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President Donald Trump's administration on Saturday began making deep cuts to Voice of America and other government-run, pro-democracy programming, with the organisation's director saying all VOA employees have been put on leave. On Friday night, shortly after Congress passed its latest funding bill, Trump directed his administration to reduce the functions of several agencies to the minimum required by law. That included the US Agency for Global Media, which houses Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Asia and Radio Marti, which beams Spanish-language news into Cuba. On Saturday morning, Kari Lake, the failed Arizona gubernatorial and US Senate candidate whom Trump named a senior adviser to the agency, posted on X that employees should check their email. That coincided with notices going out placing Voice of America staff on paid administrative leave. For the first time in 83 years, the storied Voice of America is being silenced, Michael Abramowitz, the organisation's director,
The White House said Tuesday that its officials will determine which news outlets can regularly cover President Donald Trump up close a sharp break from a century of tradition in which a pool of independently chosen news organisations go where the chief executive does and hold him accountable on behalf of regular Americans. The move, coupled with the government's arguments this week in a federal lawsuit over access filed by The Associated Press, represented an unprecedented seizing of control over coverage of the American presidency by any administration. Free speech advocates expressed alarm over what it could mean for democracy. And three wire services that reach billions of people around the world said Wednesday that the change would harm the dissemination of reliable information about the nation's chief executive. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the changes would rotate traditional outlets from the group and include some streaming services. Leavitt cast the .
The White House said Tuesday that its officials will decide which news outlets can regularly cover President Donald Trump up close - a sharp break from a century of tradition in which a pool of independently chosen news organisations go where the chief executive does and hold him accountable on behalf of regular Americans. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the changes would rotate traditional outlets from the group and include some streaming services. She cast the change as a modernisation of the press pool, saying the move would be more inclusive and restore access back to the American people who elected Trump. Moving forward, the White House press pool will be determined by the White House press team," Leavitt said at a daily briefing. A select group of DC-based journalists should no longer have a monopoly of press access at the White House. She spoke a day after a federal judge refused to immediately order the White House to restore The Associated Press' access to
Journalists at The New York Daily News and Forbes walked off the job on Thursday amid contentious contract talks with management and a difficult few weeks in the news industry. Both strike are historic: It's the first-ever at the business-focused magazine in more than a century, and the first at the storied newspaper in more than three decades, according to the NewsGuild of New York. The one-day strike at the Daily News coincides with Forbes walkout, which runs through Monday. In midtown Manhattan, dozens of Daily News staffers and their supporters picketed Thursday outside a small co-working space the newspaper's office since its lower Manhattan newsroom was shuttered in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic. Founded in 1919, it was once the largest circulating newspaper in the country. Strikers marched around the building holding signs that read New York Needs Its Hometown Paper and Alden to News: Drop Dead, a reference to the tabloid's famous 1975 headline. They also put up a l