JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
President Trump has picked a conservative critic of mainstream media to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media. That is the parent agency of federally owned international broadcasters like Voice of America. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik has chronicled the agency and joins us now. Hi, David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Hey, Juana.
SUMMERS: So David, let's just start with the news, if we can. Who has Trump picked to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media?
FOLKENFLIK: So he's picked a 69-year-old kind of firebrand conservative media critic named Brent Bozell. He's the founder of Media Research Center and has really been a fixture on the right, holding the media to account - the mainstream news media in particular - for being what he perceives as reflexively liberal and in kind of thrall to the Democratic Party. He's been really a figure that you can see particularly on conservative talk radio, Fox News and other sympathetic outlets to that point of view.
SUMMERS: Many people are familiar with him, of course, but tell us why Trump chose him.
FOLKENFLIK: Well, Trump said that - on Truth Social in posting about it that he was just the right guy to bring change. And he mentioned Bozell's family. Bozell has links. His uncle was the founder of the National Review, William F. Buckley. He - Buckley wrote with Bozell's father at least one book, and I think collaborated on other things as well. Interestingly, his son has - was convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers on the January 2021 siege of the Capitol, but his son was released after being encompassed in the near-blanket pardons that Trump recently issued for all of that.
And Bozell - you know, Trump has indicated Bozell - he wants Bozell to be accompanied by Kari Lake to be the director of Voice of America. Lake, of course, a former Arizona local newscaster who ended up running for statewide office in Arizona unsuccessfully twice as a very strongly pro-Trump candidate and indeed has made a part of her appeal her attacking the press as being fake news.
SUMMERS: This is a position that must be confirmed by the Senate. So if Brent Bozell is confirmed, what changes could be ahead for this agency?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, he hasn't announced particulars yet, but I think it's instructive to look back at what Trump was able to do in his final year in office. He finally, after a two-year wait, got appointed a conservative documentarian named Michael Pack, who kind of turned the place upside-down, both trying to more politicize the institution but also to really crack down on what he saw was the swamp of fake news. And so you had things like senior executives accused of being part of security breaches. But particularly you had political appointees reaching down and conducting what they considered were reviews for anti-Trump bias. Others called it a kind of politicized witch hunt, looking for people who saw themselves as straight reporters somehow being biased against President Trump for simply reporting the news.
And one thing I want to mention is the Voice of America and its sister network - like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and others - are supposed to model democracy by having the inclusion of dissent in their news coverage and criticisms of whoever's in office at that time and also to bring independent news reporting into lands where there aren't independent news outlets. And what you saw under Pack in those 7 1/2 months under Trump was really an effort to promote a Trump vision of the world. And we'll see what Bozell would bring to the agency if he's confirmed.
SUMMERS: That's NPR's David Folkenflik. Thank you so much.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
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