Radio Free Asia

Radio Free Asia (RFA) is a news service that publishes online news, information, commentary and broadcasts radio programs for its audiences in Asia. The service, which provides editorially independent reporting, has the stated mission of providing accurate and uncensored reporting to countries in Asia that have poor media environments and limited protections for speech and press freedom.

RFA operates as a non-profit corporation, headquartered in Washington, D.C., with news bureaus and journalists in Asia, Europe, and Australia.

RFA was established by the US International Broadcasting Act of 1994 with the stated aim of "promoting democratic values and human rights", and countering the narratives and monopoly on information distribution of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as providing media reports about the North Korean government. It has historically been funded and supervised by the U.S. Agency for Global Media (formerly Broadcasting Board of Governors), an independent agency of the United States government.

RFA digitally publishes news articles, photos, videos, and podcasts on its website and social media channels including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, X in nine Asian languages for audiences in Mainland China, Hong Kong, North Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar.

On March 15, 2025, the United States Agency for Global Media terminated grants to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia following a directive from the Trump Administration. The news service and its staff have defied the executive order and remained on the air while considering legal action to challenge the presidential directive. On March 27, Democracy Forward filed suit on behalf of Radio Free Asia to block the U.S. Agency for Global Media's attempt to cancel federal funds appropriated by Congress.

History

After the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, a bipartisan group of senators and congressmen led by Jesse Helms and Joe Biden came together and sponsored legislation to create Radio Free Asia. Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich supported Radio Free Asia as a means to press China on human rights. The International Broadcasting Act was passed by the Congress of the United States and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1994, officially establishing Radio Free Asia.

Radio Free Asia was incorporated in March 1996, and began broadcasting in September 1996. Although RFA directors preferred to broadcast under the name "the Asia-Pacific Network", Republican representatives including Chris Smith and Jesse Helms insisted on returning the name to Radio Free Asia before broadcasting began, to which president Richard Richter complied. Radio Free Asia was forced to change the name in part due to financial pressures from the US government, for although they operated with an independent board, their initial $10 million annual budget came from the Treasury.

In 1997, the then US Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, began talks with the government of Australia to purchase abandoned transmission facilities near Darwin, Northern Territory for the purpose of expanding RFA's signal to overcome jamming. Richter personally lobbied in Canberra to support this effort. Although the Australian Government intended to sell the facilities to a foreign broadcaster, preference was given to the BBC over the fledgling RFA due to fears that such a sale would anger China, with Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer stating, "we are certainly not in the game of provocatively damaging our relations with China."

In response to radio jamming efforts from China, Newt Gingrich and House Republican leaders helped to increase the budget of RFA and VOA, with further funding of RFA proposed as a way to combat China's political repression without levying trade restrictions that would anger American businesses.

With the passage of the International Broadcasting Act in 1994, RFA was brought under auspices of the United States Information Agency where it remained until the agency's cessation of broadcasting duties and transitioned to U.S. Department of State operated Broadcasting Board of Governors in 1999. In September 2009, the 111th Congress amended the International Broadcasting Act to allow a one-year extension of the operation of Radio Free Asia.

On June 25, 2010, the US Senate unanimously approved Republican Senator Richard Lugar's legislation to promote the free dissemination of information in East Asia through the permanent authorization of RFA. The House of Representatives passed Lugar's bill S.3104 to grant Radio Free Asia permanent Congressional authorization on June 30 and it was signed into law on July 13, 2010.

RFA broadcasts in nine languages, via shortwave, satellite transmissions, medium-wave (AM and FM radio).

The first transmission was in Mandarin Chinese and it is RFA's most broadcast language at twelve hours per day. RFA also broadcasts in Cantonese, Tibetan (Kham, Amdo, and Uke dialects), Uyghur, Burmese, Vietnamese, Lao, Khmer (to Cambodia) and Korean (to North Korea). The Korean service launched in 1997 with Jaehoon Ahn as its founding director. Broadcasts in Khmer to Cambodia that began under the country's communist regime continue despite the country no longer being communist. In 2017, RFA and other networks, such as Voice of America, were put under the then newly created U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) that also sends representatives to its board of directors.

