Czechs appeal for EU help with Radio Free Europe after Trump cuts

The Czech Republic is pushing for EU support to keep Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) running after the Trump administration cut funding for the global broadcaster.

Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky said RFE/RL, based in Prague, “is one of the few credible sources in dictatorships like Iran, Belarus, and Afghanistan”.

In Eastern Europe, the US government-funded outlet reached millions of listeners during the Cold War, helping to spread democratic values while communist authorities tightly controlled local media.

Elon Musk, in charge of cost-cutting under Donald Trump, dismissed RFE/RL as “radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money”.

But RFE/RL’s president and CEO Stephen Capus said axing the broadcaster’s grant agreement “would be a massive gift to America’s enemies”.

“The Iranian Ayatollahs, Chinese communist leaders, and autocrats in Moscow and Minsk would celebrate the demise of RFE/RL after 75 years,” he added.

Mr Capus’s concern was echoed by the independent Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which complained that thousands of journalists would be hit by the US funding cut – and that some working in censored countries were already “in grave danger”.

RFE/RL says it reaches a weekly audience of nearly 50 million people in 23 countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Afghanistan and ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Czech foreign minister Mr Lipavsky told the BBC he was working on building a “platform of countries” to support the station, but added that they “need to be very careful and mindful of the USA, which has this operation on their side”.

“We will try to do everything to keep this organization with 75 years of legacy afloat,” he said.

RFE/RL, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America (VOA) have relied for decades on funding from the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM).

President Trump signed an executive order on Friday to cut their funding after Musk had scorned them on X, saying “shut them down”.

The move contrasts with the media policies of authorities in Russia, China and Iran, who have poured funding into their state broadcasters to counter the impact of Western liberalism around the world.

Most of VOA’s full-time staff have been put on administrative leave and the broadcaster’s contractors, who dominate the non-English language services, have been laid off, the AFP news agency reports.