The Voice of America needs us to hope
Hope is not a wish. It's an action.
I have the sensation of time folding in on itself, where past and present exist in a single, disorienting breath. It’s like déjà vu but deeper — more like déjà vécu, the sense that you are reliving rather than simply recognizing.
The feeling crept in when President Trump ordered the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for Global Media on March 14, defunding and essentially abolishing the news outlets it oversees. These organizations are designed to fight tyranny by broadcasting uncensored information to societies ruled by dictators. They include the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Voice of America (VOA). The president accused the broadcasters of “radical propaganda,” accusations he hasn’t backed up.
One of my earliest jobs as a journalist was with VOA in Phnom Penh two decades ago. I worked for the international broadcaster for eight years, first stumbling into the gig in my early 20’s at the Cambodian king’s coronation. There I met VOA correspondent Scott Bobb, visiting from Bangkok, who asked if I did radio. I told him I could learn. I bought a microphone and a recorder and started sending dispatches to the bureau chiefs in Hong Kong, Jennifer Janin and Kate Dawson. I covered labor protests, the Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal and the political persecution of pro-democracy activists. My stories were broadcast around the world in English, and then translated into different languages including Khmer, pinging news back to Cambodia that might otherwise be censored.
I felt so proud scooting around the country on my motorbike, hearing VOA’s theme song perk up in house after house as people turned on the radio. When visiting the northern jungles of Ratanakiri, where there was no electricity, no newspapers or television, people asked me through a translator about the war in Iraq. They knew about it from VOA. Some said they wished the United States would take down their own dictator, then-Prime Minister Hun Sen.
The former leader ruled Cambodia for nearly four decades until handing power to his son in 2023. Hun Sen ran the country with fear, crushing dissent and free speech and forcing the closure of The Cambodia Daily newspaper where I’d once worked. His critics were silenced, either through persecution, exile or violence. On March 17, Hun Sen praised Trump for silencing VOA, welcoming "his courage to lead the world in combating fake news, starting with news outlets funded by the US government."
I messaged my ex-husband Sarada Taing, a Cambodian reporter I’d met in Phnom Penh in 2003, while covering the politically-motivated trial of student activists falsely accused by the government of inciting violence. Rada, as I call him, moved to the U.S. with me in 2008. He became a U.S. citizen five years later at a ceremony that welcomed him to belong to a democratic country where he could live and report freely.
Rada worked for VOA, RFA and, until the Trump administration slashed National Endowment for Democracy funding last month, an online version of The Cambodia Daily.
“How are you doing? How are you taking care of yourself?” I asked Rada.
“Suffering. This is a new dictatorship,” he said of the U.S. government, run by a president trying to silence and criminalize the free press, retaliate against his critics and violate the Constitution and rule of law.
Working from Washington, DC, Rada has defied transnational threats from the Cambodian government to report on corruption and abuse of power that local reporters couldn’t cover back home because they risked violence or death. By gutting U.S. broadcasting agencies, the Trump administration is killing one of America’s greatest sources of power: Hope.
VOA launched during World War II eight weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and for 83 years, the United States broadcast hope to the world. Until now.
Writer Dana Milbank, my former Washington Post colleague, captured the blow in his March 17 column:
”Adolf Hitler couldn’t silence it. Joseph Stalin and his successors, right up through Vladimir Putin, couldn’t silence it. Mao Zedong and his successors, through Xi Jinping, couldn’t silence it. Ruhollah Khomeini and the ayatollahs couldn’t silence it.
But Donald Trump has just silenced the voice of freedom. For the first time since 1942, VOA has been taken off the air, after Trump put virtually all of its 1,300 staff members on leave…The world’s autocrats are doing somersaults.”
I asked Rada how he thought people would experience not having this part of America speaking — or listening — to them. He worried they’d feel alone, which carries a psychological toll. People living under dictatorships can pretend they’re free until they want to speak up. Then they remember: They can’t. Their jobs, safety, lives are at risk. In those moments, Rada said, it’s a small comfort to know a super power cares about freedom. America was a model for the world, something to aspire to.
