Radio Free Asia said Friday it will lay off almost all of its staff and close production in several languages, including a rare Uyghur service, after President Donald Trump cut off funding.
Radio Free Asia — created by the United States with a mission to deliver news in countries without free media — said it will terminate 280 staff members in Washington, accounting for more than 90 percent of its US-based workforce, as well as 20 positions overseas.
It said it would no longer produce original content in Uyghur, in what it described as the world’s only editorially independent news service in the language of the mostly Muslim people centered in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region.
The United States has described China’s treatment of Uyghurs as genocide, a charge strongly rejected by Beijing.
Radio Free Asia will also terminate services in Tibetan, Burmese and English. It will maintain production in Mandarin, Cantonese, Khmer and Vietnamese.
“We are in an unconscionable situation,” Radio Free Asia president and CEO Bay Fang said in a statement.
“We are losing journalists who broke the news about the (Chinese Communist Party’s) genocide against the Uyghurs, who risked their lives covering a civil war in Myanmar, who exposed human trafficking networks in Southeast Asia and who brought to light the crackdown on religious freedom in Tibet,” she said.
The Trump administration in mid-March said it was ending financing for US government-funded broadcasters, including Voice of America, even though Congress had approved the money.
A federal court last week issued a preliminary order to the government to restore funding, saying a legal challenge by Radio Free Asia as well as US-funded Arabic media was likely to succeed.
The Trump administration has not complied and another court Thursday temporarily stayed last week’s order pending court procedures.
Voice of America, which was administered more directly by the government, shut down production after the funding cutoff but is also challenging the Trump move in court.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — created to reach inside the Soviet bloc during the Cold War — remains operational, with the Czech government stepping in to keep it afloat.
In an additional show of support, rockers R.E.M. reissued their 1981 single “Radio Free Europe” on Friday to benefit the broadcaster in advance of World Press Freedom day.
Trump has long bristled at media coverage of him and complained about an editorial “firewall” that prohibited the government from intervening editorially in taxpayer-funded media.
