The United States will devote funding to help journalists overseas survive frivolous lawsuits meant to silence them, USAID chief Samantha Power announced Thursday.
In a wide-ranging speech, the US Agency for International Development administrator also promised to increase sharply how much American aid is channelled to local groups, vowing to make such assistance more inclusive and effective.
Power, herself a former reporter, said that President Joe Biden’s administration was setting up a “global defamation defense fund” for journalists as part of his democracy promotion agenda.
“We will offer the coverage to survive defamation claims or deter autocrats and oligarchs from trying to sue them out of business in the first place,” she said at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
Power said her talks with international journalists showed that autocratic regimes were increasingly using the “crude but effective tactic” of filing lawsuits to bankrupt news outlets and kill stories they do not like.
“As autocrats grow savvier in their attempts to control and manipulate people, we need to help support a free and fair global press to hold leaders to account,” she said.
She did not outline how the fund would work or whether it would support journalists in countries allied with the United States.
Biden plans next month to hold a summit to back democracy, seeking to show a sharp change from his predecessor Donald Trump who embraced autocratic leaders and persistently denounced the role of independent media.
Critics will likely point to Washington’s continued to extradite from Britain the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who considers himself a journalist and faces the rest of his life in prison for the leak of classified US documents.