''The Economist'' credited Radio Free Asia with breaking the story on the Xinjiang internment camps.

The Global Investigative Journalism Network credited RFA with uncovering corruption in Vietnam and credited its journalists for risking prison sentences and worse from the regimes that they covered.

In January 2022, RFA announced that it had appointed Carolyn Bartholomew as the new chair of its board of directors. As of December 2023, its board members include: Michael J. Green, Michael Kempner, Keith Richburg, Shanthi Kalathil, and Allison Hooker. RFA receives its funding through annual budget allocations from the USAGM.

In March 2024, RFA announced the closure of its Hong Kong bureau, citing journalist safety concerns from Hong Kong's enactment of the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance.

On March 15, 2025, the United States Agency for Global Media imposed a 30-day total freeze on funding to RFA and terminated grants to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia following a directive from the Trump Administration and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with the intention of making that permanent. The station and its staff have defied the executive order and remained on the air while considering legal action to challenge the presidential directive. On March 21, RFA affiliate ''WHYNOT'' halted operations. On March 27, Democracy Forward filed suit on behalf of Radio Free Asia to block the U.S. Agency for Global Media's attempt to cancel federal funds appropriated by Congress On April 4, Radio Free Asia halted radio broadcasts in Mandarin, Tibetan and Lao, and heavily reduced its Burmese, Khmer, Korean and Uyghur language services. In April, it closed down its Lao language service. On May 2, RFA announced it was laying off 280 staff members members in the United States and cutting 20 positions overseas. It also announced it would be closing down its Tibetan, Burmese, English and Uyghur language services by the end of May, and announced it would close Asia Fact Check Lab and all radio and TV-style broadcasts. On May 9, RFA suspended Uyghur and Tibetan language services.

List of presidents

Radio jamming and Internet blocking

Since broadcasting began in 1996, Chinese authorities have consistently jammed RFA broadcasts.

Three RFA reporters were denied access to China to cover U.S. President Bill Clinton's visit in June 1998. The Chinese embassy in Washington had initially granted visas to the three but revoked them shortly before President Clinton left Washington en route to Beijing. The White House and United States Department of State filed complaints with Chinese authorities over the matter but the reporters ultimately did not make the trip.

The Vietnamese-language broadcast signal was also jammed by the Vietnamese government from the beginning. Human rights legislation has been proposed in Congress that would allocate money to counter the jamming. Research by the OpenNet Initiative, a project that monitors Internet filtering by governments worldwide, showed that the Vietnamese-language portion of the Radio Free Asia website was blocked by both of the tested ISPs in Vietnam, while the English-language portion was blocked by one of the two ISPs.

To address radio jamming and Internet blocking by the governments of the countries that it broadcasts to, the RFA website contains instruction on how to create anti-jamming antennas and information on web proxies.

On March 30, 2010, China's domestic internet censor, known as the Great Firewall, temporarily blocked all Google searches in China, due to an unintentional association with the long-censored term "rfa". According to Google, the letters, associated with Radio Free Asia, were appearing in the URLs of all Google searches, thereby triggering China's filter to block search results.

Arrests of Uyghur journalists' relatives

In 2014–2015, China arrested three brothers of RFA Uyghur Service journalist Shohret Hoshur. Their jailing was widely described by Western publishers as Chinese authorities' efforts to target Hoshur for his reports on otherwise unreported violent events of the Xinjiang conflict. Much larger numbers of relatives of RFA's Uyghur-language staff have since been detained, including the family of Gulchehra Hoja.

RFA was the only station outside China that broadcast in the Uyghur language. It has been recognized by journalists of ''The Atlantic'', ''The Washington Post'', ''The New York Times'', and ''The Economist'' for playing a role in exposing Xinjiang internment camps. In particular, ''The New York Times'' has regarded certain RFA articles as part of the few reliable sources of information about Xinjiang.

