With Communist China, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Russia celebrating the closing of Voice of America, several conservative voices worry that the Trump administration is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

“As much as it might feel good to punish reporters and leaders who covered global events on the taxpayer’s dime with a left-wing slant, we’re stuck with a world where Russia, China, and Iran are flooding the globe with propaganda and lies and we’re outgunned in the messaging war,” Jim Geraghty writes in a National Review article headlined: “A Better Voice of America, or No Voice of America at All?”

“I greatly prefer a reformed and refocused U.S. Agency for Global Media — one focused on telling the truth and America’s side of the story — to not having one,” a senior American Enterprise Institute fellow, Dalibor Rohac, writes in the Spectator: “The damage that the Trump administration has managed to do in such a short period of time to America’s standing in the world, and to the cause of freedom, is extraordinary.”

In pulling the plug on the 3,500-employee organization, the Trump Administration seems to have been distracted by the Agency’s English language coverage. Since 1942, these stories have been aimed at educating foreigners about America and teaching American English. By law, American government press organizations do not broadcast to Americans.

The budget cutters seem to have ignored the Agency’s 48 language services. These include Burmese, Cambodian, Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin, Persian, Russian, Tibetan, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. Each week, the services reach almost half a billion people through radio, television, and Internet. For persons in such closed societies as Communist China, Iran, North Korea and Russia, the Agency teaches people how to use virtual private networks.

Surveys indicate that 36 percent of Russian internet users now use these confidential workarounds to evade cyber controls. VOA’s success in penetrating closed societies can be measured by the joy expressed this week in state media in Russia and Communist China.

At Moscow, Russia Today editors and reporters were celebrating “because Trump suddenly announced that he’s closing down RFE/RL and Voice of America,” RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, said on Russia-1 TV. “This is an awesome decision by Trump.” RT, with five language services, has an annual budget of about $300 million,  12 percent larger than Voice of America’s $267 million.

Television host Vladimir Solovyov agreed, crowing: “Several thousands of chronic slackers will now be searching for jobs.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov told  reporters on Monday that American media outlets “can hardly be classified as popular and in demand in the Russian Federation, so it doesn’t really concern us.” 

He neglected to mention that President Putin first took the Russian language service, known as Radio Svoboda, off all Russian radio stations. Then he declared it “a foreign agent.”  Finally, last month, it was listed as an “undesirable organization,” effectively making it illegal in Russia.

Today, the Radio Svoboda website carries this warning: “If you are in Russia or the Russia-controlled parts of Ukraine and hold a Russian passport or are a stateless person residing permanently in Russia or the Russia-controlled parts of Ukraine, please note that you could face fines or imprisonment for sharing, liking, commenting on, or saving our content, or for contacting us.”

Largely staffed by Russian exiles, Radio Svoboda has such a strong brand as reliable information on Putin’s Russia that the European Union is discussing how to keep it going by taking over funding from the United States. Headquartered at Prague, Radio Svoboda rents a purpose-built building that is not the property of the American government.

On Monday, the Czech foreign minister, Jan Lipavský, discussed with other foreign ministers at Brussels  “how to at least partially maintain its broadcasting.” He warned: “If it shuts down, it cannot be easily rebuilt.” He tweeted: “From Belarus to Iran, from Russia to Afghanistan, RFE and Voice of America are among the few free sources for people living without freedom.”

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, agreed, calling Radio Free Europe “a beacon of democracy.” She added: “It is sad to hear that U.S. is withdrawing its funding.” A Soviet-born Estonian, Ms. Kallas said after the meeting: “There was really a push from the foreign ministers to discuss this and find the way.” Poland’s foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, promised:  “We will look at what can be done.”

On Tuesday, RFE/RL sued the Trump Administration in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to block the termination of its federal grant. The suit charges that the Constitution “vests Congress with exclusive power over federal spending.” 

In Asia, authoritarian governments also express joy at the demise of RFE/RL’s sister outlet, Radio Free Asia. The spokeswoman for the Communist Chinese foreign ministry, Mao Ning, said yesterday of Radio Free Asia and Voice of America: “Their blemished track record on China coverage is hardly a secret.” On Monday, the Communist Party-run newspaper  Global Times, ran an editorial denouncing Voice of America as a “lie factory” with an “appalling track record” on China reporting.

“From smearing human rights in China’s Xinjiang… to hyping up disputes in the South China Sea … from fabricating the so-called China virus narrative to promoting the claim of China’s ‘overcapacity,’ almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it.” The newspaper concluded approvingly: “The so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.”

“Voice of America has been paralyzed! And so has Radio Free Asia, which is just as malicious toward China. How truly gratifying!” nationalist commentator Hu Xijin wrote on Weibo to his nearly 25 million followers. “Chinese people are more than happy to see America’s anti-China ideological stronghold crumble from within, scattering like a flock of startled birds.”

Approval also came from Cambodia, where the senate president, Samdech Hun Sen, has implanted a family dynasty that has ruled for 40 years. Over the last decade, independent newspapers and radio stations have been shut down. “This is a major contribution to eliminating fake news, disinformation, lies, distortions, incitement, and chaos around the world,” Mr. Hun Sen wrote yesterday on Facebook.  He praised Mr. Trump “for having the courage to lead the world to combat fake news, starting with U.S. government-funded news networks.”

Another authoritarian government in Southeast Asia, the military rulers of Myanmar, also welcomed the move. The shutdowns of American government media will end “years of divisive foreign propaganda that fueled unrest and weakened national unity,” hailed Views of Myanmar, a pro-government X channel. “Ending their influence paves the way for stability, cohesion, and stronger domestic media in Myanmar.”

In one measure of the language services’ devotion to freedom of information, nine staffers are currently imprisoned across the globe: one in Azerbaijan, one in Belarus, one in Myanmar, two in Russia, and four in Vietnam.