Kari Lake Slams 'Propaganda' On Voice Of America Airwaves: 'Wasteful' To Support Voice Of America

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At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday, Kari Lake delivered a closing statement about Voice of America's future.

Transcript

00:00I do closing statements. I think we covered a lot of ground here today.

00:03You spoke about a number of different concerning things, from what's going on with lawfare to

00:09foreign nationals being hired and given access and not actually being vetted, to facilities

00:15being empty and not used, and individuals that have, you know, worked for our adversaries,

00:21even though they were supposed to be expressing the sentiments of America.

00:24I was, it's sad that it was not bipartisan to bring up those issues, but only to attack

00:31you. I do want to give the minority side an opportunity to offer any closing statement,

00:36because maybe they want to bring it up now.

00:43We cleared the room.

00:47I don't want them to say I didn't give them a chance, because that'll happen later.

00:51Yeah.

00:54I guess the minority doesn't have anything else that they want to say.

01:01Ms. Lake, for my closing statement, I'm going to give you the opportunity to take my time

01:06and express any other sentiments that you feel like you didn't have the opportunity to express,

01:10any other information that you'd like to put out, and then we'll close down this hearing.

01:14Well, I want to thank you, Chairman Mast, for allowing me to come and speak about the Voice

01:18of America, U.S. Agency for Global Media.

01:20America has an incredible story to tell. Unfortunately, it hasn't been told properly

01:26or positively on Voice of America for a long time, and I'd like to see that change. We have so much

01:32that we should be telling the world, and we shouldn't be putting CCP propaganda, Russian propaganda,

01:38Iranian regime propaganda on our airwaves that the taxpayers are paying for.

01:43This is nearly a billion-dollar agency. We know for a fact money is being wasted. We know that

01:48the content going out is not supportive of this great country, yet the great people of this country

01:54are being forced to pay for it. And thankfully, President Trump has come into office and said,

01:58I want to make sure we scale back this out-of-control bloat in the federal bureaucracy.

02:02And I don't take pleasure in people losing their jobs, but I will tell you, in the media landscape,

02:11the trends have been newsrooms are getting smaller. We don't need as many people. Where it used to take

02:16a team of six or seven to get a story out in a live shot, one person can do that now. I mean,

02:21I mentioned Joe Rogan. He reaches hundreds of millions of people with each of his podcasts,

02:25and he doesn't have a staff of 1,100 or 1,200 people doing that. Unfortunately, in the government,

02:32they don't like the word modernize, and they haven't modernized in this agency. The, you know,

02:3915,000 people in media have lost their jobs in 2024. 15,000 broadcast media employees lost their jobs

02:49due to downsizing. We can't continue to operate at the level that we're continuing at. And President

02:55Trump has asked us to bring this agency down to its statutory minimum, and he's calling for

03:00eliminating the agency starting in the fiscal year 2026, which begins in October. And I'm going to

03:07work to effectuate that. You know, I could be selfish and say, I don't want to end an agency

03:11because I'm working in it. I'm happy to do what the president has asked us to do. We need to start

03:17scaling back some of the waste. And I do think it's wasteful to spend money at an agency that's supposed

03:22to be telling America's story that is not telling America's story. I'm going to do everything in my

03:27power to make sure that we stop running CCP propaganda, that we start putting the true

03:32story of America forward as much as I can in the coming months. So thank you so much for giving

03:37us an opportunity. And, you know, I wanted to be respectful to everybody. Unfortunately, I didn't,

03:43I didn't think that some of the questions really came forth to, to prod and find out what's happening

03:49and how we can make it better. But hopefully I was able to provide some answers. We appreciate

03:54your testimony today. And I would simply add to that, you know, we can accomplish today with any

03:59one given phone, what it used to take a team of people to do a camera person with a tripod and a

04:0520 pound camera and a reporter and somebody holding a microphone and a news truck to broadcast that

04:10any one of us and any individual across the globe can now conduct that with something that most of us

04:15carry in our pocket. That's the difference in the world today as to just a decade ago.

04:19That's right.

04:20And that I would say this.

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