Xinjiang internment camps

In 2018, after RFA journalist Hoja published an interview with an individual who had been detained in the Xinjiang internment camps, Chinese authorities detained approximately two dozen of Hoja's relatives. Later that year, Chinese authorities forcibly disappeared two brothers and five cousins of an editor for RFA's Uyghur language service.

''National Review'' has reported that as of 2021, eight of Radio Free Asia's fifteen staff of Uyghur ethnicity have family members who are detained in the Xinjiang internment camps.

Mission

Radio Free Asia's functions, as listed in , are to:
# provide accurate and timely information, news, and commentary about events in Asia and elsewhere; and
# be a forum for a variety of opinions and voices from within Asian nations whose people do not fully enjoy freedom of expression.

Additionally, the International Broadcasting Act of 1994 (Title III of ), which authorized the creation of the RFA, contains the following paragraph:

According to a Congressional Research Service report titled "U.S. International Broadcasting: Background and Issues for Reform" updated on December 15, 2016:

RFA’s target audiences are mandated by legislation and include countries in Asia where governments prohibit access to a free press, specifically the People’s Republic of China and its regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam. RFA was authorized as a nonfederal, private nonprofit corporation that would operate under a BBG grant, much like RFE/RL.

The RFA's mission statement is outlined on its website as follows:

Reception

In 1999, Catharin Dalpino of the Brookings Institution, a former assistant secretary deputy for human rights, called Radio Free Asia "a waste of money" and elaborated that she believed its goals had more to do with domestic political symbolism than with supporting democratic movements in Asia, stating that "Wherever we feel there is an ideological enemy, we're going to have a Radio Free Something." Dalpino said she had reviewed scripts of RFA's broadcasts and viewed the station's reporting as unbalanced due to focus on the testimony of dissidents in exile rather than the events occurring in the countries themselves. Lynne Weil, a director of communications and external affairs for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, has disputed descriptions of government-funded outlets as propaganda, referring to outlets such as BBC as examples of non-propagandist journalism funded by a government entity. In 2001, Richter stated that congressional interference in the organization was minimal, saying that he "wanted to make sure we weren't just getting set up to be a kill-the-Commie organization."

Monroe Price, director of the Center for Global Communication Studies, described RFA as "a modern iteration of Cold War use of the airwaves, emphasizing a turn from the traditional Cold War targets to new ones" and argued that the goals of RFA prove that the "instruments of international broadcasting are a reflection of the priorities and internal politics of the sending nation." Michael Sobolik of Hudson Institute said "RFA reporting from countries like China has been great for our foreign policy leaders and our elected officials, because we get better insight into what’s happening there, which serves the American interest. We don’t do this just out of the goodness of our hearts."

Vietnamese newspapers such as the state-run '' Nhân Dân'' have criticized the goals of RFA and broadcasts into the country, with a writer for ''Nhân Dân'' accusing the network of attempting to "interfere in other countries' internal affairs."

According to ''The Baltimore Sun'' in 2001, Chinese citizens calling in to RFA have expressed a wide range of opinions on the network, both positive and negative, many calling from pay phones to hide their identities.

Controversies and disputes

In early November 2012, Ngabo Jigme, director of the Tibetan language department of Radio Free Asia (RFA), was suddenly fired. It is said that the reason why Ngapoi Jigme was fired by RFA was that he allowed the Tibetan language department to express "opposition to the Tibetan government-in-exile" and because Ngapoi Jigme was "disrespectful" to the 14th Dalai Lama. This caused dissatisfaction with the Tibetan government-in-exile; RFA was pressured to fire Ngabo Jigme. Although the Tibetan government-in-exile and RFA denied it, the incident was still questioned by many parties. RFA's long-term consultant Maura Moynihan called it a "scandal" and Tibetan writer An Leye Calling this a "farce", American Tibetologist Elliot Sperling said "there are several assertions that the political conspiracy of exiled government leaders to put pressure on the RFA was the main reason for Ngabo Jigme's dismissal".

