Eric McGlinchey

TRANSCRIPT:

One of the biggest challenges in the Central Asian media space is the limited access to trustable, fact-based reporting. And I think the greatest strength of VOA is its ability to demonstrate to the world what true, open, honest reporting looks like.

When Central Asians, when my counterparts were questioning what was going on in Andijan in 2005 with the unrest in Andijan, or in Kazakhstan in 2022, they questioned it because there weren’t resources, there weren’t outlets in Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, or in Kyrgyzstan in 2010 during the deadly ethnic violence. There weren’t local resources that they could trust. What they could trust was the reporting of Voice of America, because they knew that Voice of America was an impartial news source, wasn’t playing one side or the other side.

Voice of America was critical for addressing Russian disinformation at multiple points, but let me just give you one example. In 2024, when the Russian government came out and said that the Crocus City Hall attacks were inspired by the United States, were in part aided by the United States, what Voice of America was able to do was actually conduct reporting in Central Asia, meet with the family members or the relatives of people who were involved in the Crocus attacks, and play a fundamental role in countering this disinformation from the Kremlin by actually speaking with these family members and getting to the bottom of some of the perpetrators who were behind these events.

So, without VOA, without the credibility of VOA, without the actual interviews with Tajiks in Tajikistan, it would have been much more difficult for the United States to counter this disinformation narrative that the U.S. was behind the Crocus City Hall attacks.

So one of the really helpful things that Voice of America was able to do was by talking about challenges that we faced in the United States when it came to talking about challenges that the Kazakh and Uzbek governments and Uzbek societies faced. For example, challenges surrounding human rights. Voice of America was well-positioned to speak credibly about violence, about police violence, about human rights.

Published April 1, 2026

McGlinchey is director of the International Relations Policy Task Force at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. His research focuses on conflict, extremism, democracy promotion and human rights in Central Asia.