Former Arizona gubernatorial and Senate candidate, Kari Lake, who is now serving within the Trump administration, announced over the weekend that the international media arm will be ripping up their contracts with the Associated Press and other “nonsense” media outlets that she has stated previously have been authoring hit piece after hit piece against President Donald Trump.
Lake, the current Special Adviser for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, put out a statement revealing that Voice of America, which is an initiative that receives big bucks from the federal government to disseminate pro-democracy media into developing countries, will not be relying on or using reporting from the following three publications: The Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse.
She then stated that the contracts between the organization and these media outlets that allow for the republication or syndication of their articles will be brought to an end, according to a report from Trending Politics News.
USAGM and VOA are weighed down by “expensive and unnecessary newswire contracts” approved by former President Joe Biden during a 2024 request to increase the department’s budget, Lake stated, adding the contracts amount to “tens-of-millions of dollars.”
“USAGM is an American taxpayer funded News Organization with an 83-year history. We should not be paying outside news companies to tell us what the news is—with nearly a billion-dollar budget, we should be producing news ourselves,” Lake went on to explain in a statement obtained by the Daily Caller. “And if that’s not possible, the American taxpayer should demand to know why.”
During a meeting with USAGM staffers on Friday, Lake and her subordinates allegedly ordered the VOA to refrain from utilizing “wire service material for their reports.” Such inclusions are typically meant to cover news topics or areas of the globe where reporters are not present.
Lake also told the folks at Newsmax that the contracts are just “a lot of nonsense the American taxpayer shouldn’t be paying for.”
“Today, I started the process of terminating the agency’s contracts with the Associated Press, Reuters, & the Agence France-Presse. This will save taxpayers about 53 million dollars. The purpose of our agency is to tell the American story. We don’t need to outsource that responsibility to anyone else,” Lake said in a social media post while shining light on the topic during the interview.
There are only a handful of programs coming out of the federal government that I think are justifiable for use of taxpayer dollars. One is the military and federal law enforcement, though a case can be made that we’d be better off if local police handled matters, but that’s just my opinion.
Much of what has been dug up from the swamp by the Department of Government Efficiency is complete waste and fraud. These “programs” exist for the sole purpose of laundering money that is really going in the back pocket of politicians and lobbyists. It all needs to be disposed of. Pronto.
Lake, who ran for governor in 2022 and U.S. Senate in 2024, was tapped in March to serve in her current role where she has pledged to “streamline” an agency that many conservatives feel is top-heavy with initiatives and line items antithetical to President Trump’s agenda. Her cuts follow the total dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development where similar programming was brought to light.
If she carries out her mission successfully, Lake will have endeared herself to voters in her state and around the country, providing her with a boost in popularity and a record to back up her conservative values and rhetoric. That might improve her chances of winning an election of some type in the future if she ever decides to give it another go.
The AP has been at the forefront of the Trump administration’s sparring with the Washington, D.C. press corps. In February, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced she would be revoking the outlet’s briefing credentials after its editors refused to use the term “Gulf of America” in reports.
Not long afterward, a federal judge ruled in favor of the Trump administration in a lawsuit, going on to explain that the AP failed to demonstrate “irreparable harm” from being excluded from the White House.
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