Radio Free Asia (RFA) announced that its broadcasting operations have been significantly curtailed due to the cessation of signal transmission from relay stations owned or leased by the US government.
RFA informed listeners Thursday that its shortwave broadcasts in Mandarin, Tibetan, and Laotian have ceased. The US Congress-funded outlet said it will only maintain a significantly reduced schedule in Burmese, Khmer, Korean, and Uighur.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees RFA, abruptly terminated its federal funding on March 15. RFA was subsequently forced to furlough most of its staff and filed a lawsuit last week, alleging that the termination violated federal law and demanding the restoration of funding.
The Trump administration has recently begun cutting news organizations funded by Congress, including Voice of America and other organizations funded through federal grants, such as RFA and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as part of its policy of reducing government spending.
Even with significantly reduced staff, RFA continues to provide limited news updates in nine languages on its website and social media platforms. Founded in 1996, RFA is dedicated to providing independent reporting in Asian countries and regions where press freedom is severely limited or absent, such as North Korea, China, Myanmar, and Vietnam.
Monitoring of radio frequencies previously used by Radio Free Asia (RFA) shows that shortwave and mediumwave relay stations owned or leased by the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) have stopped transmitting signals over the past week, meaning RFA's radio broadcast hours have plummeted from 63 in March to just seven hours now.
The findings are based on an analysis of an online Remote Monitoring System maintained by USAGM, which provides regular audio samples of frequencies used by broadcasters it monitors in specific regions.
According to Radio Free Asia (RFA) audience research and feedback from listeners over the past decade, although the use of shortwave and medium wave radio has declined, it remains an extremely important way to obtain information in areas with insufficient Internet coverage or subject to official censorship and surveillance.
"For millions of people living in North Korea, Tibet, and Uighur regions of China, RFA's exclusive news and content can only be received through shortwave radio," said RFA Communications Director Rohit Mahajan. "Now, people in these regions are being cut off from this only lifeline of information. The same is true in Myanmar, where people recently suffered a devastating earthquake and are desperately relying on this critical medium."
"At the very moment when the truth is needed most, they've lost their only channel for it," he said.
Since the 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck central Myanmar on March 28, killing more than 3,000 people, RFA's Burmese service has received increasing requests to resume or increase broadcasts due to widespread internet outages caused by the quake.
Kyaw Kyaw Aung, director of RFA's Burmese service, said they received strong calls from Rakhine State after the disaster. Although the area was not severely damaged by the earthquake, it has been affected by long-term conflicts and unstable Internet connections, making it difficult for residents to obtain information from the outside world.
"Only a handful of people learned about the disaster through the military-controlled, state-run MRTV shortwave radio station, but its coverage was heavily censored and filtered," said Jojo Aung, who has personally hosted a 15-minute daily RFA news broadcast since the earthquake. "Our listeners are clamoring for the resumption of RFA broadcasts."
