Trump’s freeze on US foreign aid deals a painful blow to CEE media

Just last week Meta’s decision to end its fact-checking programs was top of media leaders’ minds. Then came a much more painful blow – the United States pausing funding for foreign aid.

The new Trump administration ordered a 90-day review of foreign assistance programs. The sudden and immediate halt impacted life-saving programs like AIDS relief and humanitarian aid. It also hit independent media that have received funding from USAID, particularly in the Central and Eastern Europe region.

“Just [on Monday] I heard from independent media outlets in Romania, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine and Bosnia… Those are mid-size independent media, not corporate, not international publishers”, the Media Development Investment Fund’s Program Director for Europe Marcin Gadziński wrote. “Most of them started-up over the last 3-10 years, most of them very successful in terms of impact on public debate in their respective countries. And each of them is currently a grantee of different programs funded by USAID”.

Ukraine’s independent media sector has been hit especially hard – building sustainable media businesses is a gargantuan task for a country whose economy is crippled by a full-scale war. Affected organisations include Ukraine’s public broadcaster Suspilne, investigative outlets such as Slidstvo.Info and Bihus.Info, advanced regional media like Cukr. “The sudden freeze of U.S. aid has caused harm to independent Ukrainian journalism on par with the COVID-19 pandemic and the onset of Russia’s full-scale war”, The Kyiv Independent’s chief editor Olga Rudenko wrote. Publishers have pleaded readers for help – a smart approach, but one that’s unlikely to save the day given how many media have been affected.

In Hungary, leading independent media lost millions in funding due to the freeze, Telex reports. This is particularly dangerous given the ruling party’s grip over much of the country’s media sector. Local media across Poland have been affected as well, Wirtualne Media notes.

The freeze once again highlighted the importance of having a sustainable business model with diversified revenue streams. News outlets funded by readers, like The Kyiv Independent or Denník N, are in a good position to weather both platforms’ whims and grant funding shifts. But what works in Stockholm or New York often falls flat in Kyiv or Budapest – where the societal need for high-quality news publishers doesn’t always match what readers can afford. 

In the short term, hopefully other large institutional donors will step in to help. In the longer term, survival of independent media will likely depend on their ability to achieve more with less resources, while also securing some form of stable reader revenue.

Source of the cover photo: Bobt54, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons