terminate the majority of USAGM staff, they violated their First Amendment rights.
A federal appeals court on Saturday blocked a ruling that had ordered the Trump administration to put more than 1,000 VOA employees back to work.
(Reporting by Helen Coster in New York; Editing by Frank McGurty and Daniel Wallis)
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