The US made breakthroughs expanding media to North Korea. Then it pulled the plug

For more than 80 years, Voice of America has broadcast in Korean. First, providing reliable news and information to Koreans living under Japanese occupation during World War II, then offering that same lifeline to populations facing the struggles of post-war division, the Korean War and the North’s long rule by a dynasty of dictators. As the North Korean government cracked down on outside information, VOA focused on reaching influential elites, who represent 10-15% of the population.

When 2025 started, VOA’s Korean Service was broadcasting 51.9 hours of audio and video reports in Korean each week, providing news not available on state-controlled media. However, when President Donald Trump issued his March 14 executive order that effectively began dismantling VOA, the service went dark. It has stopped all its broadcasts and is producing no digital content.

Before the Korean Service was silenced, it had been making huge strides in increasing its reach inside North Korea. After a decade of negotiations between the U.S. and South Korean governments, VOA was granted access in early 2023 to South Korean state-controlled broadcast towers along the inter-Korean border. The result was historic. People living in one of the most tightly controlled countries in the world were able to watch a 25-minute TV program that provided accurate, uncensored news and information. That is, until it was shut down.

The show, the Korean Service’s flagship program “Washington Talk,” aired four times a week on TV and online, and gave audiences unbiased explanations and analysis of U.S. foreign policy including U.S. views on North Korea’s weapons development, its dealings with China and Russia, North Korean sanctions violations and other political issues within Korea. In addition to the uncensored reporting, “Washington Talk” provided audiences with the unique opportunity to hear directly from White House, State Department, Pentagon and CIA officials as well as leading Washington experts.

The show drew up to 550,000 online viewers per episode and earned recognition in Seoul and Washington as the premier forum explaining America’s Korea strategy in the Korean language. It was making a real impact inside of North Korea. That is, until it was silenced.

VOA’s Korean Service was also known for carrying out groundbreaking reporting on topics that included North Korea’s sanctions-evasion schemes, the use of North Korean weapons in the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and the mistreatment of Otto Warmbier, an American university student who died shortly after his release from more than a year in North Korean custody. Its reporting on weapons distribution, based on careful examination of satellite imagery, exposed ship-to-ship smuggling networks and drove U.N. and U.S. policy discussions on the issue.

VOA reporter Sungwon Baik questions a North Korean official during a rare media tour of Pyongyang’s Satellite Control Center.

VOA was on the ground in April 2012 when Pyongyang staged what it called a “peaceful satellite launch.” Among the foreign press covering the event, only VOA’s Korean correspondent could understand the language around him. It was an advantage that proved pivotal. While documenting remarks delivered to a small group, a North Korean professor who doubled as a semi-official spokesperson let slip that the same technology used for the launch could also serve military purposes. It was the first time a North Korean insider had publicly acknowledged this link, and VOA’s reporting captured it in real time.

Without VOA, the world faces a deeper information black hole around North Korea’s human rights situation. VOA’s Korean Service had long made human rights one of its core reporting priorities, closely following U.S. and U.N. actions, international sanctions and humanitarian aid initiatives linked to North Korea’s rights conditions. It has also documented the government’s overseas labor programs, which sends workers abroad to earn hard currency. To cover the story, the Korean Service had journalists report from North Korea as well as Qatar, Senegal and Russia. After a 2014 UN report detailed gross human rights violations by Pyongyang, the Korean Service conducted a one-on-one interview with Jang Il-hun, North Korea’s deputy ambassador to the U.N., directly challenging him on the government’s human-rights record — a rare moment of accountability.

Because of the government’s near total control of the media, audience research is impossible within North Korea. However, VOA’s parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, was able to survey individuals who had left the country. Defectors and refugees have repeatedly confirmed that they listened to VOA and its sister network Radio Free Asia from inside North Korea despite government threats of harsh penalties.

A high-ranking North Korean defector, Thae Young-ho, the country’s former deputy ambassador to the North Korean embassy in Britain, told VOA in 2016 that the North Korean regime “pays great attention [to] the contents of VOA.”

With VOA’s Korean Service silenced, North Korean elites, diplomats and others have been left without an objective, accurate and comprehensive news source in Korean. Many have had to turn to state media and second-hand narratives, which are often shaped by hostile or incomplete reports and pro-China messaging. South Koreans who relied on the service are also left without a source of U.S.-based news and must rely almost entirely on domestic media, whose coverage of U.S. positions is often politicized or influenced by anti-U.S. narratives.