From Talking Points Memo, what one House Democrat calls “our worst nightmare,” as the Trump Administration plans to replace American broadcast outreach to the rest of the world with right-wing propaganda and hateful swill dictated by Breitbart News:
The top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee says whistleblowers have detailed a plot by the Trump administration to oust the CEO of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and replace him with someone favored by the White House.
The BBG oversees such U.S. radio outlet broadcasting as Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America. Its current CEO is John Lansing, who was appointed in 2015 under the Obama Administration. His Trump-selected replacement, Andre Mendes, plans to oust the BBG’s entire Board of Governors, according to Representative Eliot Engel (D. NY), replacing them with Trump loyalists pre-selected by the likes of Breitbart News:
[W]histleblowers have informed [Engel] that a former Breitbart contributor Jeffrey Shapiro has been working on a plan with White House Associate Director of Presidential Personnel Jennifer Locetta to push Lansing out the door and scrap the agency’s move toward independent, non-partisan journalism.
Breitbart had pushed for Lansing’s replacement, contending that broadcasts such as VOA and Radio Free Europe were becoming too similar to CNN, ABC, NBC, and the other major broadcast news networks, a trend that Breitbart with its focus on race-baiting, hate-mongering and immigrant bashing disagrees. In reality, the BBG has attempted to preserve journalistic standards by presenting to the world an American-centric viewpoint that preserves the tenets of objective, nonpartisan journalism. It’s not surprising that the organizations being attacked are the same outlets that Trump has condemned as “fake news” for highlighting stories unflattering to the Administration, such as Trump’s ties to the Russian government, the rampant corruption of his family members and his adulterous affairs:
“According to several accounts, Messrs. Mendes and Shapiro have made it clear in recent months their intention to remake the BBG into an agency aimed at promoting the Trump Administration’s agenda, which would constitute an egregious violation of the law requiring a ‘firewall’ between BBG’s management and its independent journalists,” Engel wrote this week. “Such a scheme would represent a shocking abuse of authority and would reveal an effort by this administration to turn the BBG into a propaganda machine.”
Shapiro has already stated he intends to transform the BBG into a vehicle to promote Steve Bannon’s “legacy,” presumably including white supremacy, and to “root out all Trump disloyalists.”
Mendes, in the characteristic behavior of all Trump appointees, apparently has chosen to lie and deny his knowledge of the plot to oust the entire BBG Board of Governors, which seems highly implausible as his complicity would be necessary to carry it out. Not coincidentally, he must be must be confirmed by the Senate while the BBG itself retains the right to select an interim replacement.
Representative Engel, for his part, has demanded all internal records and emails concerning this planned coup by week’s end, demonstrating yet again the absolute necessity of electing a Democratic House of Representatives this November.