Trump appoints Kari Lake to lead Voice of America

Donald Trump has nominated former news anchor Kari Lake as the director of Voice of America, the U.S.’s state-owned media operation.

Lake was most recently a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Arizona but lost in the November 2024 election.

Prior to that, she rose to national prominence as a gubernatorial candidate in the state. After narrowly losing the election in 2022, she spent nearly two years disputing the election results in court and other venues.

She is also an avowed election denier who has stated multiple times that she believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 election despite bipartisan support that President Joe Biden won the election fairly. She also has floated theories that her 2024 Senate loss was invalid, again without any evidence. 

Prior to running for governor, Lake worked at Phoenix TV station KSAZ from 1999 to 2021. She was an evening co-anchor at the station until March of 2021 after she was spotted at the Conservative Political Action Conference while still an employee of the station.

She left the station shortly after that and would announce her candidacy for governor in June 2021. 

Earlier in her TV career, she held jobs at KWQC in Davenport, Iowa, WHBF in Rock Island, Illinois, KPNX in Phoenix and a short stint at WNYT in Albany, New York.

Lake has little experience in upper-level broadcast management, with the built of her career spent behind the anchor desk or reporting. Various biographies of her do not list any experience as a news director or similar role. She also largely lacks experience working as a correspondent or producer at a national or international network. 

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Although television anchors are commonly referred to as “leaders” of newsrooms, that term does not necessarily come with any formal management responsibility, though some anchors are able to exercise some editorial control over their broadcasts either formally or informally.

Her loss of both a governor and senate election also means she has little on-the-job political experience or working with larger pools of staff support.

Several GOP leaders spoke out in support of the Trump surrogate being named head of VOA, while pundit Adam Carlson jokingly wondered how she could be head of the VOA “while simultaneously serving as governor and U.S. Senator,” poking fun at her assertions that she won both of those races.

Lake also has a history of spreading false or misleading information and conspiracy theories about COVID-19, vaccinations, election results, immigration and other hot button issues, including during a period when she was working as a journalist at KSAZ when she would post inaccurate or misleading information on her social media accounts.  

She has previously been registered a democrat and independent and reportedly supported Barak Obama and John Kerry in the past. 

At Voice of America, Lake would be responsible for a $267.5 million budget and a staff of just under 1,000. 

While the VOA job does not require Senate approval, Lake would need at least one Democrat on the six-member International Broadcasting Advisory Board that oversees the broadcaster to vote for her. Being appointed head of VOA requires a simple majority vote by the IBAB. It’s unclear if Lake could gain enough cross-party support to pass such a vote successfully.

VOA was created in 1942 and is focused on broadcasting information about America to non-U.S. audiences. It produces programming in 48 languages and distributes content globally, reportedly reaching as many as 326 million adults worldwide. 

If approved, Lake would replace Michael Abramowitz, who just took over the top job at VOA in the summer of 2024. Abramowitz has experience at The Washignton Post.

Prior to that role, he was president of Freedom House, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit providing research and analysis, advocacy and support to journalists and human rights defenders, according to the VOA site. He also previous headed up the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Levine Institute for Holocaust Education and worked on its genocide-prevent efforts.

During his time at the Post, Abramowitz helped lead a team that would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the post-9/11 war on terrorism.

VOA’s top spot was vacant for much of President Joe Biden’s term, when the IBAB board removed Trump era-director Robert R. Reilly as head of the broadcaster.

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Reilly had little experience with broadcasting, though he was the host of a weekly talk show on VOA prior to taking over. He did have experience in foreign diplomacy and also worked at conservative think tanks as well as authoring books, many of which have been criticized as being anti-Islamic and homophobic.

Prior to Reily, Amanda Bennett headed up VOA but resigned in 2020 after Trump changed leadership at VOA’s parent agency with a conservative director and filmmaker. Bennett had worked covering global issues for The Wall Street Journal and had been co-chair of the Pulitzer Board.