By Lili Bayer
BRUSSELS/PRAGUE (Reuters) -After 75 years of operating through historic times that marked the end of communism and return to democracy across eastern Europe, the future of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is now at risk after U.S. President Donald Trump cut its funding.
This has prompted a call from the Czech government urging European Union foreign ministers to discuss the matter at their meeting in Brussels on Monday, to allow RFE/RL to continue to provide news coverage in countries where free press is banned or still in its infancy.
“We have to start with the political readiness to do something, so I will ask for that today,” Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky said.
He added on social media platform X that ministers would discuss how to at least partially maintain its broadcasting.
Touted by Trump as a move to cut back on federal bureaucracy, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) over the weekend terminated grants to RFE/RL, which broadcasts to countries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, including Russia, Belarus, war-torn Ukraine and Iran.
Trump ally Elon Musk called for the Prague-based RFE/RL to be shut down in a post on X last month, saying “it’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves”.
Trump signed an executive order on Friday aimed at gutting the parent of U.S. government-funded media outlet Voice of America and six other federal agencies, shortly after his government cancelled more than 80% of all the programs at U.S. Agency for International Development.
While USAID distributes billions of dollars of humanitarian aid, it has also been involved in projects aimed at strengthening civil society and supporting media and democracy globally, including in eastern Europe and the Balkans.
RFE/RL President and CEO Stephen Capus said in a statement that the cancellation of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s grant agreement “would be a massive gift to America’s enemies”.
RFE/RL journalists kept working on Monday with stories appearing on its website.
Set up in 1950, initially RFE and RL were funded principally by the U.S. Congress through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) broadcasting to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, countries behind the Iron Curtain.
In 1953, RL began broadcasting to the former Soviet Union in Russian and 17 other national languages.
“Radio Free Europe must be the voice not only of our people, but of the people of all of Europe. RFE must continue to help get the truth behind the Iron Curtain,” President John F. Kennedy said in his prepared remarks to Radio Free Europe Fund in 1962.
After the end of the Cold War, RFE/RL launched new language services in Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian to the Yugoslav successor states in early 1994.
At the invitation of former Czech President Vaclav Havel, the leading figure in the “Velvet Revolution” that toppled Communist rule there, RFE/RL relocated its broadcasting center from Munich to Prague in 1995.
(Reporting by Lili Bayer, writing by Krisztina Than and Jason Hovet, editing by Andrew Gray, Timothy Heritage and Ed Osmond)