On May 10, 2020, RFA published a news article titled "China Border Inspection Strengthens Inspection of Entry and Exit Nationals, International Students Had Their Passports Cut," which contained a screenshot of a Reddit post by a user who said his passport had been clipped by China's border inspections. However, it was later revealed that the user's attached picture was stolen from someone else. The news triggered criticism from mainland Chinese media, saying that the claims stated in the news were incongruent with the situation.

On 11 May 2021, fact-checker First Draft News found that Chinese- and Cantonese-language versions of Radio Free Asia (RFA) published anti-vaccine misinformation regarding the Chinese vaccines, particularly the ones manufactured by Sinopharm and Sinovac. The investigation found the RFA articles amplified misleading claims about the vaccine programs, and its stories were reprinted by popular tabloid newspapers to reinforce the anti-vaccine misinformation. The RFA site did not cover suspected adverse events related to Western-made vaccines. Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou, program director at the National Cancer Institute, believed these articles caused vaccine hesitancy and global public health risks. Masato Kajimoto, a misinformation expert and journalism professor at the University of Hong Kong, suggested the articles were biased toward anti-Beijing messages and repeated unsubstantiated claims made by unreliable sources, such as '' The Epoch Times''.

Awards

Radio Free Asia has received several awards for its journalism, including:
* 2008: Consumer Rights award. Hong Kong Consumer Council, Hong Kong Journalists Association.
* 2010 and 2020: The International Women's Media Foundation's Courage in Journalism Award.
* Edward R. Murrow National Award, 2019. Radio-Television News Directors Association.
* Sigma Delta Chi award, 2014. The Society of Professional Journalists.
* Annual Human Rights Press Award, 2012, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2000. Amnesty International, Hong Kong Journalists Association, Foreign Correspondents' Club, Hong Kong.
* Edward R. Murrow Regional Award, 2013, 2005, 2003, 2002, and 2001. Radio-Television News Directors Association.
* Gracie Allen Award, 2013, 2010, and 2008. American Women in Radio and Television.
* The U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors' David Burke Distinguished Journalism Award, 2010.
* Society of Environmental Journalists's First Prize for Outstanding Online Reporting on the Environment for RFA's 2010 multimedia series "The Last Untamed River."
* BenarNews, a RFA affiliate that reports in Bengali, Thai, Bahasa Malaysia, Bahasa Indonesia and English targeting South and Southeast Asia, won the 2021 Murrow Award for Excellence in Video (Small Digital News Organization) from the Radio Television Digital News Association for a video report showcasing volunteers who helped transport, bury and conduct the last rites for people who died from COVID-19 in Bangladesh.
* 歪脑 , WHYNOT ( zh, s=歪脑, t=歪腦, p=Wāinǎo), a RFA affiliate aiming for younger Mandarin speakers, won the 2021 Online News Association's Journalism Award (Feature, Small Newsroom) for "Preserving the Erased Decade of the Chinese Feminist Movement".
* 2024 Gracies Award from Alliance for Women in Media in the TV National category for Ayeyarwady Riverbank Erosion produced by imprisoned Burmese independent filmmaker Shin Daewe for RFA Burmese language service.
* 2024 National Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio-Television News Directors Association in the Network Radio Digital category for "Under the Gun in Myanmar"
* 2025 Gracies Award from Alliance for Women in Media in the Radio National Winners category for the special report "Please save my sister: A North Korean escapee's plea"

Broadcasting information

See also

* International Broadcasting Bureau
* Media coverage of North Korea
* Murder of Robert Eric Wone, former counsel for Radio Free Asia
* Open Technology Fund – a Radio Free Asia program that was created in 2012 to support global Internet freedom technologies

References

Further reading

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External links

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International broadcasters
Non-profit organizations based in Washington, D.C.
Radio stations established in 1996
Tibetan-language radio stations
Democracy promotion
Uyghur-language mass media
Multilingual news services
United States government propaganda organizations
Publicly funded broadcasters
Anti-communist organizations in the United States