WASHINGTON - Today, Radio Free Asia (RFA) leadership informed its furloughed and the majority of their additional staff that they would be laid off, effective May 9. By the end of May, half of RFA’s language services will no longer produce or publish new content: RFA Tibetan, Burmese, Uyghur - which is the world’s only independent Uyghur language news service - and Lao (which closed down this week already). Also, ceasing operations will be RFA English service and Asia Fact Check Lab, a special unit focused on picking apart false narratives seeded by the Chinese Communist Party. These moves are drastic but necessary, RFA President and CEO Bay Fang said, given the delays in receiving its funds from the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), despite a court order last week.
“We are in an unconscionable situation,” Fang said. “Because we can no longer rely on USAGM to disburse our funds as Congress intended, we will have to begin mass layoffs and let entire language services go dark in the next week.
“We are losing journalists who broke the news about the CCP’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.
“Their invaluable work is part of RFA’s responsibility to uphold the truth so that dictators and despots don’t have the last word. Our priority remains to preserve our company and Congressionally mandated mission, while protecting our most vulnerable journalists.”
Next Friday, more than 280 staff members will be laid off, almost 90 percent of RFA’s U.S.-based workforce. Overseas, the service will terminate almost 20 positions. Additional terminations will continue throughout the month. Every department and level of the organization is being impacted. In addition, staff being terminated will have their health insurance paid through the end of May.
Following the termination of its grant agreement by the USAGM on March 15, RFA put three quarters of its U.S.-based employees on unpaid leave and terminated most of its overseas contractors. Soon after, it initiated a lawsuit to receive its Congressionally appropriated funds in the court. The Justice Department has appealed last week’s ruling to reinstate RFA’s grant agreement and funding stream. Last night, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit temporarily granted a motion for an administrative stay on the previous ruling, effectively allowing the USAGM to continue withholding funding from RFA and its sister grantee network Middle East Broadcasting Networks.
In a piece published today, the day before World Press Freedom Day, on The New York Times website, Fang laid out the case for RFA’s value to U.S. interests and what its potential demise means, given the sacrifice of its staff: “[T]hese brave journalists, who have risked everything to speak truth to dictators abroad, may be silenced by the very nation whose belief in press freedom inspired them in the first place.”