President Trump says he wants L. Brent Bozell III, founder and president of the Media Research Center, to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM. In this 2016 photo, Bozell speaks at a “Climate Hustle” panel discussion at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC.
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Kris Connor/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
President Trump has named a staunch conservative critic of the mainstream media, L. Brent Bozell III, as his choice to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the parent agency of Voice of America and other international broadcasters owned by the federal government.
In an article published on Truth Social, Trump said Bozell would make much-needed changes at the agency, led by veteran editor-in-chief Amanda Bennett, herself a former director of Voice of America.
She resigned along with other Biden cabinet appointees when Trump took office.
“Few people understand the global media landscape in print, on television and online better than Brent,” Trump wrote. “He and his family have fought for the American principles of freedom, liberty, equality and justice for generations, and he will ensure that this message is heard by freedom-loving people around the world.”
Bozell, 69, is the founder of the conservative nonprofit Media Research Center. For decades, he has criticized the news media and pop culture from a decidedly center-right perspective.
“They are not impartial observers of the national scene,” he wrote of journalists, in a characteristic comment in 2018. “They are left-wing partisans.” (In recent years, his syndicated column has been written with Tim Graham, a Center colleague who is also editor-in-chief of its affiliate, NewsBusters.)
Bozell comes from a family with strong ties to conservative media. He is the nephew of National review founder William F. Buckley Jr., who collaborated on writing with his father.
Additionally, Bozell’s son, Leo Brent Bozell IV, was convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers during the siege of the US Capitol in January 2021 and sentenced to 45 months in prison. Trump grants blanket pardon to nearly all convicted January 6 rioters encompassed young Bozell.
Before taking office, Trump announced that he wanted to nominate Lake Karia former local news anchor in Arizona who unsuccessfully ran for governor and U.S. Senate on a strongly pro-Trump platform, serving as director of Voice of America. Like Trump, Lake attacked journalists as “fake news.”
For now, Michael Abramowitz, the former Washington Post editor who served as head of the human rights nonprofit Freedom House, remains at the helm of Voice of America.
For procedural reasons, appointing a new network director requires appointing a new head of USAGM and establishing members of a bipartisan oversight board; it is not a presidentially appointed position. Yet Trump swept aside every member of the agency’s congressionally appointed board — Republicans and Democrats — upon taking office.
Beyond Voice of America, USAGM networks also include Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio and Television Martí and Middle Eastern Broadcasting Networks. The law prohibits international channels financed by the United States from broadcasting their reports in the United States.
Their goal is to provide credible overseas media coverage for countries that do not have an independent or free press. This includes current events in American political and social debates.
In doing so, the networks model American democratic values for foreign audiences who, they believe, now reaches 427 million people around the world every week. (These figures do not include people who watch, read or listen to its offerings in China or North Korea, because measuring those audiences has not been possible, the agency reported.)
USAGM served as Flash point for the final year of Trump’s first term. Trump appointee Michael Pack won U.S. Senate confirmation in May 2020 after a two-year wait and spent more than seven months in office. attacking several of its journalists.
In office, Pack told the conservative Federalist that he viewed his mission this way: “to drain the swamp, root out the corruption and deal with these (anti-Trump) bias issues.”
In practice, this meant buying into conspiracy theories, accusing top executives of being security threats, and having high-level political advisers screen Voice of America journalists for anti-bias. Trump.
Pack also refused to authorize visa extensions for his foreign journalists, many of whom had language skills difficult to find in the Washington press. Several of his actions were later found to be against the law and, in the case of bias reviews, be unconstitutional.