TRANSCRIPT:
Voice of America and the other radio services of the United States did an amazing job over decades of giving people a broader view of the world and of what was possible in the world beyond their own tightly controlled societies.
On a personal level, it affected my career at many important points. My diplomatic career. The most dramatic, I think, being when I was serving as ambassador to Uzbekistan and the Voice of America was really an important source of information for the society, for the government, and for our embassy.
I think we benefited by having a superb VOA correspondent, Navbahor Imamova, who is from Uzbekistan and very well connected there. So we saw in Uzbekistan, it opened up the space for real reporting in a way that I think would have been impossible otherwise.
Not having this service is, to me, devastating for American foreign policy, for American values, and for America’s place in the world. Our competitors, our adversaries, countries that are trying to dominate in place of the United States, in the world, have their own media. We are not putting our message out in the world. And to me that was a large part of the value of Voice of America, a large part of the value of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which also broadcast into the countries I worked in.
And that’s why I’m very saddened by the steps that have been taken to silence Voice of America and to silence the other media outlets associated with the Agency for Global Media. I hope that there is a way to bring the Voice of America back into the world. We need that voice out there.
Published
Rosenblum served as U.S. ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2019-2022 under presidents Trump and Biden, and as U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan from 2022-2025 under Biden. From 2014-2019, he was deputy assistant secretary of state for Central Asia, serving the Obama and Trump administrations.