BRUSSELS: The EU on Monday warned that President Donald Trump’s freeze on US-funded media outlets, including Radio Free Europe, risked “benefitting our common adversaries”.
Trump’s administration at the weekend started laying off staff at Voice of America and other broadcasters including Prague-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) after freezing their funding.
“We see these media outlets really as beacons of truth, of democracy, and of hope for millions of people around the world,“ said European Commission spokeswoman Paula Pinho.
“Freedom of the press… is critical for democracy. And this decision risks benefitting our common adversaries,“ she said without naming countries, groups or individuals.
Founded by the United States during the Cold War to counter Soviet propaganda, RFE/RL was banned across the communist bloc, where regimes regularly jammed its signal.
The US-funded media have since focused on countries like Russia, China, Iran and Belarus.
EU foreign ministers discussed the freeze and ways to make up for it in Brussels on Monday.
The bloc’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the EU would not “automatically… fill the void that the US is leaving”.
“We have a lot of organisations who are coming with the same request to us,“ Kallas told reporters.
“But there was really a push from the foreign ministers to discuss this and find the way, so this is the tasking to our side to see what can we do,“ she added.
Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky, whose country has been the home of RFE/RL since its 1995 move from Munich, said after the talks Europe should take care of the radio.
“I raised this question to see whether our partners see value in keeping RFE/RL running. We certainly do, and if we see value in it, then it makes sense to consider ways to secure its future, including the possibility of buying it,“ he told AFP.
Lipavsky said earlier that the costs of running RFE/RL would reach up to $120 million a year.
His Polish counterpart Radoslaw Sikorski said Monday the EU could raise the budget of the European Endowment for Democracy, an NGO founded to boost democracy in the bloc’s neighbours, and thus help finance the radio.
Trump has already eviscerated the United States’ aid agency and its education department.
The media funding freeze affects many other US outlets besides Voice of America and RFE/RL, including Radio Farda, a Persian-language broadcaster blocked by Iran’s government, and Alhurra, an Arabic-language network established after the Iraq invasion in the face of highly critical coverage by Qatar-based Al-Jazeera.
Iran, China and Russia have all invested heavily in state media outlets created to compete with Western narratives and to push out government lines to foreign audiences.
