The European Union has agreed to provide Radio Free Europe with 5.5 million euros’ worth of emergency funding just a couple of months after Donald Trump slashed the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) budget, which previously filled the Cold War relic’s coffers.
Top Brussels diplomat Kaja Kallas said that “in a time of growing, unfiltered content, independent journalism is more important than ever.” But AfD MEP Mary Khan previously highlighted that “an allegedly ‘independent’ radio station funded by the state [or, indeed, a collection of states] is a state organ and not a free press!”
While freedom of speech in the European Union is increasingly under pressure from left-wing projects like the Digital Services Act or publicly funded reporting centered against “hate and incitement,” the European Commission now wants to launch the next project for controlled opinion-making.
Austrian MEP Harald Vilimsky added on Wednesday that €5.5 million for the “propaganda broadcaster” was “a waste of money,” especially “while 40 million Europeans can’t afford heating.”
Nothing is too expensive for the system’s media organs.
The funding falls short of what Radio Free Europe requested but will help it tick over “for a short while longer,” according to its president, Stephen Capus. The organisation has also filed an emergency petition in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking its May funding.
Once hailed for its role in fighting Soviet oppression before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the broadcaster has since become known for spreading progressive ideology and anti-conservative messages.
Twitter/X owner Elon Musk said ahead of Trump’s slashing of funding that Radio Free Europe was now run by “radical Left crazy people talking to themselves.” Spanish MEP Hermann Tertsch (VOX/Patriots) also bashed the network for pushing “anti-national propaganda, gender ideology, or other toxic items of progressive politics, like socialism and communism … against the interests of European citizens.”