By BOYAH J. FARAH Los Angeles Times
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Before I became an American citizen, I knew America.

I remember sitting beneath Mogadishu’s blue sky, under the skeleton of an acacia tree, watching pigeons soar low and high as boys chased a ball, their laughter carried by the wind while dust rose and danced above their heads. Somalia’s civil war had not yet begun, and the world still made sense. Voice of America was my favorite radio station, the voice of a beloved, diverse nation.

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In the late 1980s, before war marched into our lives and destroyed everything, my older sister was obsessed with Michael Jackson’s song “Thriller.” Voice of America played it repeatedly, and though I secretly enjoyed the song, I wouldn’t dare let her catch me nodding along because I was a boy: She loved music, singing and dancing, while I admired military men in green uniforms. But Voice of America broke through all that, and we learned another story was possible.

Years later, when I became a student at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, that voice of publicly supported media followed me: National Public Radio became my favorite radio station. Helping me refine my accent and deepen my understanding of the language, it helped me learn not only the language, but also the rhythm of American thought, its debates, its heartache, its humor.

Public media has long been America’s greatest superpower, and its influence long the envy of other nations. But the Trump administration has now surrendered to America’s enemies, killing off public media and letting Russia and China take over.

In 2024, I met a wealthy man in Somalia — a man blessed with two houses, two wives and children.

As we sat outside in the warm Somali sun, he turned to me.

“Do you think I can go to America?” he asked me. “I’d like to go to California. I’ve heard so much about it on Voice of America when I was growing up learning English.”

That’s the power that the U.S. used to project: persuading people around the world that the U.S. had everything figured out, even selling the American dream to people who were living successful lives elsewhere. The radio network reached 300 million people globally.

Voice of America is part of this grand storytelling machine. Influence is more powerful than war. War destroys, breeds enmity and stirs resentment, but storytelling exerts lasting control by changing how people think. That is what made America so attractive and influential.

But America’s standing has been in decline, through decades of feckless foreign policy. Eliminating institutions like Voice of America and the Public Broadcasting Service will only accelerate this downfall. The most beautiful country in the world does not thrive on its war machine; it thrives on the power of its story.

Now, in 2025, as America under President Donald Trump threatens to dismantle the very media that tells its story to the world, I feel something strange moving in my belly. Once public radio is murdered, much of America’s storytelling dies with it. And when that happens, the dream — the one that compels boys and girls from all over the world to risk everything just to come to America — dies too. America will feel that loss, and a generation of talent will flock to rival nations instead.