Like many of Trump’s executive orders, the one dismantling the U.S. global broadcasters could be challenged in court. Radio Free Europe is already suing. Still, Trump’s Justice Department defied a federal judge’s order in an unrelated case, placing the U.S. in a Constitutional crisis, so it’s unclear what would happen if a judge ordered the broadcasters to be restored.
Despite this, I refuse to lose hope. I urge you to resist losing it, too.
I reflect often on the question someone asked me leading up to the U.S election last November: “What’s the point of freedom if you can’t afford to live?” The point is that we are free to say that we want something different, that we deserve something better. It’s hard to understand this until your rights are taken away. But I know the value of freedom because I’ve lived in countries that don’t have it.
I know that freedom requires hope.
Optimism expects a better future, but hope is action-driven and learnable. As Ashley Abramson points out in the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology: Psychologist C. Rick Snyder defined hope as “the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways.”
People can’t wish their way to a better future. They have to take action, as U.S. veterans did by marching on Washington and in state capitals on March 14 to protest violations of the Constitution, which veteran
notes they swore an oath to defend. Unlike U.S. legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil, a student activist the Trump administration detained and is threatening to deport for exercising his First Amendment right to protest Israel’s war in Gaza, the veterans were not censured for their demonstrations.This freedom is worth hoping for. It has health benefits, too. Research suggests that hope boosts mental health and self-esteem, improves daily functioning in those with chronic illness and protects against PTSD.
With the history of tyranny surfacing in real-time, it feels like we’re standing at the crossroads of two moments, watching them merge. The past reminds us there are always parallel storylines running at any moment. Collective, active hope is what will restore the voices of America to tell a different story than the one unfolding now.
A change of frame…
On Feb. 25, in my piece, “Navigating crisis takes a village. And a break.,” I admitted I was feeling quite hopeless and that it took a village to help me reframe. I asked you, readers, to send a glimpse of what’s fortifying you — be it a photo, a podcast, how you’re publicly engaging or even resting.
Veronica Benson of Virginia shared that she’s listening to Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton. “She speaks about the wonder of nature and how it draws us into the moment. She also mentions the political despair experienced in the 1960s. This helped remind me of the many painful hardships of our past, and how despite them, "we still rise!" (Credit to yet another great poet, Maya Angelou.)”
And Eva Kaplan of Maine sent this video of her three-year-old daughter: “At the risk of being cheesy, I will offer up Malya’s apparent instinct for being deadpan.”
Thank you, Veronica, Eva and Malya. I’ll share more of what readers told me is fortifying them in posts to come. If you’d like to share what’s bringing you solace, helping soothe your nervous system or moving you to hope, I’d love to know, see, hear and pass it on.
Invisible Threads is media for a wellbeing economy. And I’m Kate Woodsome…
…a journalist and affiliate visiting scholar with Georgetown University’s Psychology Department who’s spent 20 years navigating complex information environments in post-war, authoritarian and declining democracies. I began my career as a journalist reporting in Cuba, post-genocide Cambodia and Hong Kong before managing radio and television programs for Voice of America and Al Jazeera English, amplifying under-reported stories.
At The Washington Post, I founded a film production unit, pioneered a mental health column and reported on the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. I’ve also been recognized with the Ben Bradlee Award for Courage in Journalism, an Edward R. Murrow Award and honors from the White House News Press Photographers Association. I left The Post in 2023, no longer willing to normalize the trauma, burnout and moral injury pervasive in the industry.
At Georgetown University, I’m working with the Psychology Department’s Community Research Group and the Red House research and design unit to develop media, education and resources to disrupt cycles of trauma, foster resilience and support dialogue across divides. The Invisible Threads Project is the independent space where I share stories, teach and bring people together — free from media industry pressures.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers
By Emily Dickinson
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me
Thank you for this, Kate! It's been alarming to see the First Amendment trampled on and ignored in the past few weeks, and now the destruction of the VOA. If the public understood the full dimensions of this decision it's my hope that some Americans, enough of them, would stand up in opposition. They won't get there without the context. Thanks for writing this.