Sawt Falasteen - Radio Free Asia suspends operations after Trump cuts and shutdown

The broadcaster had already laid off or furloughed more than 90 percent of staff and drastically scaled back production since President Donald Trump's administration in March axed most money to US government-funded media.

Long a thorn in Beijing's side, RFA's closure comes just as Trump meets Chinese President Xi Jinping on an Asia trip and looks for better relations.

Some of Trump's cuts were successfully challenged before courts, but Radio Free Asia faced a new halt to funding due to the shutdown of the federal government, which has lasted nearly a month.

RFA said it would have no choice but to halt all news production effective Friday, the first time it has done so since it went on air in 1996.

Bay Fang, the president and CEO of RFA, said the decision means that remaining money can go to severance packages for staff who will now be formally let go.

"Our strategy all along has been to protect our people for as long as possible," she told AFP.

She said that Radio Free Asia, newly freed from legal constraints that came with US government funding, was looking for new revenue streams so it could resume.

"We're trying to preserve what we would need to start back up," Fang said.

"I do feel like it's a fight against the clock. We have to get this funding as quickly as possible," she said.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which was founded during the Cold War to broadcast inside the Soviet bloc and was a loose inspiration for RFA, has survived in part due to pledges of support by European governments led by the Czech Republic.

Voice of America, which unlike the others was directly part of the US government, ground to a halt immediately after the Trump cuts, with its English-language website still featuring a top story on US lawmakers averting a government shutdown -- in March.

- 'Gift' to Beijing? -

Radio Free Asia has long infuriated Beijing, which accuses it of "false news." Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of the state-run Global Times, in March called action against RFA "truly gratifying."

Trump has long railed against media and questions why the government should fund coverage that may be unfavorable.

RFA goes dark just as Trump holds the first meeting of his second term with Jinping.

Shutting the broadcaster, which produced news in multiple Asian languages, "is a gift to dictators like Xi Jinping" especially "at a time when Beijing has worked quite assiduously to control what stories can and can't get told the country," said Sophie Richardson, co-executive director of the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.

Richardson, a veteran scholar of rights in China, noted that Trump has also terminated funding for non-governmental groups that documented developments in the country.

"I think in the not too distant future we'll see more clearly whether there are topics that become much harder to write about -- or aren't written about anymore -- because we aren't able to verify or confirm things or research trends," she said.

RFA said that China has already taken transmission signals vacated by the outlet and has increased its own broadcasting in Uyghur and Tibetan.

Radio Free Asia was a rare outlet with a Uyghur-language service not linked to Beijing and was at the forefront of reporting on mass detention camps set up for members of the mostly Muslim ethnic group in China's Xinjiang region.

RFA also recently won two Edward R. Murrow Awards, a US prize for broadcasting, for a series on young people in Myanmar coping with the aftermath of the 2021 coup.

RFA laid off its stringers in Myanmar a day before a devastating March earthquake.

Nonetheless, during the earthquake "we saw our numbers really skyrocket in terms of social media engagement, because we were that last man standing, so to speak," RFA spokesman Rohit Mahajan said.

"We're able to be that voice, that news, in that language, reporting on things like the weather and not just political insurrection or political dealings," he said.

S.AbuJamous--SF-PST