In 2020, North Korean authorities reportedly executed a fishing boat captain by firing squad in front of 100 of his colleagues. His crime: secretly listening to Radio Free Asia (RFA), the U.S. government-funded news outlet that has an estimated 50 million-plus listeners across the Asia-Pacific.
We only know about the fisherman’s fate because RFA broke the story, based on interviews with sources inside North Korea, including a law enforcement official who confirmed it. RFA was one of the only global media outlets, if not the only one, to have the resources and access to uncover the facts.
But today, someone tuning in to RFA from the seas around the Korean Peninsula – or anywhere else – is more likely to find dead air. President Donald Trump’s executive order to close the station down, along with sister broadcasters Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Marti covering Cuba, and stations broadcasting into the Middle East, is extinguishing cherished connections with the outside world for millions of people in “closed” countries. In many cases, these media networks were the only such connection.
VOA was established in 1942 with a mandate to combat Nazi propaganda. RFA followed in 1994, initially triggered by the Chinese government’s censorship of the bloody Tiananmen crackdown five years earlier.
In the Asia-Pacific of 2025, RFA’s core purpose remains just as relevant.
Chinese authorities, like those in North Korea, continue to firewall their people from the global internet, while feeding them a dedicated diet of state media propaganda. They are both, along with Myanmar and Vietnam, in the bottom 10 the global press freedom index. Cambodia and Laos place only slightly higher.
Until now, the most accessible alternative to state media for many people in these countries was RFA and VOA. The irony of Trump now denouncing these outlets as “radical propaganda” will not be lost on the listeners and readers who have relied upon it for independent reporting for decades.
Not that Trump’s decision is without support in Asia.
The Beijing state newspaper Global Times reveled in the news that VOA had been “discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.” Meanwhile, Cambodia’s former ruler Hun Sen hailed the order as a “big contribution to eliminating fake news.”
“Fake news” – the catch-all truth denier popularized by Trump himself is now being gleefully parroted back to him by unlikely U.S. allies around the globe.
VOA has been bundled in with Trump’s many perceived enemies in the “radical” or “liberal” media, but this executive order appears at odds with his administration’s supposedly hawkish approach on China and foreign policy in general.
Consider, for example, that federal funding enabled RFA to report on human rights violations by the Chinese government in Xinjiang, information which has in turn played a key role in the way civil society and Uyghur communities have successfully pushed for stronger U.S. policies on China. Only this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions on Thai officials who facilitated the deportation of 40 Uyghur men to China, where they are at risk of torture and enforced disappearance. Five other Uyghur refugees are still facing the same risk; despite threats to their existence, RFA and VOA continue to cover their stories.
The U.S. president’s decision to pull the plug on one of the key outlets uncovering human rights violations across Asia, and not least crimes against humanity in China, hints at a certain incoherence in White House thinking. That Trump has surrendered a tried-and-tested tool of soft U.S. power decades in the making, a brand trusted by overseas audiences amid the ongoing battle for ideas, can only be good news for those who RFA’s reporting sought to combat. It also creates an information vacuum that other ambitious, well-resourced governments could seek to fill to their own ends. Is it any wonder the celebrations are ringing out in Beijing?
As for the Trump administration’s proclaimed advocacy for free speech, there are similar contradictions.
RFA has often been one of the few journalistic voices reporting on stifled stories: from air strikes in Myanmar, to state-linked corruption in Vietnam, to the killing of activists in Laos. Its shutdown will have an immediate impact in places where governments employ authoritarian policies to maintain control over the news and the narrative. Places where freedom of expression – and that of the press – is suppressed to quash any dissent. Places where there is no independent media, and where VOA and RFA are the lifeline that can tether listeners to reality and the outside world that exists beyond state propaganda.
Listeners like the North Korean fisherman, who reportedly confessed to enjoying RFA’s broadcasts for more than 15 years, the open sea acting as his buffer against detection.
Not only will those listeners be deprived of independent journalism; we will all be deprived of hearing their stories. Like the tree that falls in the forest with no one to hear it, the fisherman shot dead by the firing squad will now go down without a sound.