Voice of America staff allege Kari Lake violated its independence in lawsuit

Voice of America journalists sued the federal government Monday, alleging it violated the legal statute that protects the broadcaster’s editorial independence, including censoring coverage of the Iran crisis and publishing “propaganda” in support of President Donald Trump as news.

The lawsuit comes after U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled this month that Kari Lake had been illegally running VOA’s parent agency — the U.S. Agency for Global Media — with an unlawful plan to shrink the institution, and he ordered more than 1,000 employees back to work. The complaint, filed in federal district court in D.C., argues that restoring the workforce is not enough to fix a newsroom the plaintiffs say has already been corrupted from within under Lake’s watch.

The plaintiffs include Barry Newhouse, former acting director of VOA’s Central News Division; Ayesha Tanzeem, director of its South and Central Asia Division; Dong Hyuk Lee, chief of the Korean Service; and Ksenia Turkova, a former Russian Service contractor who declined to return to work last fall, citing censorship concerns. PEN America and Reporters Without Borders, two press advocacy groups, are also suing. USAGM, Lake and Michael Rigas, the new acting CEO, are named as defendants.

In a joint statement, the four journalist plaintiffs said they filed the complaint out of a sense of duty. “Without editorial integrity, VOA will be no different than government mouthpieces our audiences already hear in their own countries,” they wrote. “We bring this action because we believe it is our duty — and our legal obligation — to defend VOA’s editorial independence and restore its credibility.”

Representatives for USAGM and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Lake appointed Ali Javanmardi to oversee VOA’s Persian Service. The complaint alleges that move violates the regulation designed to prevent political appointees from interfering with the agency’s news operations, saying Javanmardi is a USAGM employee and thus should not dictate editorial coverage.

Javanmardi then banned coverage of exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi and barred journalists from booking guests without his approval, conduct the Washington Post reported in February. A VOA Persian journalist who complained about the censorship was terminated in early March, according to the suit.

The complaint also alleges that VOA’s Mandarin Service, under a new USAGM-appointed manager, Hui Jing, published an article in January featuring an AI-generated image of Trump posing triumphantly before an American flag. The piece bore no resemblance to VOA’s journalism, the complaint says, calling it “imagery worthy of North Korean propaganda.” The plaintiffs also allege that Hui Jing told staffers in meetings that “if they show loyalty to the Trump administration, they will keep their jobs at VOA.”

Lake has railed against the editorial “firewall,” including during a congressional hearing. “We need to make sure that firewall is gone,” she told the House Foreign Affairs Committee in June. “We should be able to have control over what kind of content goes out. It should be in alignment with our foreign policy.”

The lawsuit invokes a 2020 case from the waning days of the first Trump administration. Senior U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell found that VOA journalists enjoy First Amendment protections.

With VOA journalists headed back to work, there is an urgent need to protect their rights, said Andrew G. Celli Jr. of the law firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel, who is representing the plaintiffs.

“The journalists we represent have a constitutional right to report the news,” he said. “They can’t exercise that right freely when they know that, when they return to work, their copy will be censored, and their workplace has been converted into a propaganda factory. These reporters suffer from the ‘chilling effect’ from this Administration’s conduct; the law gives them a remedy in court.” The Government Accountability Project, Democracy Defenders Fund and a Yale Law School clinic are also representing the plaintiffs.

The plaintiffs are asking for a permanent injunction upholding the editorial independence and barring further interference with VOA’s editorial independence.