Book Review: Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America

Capturing News, Capturing Democracy highlights how government capture of media, exemplified by the Voice of America under the Trump administration, undermines democratic values and editorial independence. It warns that media institutions with ambiguous mandates are particularly susceptible to politicisation, self-censorship, and the erosion of democratic norms.
In 2021, the American media strategist Shawn Powers warned of an “extinction event” threatening independent media and democracy globally. At the time, Powers held the post of Chief Strategy Officer in the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the umbrella body responsible for the nation’s portfolio of five international media services including the Voice of America (VOA). The VOA network alone broadcast in 48 languages and claimed a global audience of more than 326 million. The identified threat arose from the force of both state-sourced and market-driven disinformation. Given Powers’ intimate vantage point at USAGM, he would have observed the fallout from one damaging manifestation of state-sourced intervention—the subject of this book by Kate Wright, Martin Scott, and Mel Bunce.
Scarred and demoralised, VOA had survived a political bludgeoning by appointees of the first Donald Trump presidency between June 2020 and January 2021. Theirs was an intense campaign of politicisation, purging, functional subversion, and abuse of power (the latter according to the US Office of Special Counsel). Reportedly, President Trump wanted to curb “negative reporting” by VOA, and political strategist Steve Bannon urged that the president should take control of the media behemoth. Trump did so by appointing Bannon’s friend and right-wing documentary producer Michael Pack as CEO of the USAGM. According to the authors of Capturing News, Capturing Democracy, Pack speculated publicly there might be foreign spies within USAGM: “It’s the swamp. It’s corruption. It’s bias – all together.”
Timed aptly for the coming of the second Trump administration, Wright and her co-authors offer a scholarly case study of the multi-faceted onslaught on VOA led by Pack. Prime motivations for their work were to warn how easily a government could “capture” such a network, to better understand how the processes of government capture worked, and how different forms of capture interacted with one another in determining the outcome. They examined some 15,000 documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOI), conducted interviews with USAGM and VOA staff, and studied points of comparison with seven other nations that experienced democratic backsliding and government capture of media. Among them were Hungary, Poland (pre-2023 change of government), Türkiye, and South Africa.
The value of a case study approach is in illuminating the multiple external and internal influences that affect the malleable character and conduct of a media entity. My own Australian case study of international broadcasting demonstrates that the practice should be understood as an open-ended negotiation between the interests and structures of the state, the values and processes of communicative exchange with audiences, and a range of institutional and professional biases that help determine the extent to which state interests and democratic values are congruent.
Wright et al record how the new head of the USAGM, Michael Pack, acted immediately to dismiss the heads of four of the five international media organisations; VOA’s director and deputy director resigned before they were sacked. CEO Pack dissolved bipartisan boards in each news organisation; suspended most of USAGM’s executives and had them investigated by private law firms; froze financial budgets and halted staff recruitment; did not initiate visa extensions of foreign journalists, resulting in workload pressures; and intervened in VOA’s internal disciplinary procedures to target journalists regarded as biased against President Trump.
While brutal and sudden in execution, this draining of “the swamp” requires broader analysis. Wright et al argue it is far too late for employed journalists and news managers to become seriously concerned about the politicisation of public service media only once direct editorial interventions have occurred. By then, the body likely has rotted.
A first point of vulnerability for VOA is the imprecision of its legislative mandate. VOA must apply editorial norms of accuracy and objectivity and “a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions,” while also disseminating government editorials and presenting government policies clearly. Wright et al note that the lack of a clear, consistent and well-defined mandate meant that Pack’s team could easily reinterpret it to suit their political objectives. This was made even easier by a decision of the Obama administration in 2016 to replace the structure of a bipartisan governance board with a single CEO of the USAGM; a decision perhaps made with unintended consequences.
In convincing detail, the writers analyse the contributing direct and indirect factors of government capture: governance, resource management, the use of bureaucratic bottlenecks to impede operations, staff fears of digital surveillance, and the manipulation of human resource processes, as well as the repeated intervention in editorial matters by attorneys appointed by Pack. Important also was the staff perception that they were under constant attack by other right-wing actors who amplified Pack’s criticism of VOA via online and social media. Increased stress among staff due to cost-cutting, the politicisation of human resources, and associated management hostility led to self-censorship and lowered resistance to democratic backsliding.
The authors conclude it is inadvisable to view government capture as the result of a single premeditated conspiracy: “Rather, we see it as being shaped by the interactions of various groups of actors, some of which were planned and some of which were not.” It remains the case that America’s state-owned international media services, which purport to represent democratic principles through editorially independent journalism, rate among the more powerful and purpose-driven instruments of that nation’s discursive power.
Of particular concern to the authors of Capturing News, Capturing Democracy is how easy it would be for a US government with authoritarian leanings to further risk US democracy by converting the multilingual VOA into a network targeting American citizens at home. Only a few “technical changes” would be required for VOA also to become a significant domestic broadcaster. It might be unnecessary given already the dominance of partisan media in the US. But, as theorist Jacques Ellul wrote decades ago in his classic work on Propaganda, the Formation of Men’s Attitudes: it is not sufficient to obtain a transitory political act such as a vote in Western society; one needs total adherence to a society’s truths and behavioral patterns.
This is a review of Kate Wright, Martin Scott and Mel Bunce’s Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2024).
Dr Geoff Heriot is a consultant on media and governance, and a former corporate and editorial executive with the ABC. A review of his book, International Broadcasting and its Contested Role in Australian Statecraft: Middle Power, Smart Power, appeared in The Reading Room on 30 January 2024.
This review article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may be republished with attribution.