Reply #31

Buying Venezuela's Press With U.S. Tax Dollars
Posted: 7/19/10 02:28 PM ET

Originaly published in NACLA

The U.S. State Department is secretly funneling millions of dollars to Latin American journalists, according to documents obtained in June under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The 20 documents released to this author--including grant proposals, awards, and quarterly reports--show that between 2007 and 2009, the State Department's little-known Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor channeled at least $4 million to journalists in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela through the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF), a Washington-based grant maker that has worked in Latin America since 1962. Thus far, only documents pertaining to Venezuela have been released. They reveal that the PADF, collaborating with Venezuelan NGOs associated with the country's political opposition, has been supplied with at least $700,000 to give out journalism grants and sponsor journalism education programs.

Until now, the State Department has hidden its role in funding the Venezuelan news media, one of the opposition's most powerful weapons against President Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian movement. The PADF, serving as an intermediary, effectively removed the government's fingerprints from the money. Yet, as noted in a State Department document titled "Bureau/Program Specific Requirements," the State Department's own policies require that "all publications" funded by the department "acknowledge the support." But the provision was simply waived for the PADF. "For the purposes of this award," the requirements document adds, " . . . the recipient is not required to publicly acknowledge the support of the U.S. Department of State."

Before 2007, the largest funder of U.S. "democracy promotion" activities in Venezuela was not the State Department but the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), together with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). But in 2005, these organizations' underhanded funding was exposed by Venezuelan American attorney Eva Golinger in a series of articles, books, and lectures (disclosure: This author obtained many of the documents). After the USAID and NED covers were blown wide open--forcing USAID's main intermediary, Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), a Maryland-based contractor, to close its office in Caracas--the U.S. government apparently sought new funding channels, one of which the PADF appears to have provided.

Although the $700,000 allocated to the PADF, which is noted in the State Department's requirements document, may not seem like a lot of money, the funds have been strategically used to buy off the best of Venezuela's news media and recruit young journalists. This has been achieved by collaborating with opposition NGOs, many of which have a strong media focus. The requirements document is the only document that names any of these organizations--which was probably an oversight on the State Department's part, since the recipients' names and a lot of other information are excised in the rest of the documents. The requirements document names Espacio Publico and Instituto Prensa y Sociedad, two leading organizations linked to the Venezuelan opposition, as recipients of "subgrants."

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-bigwood/buying-venezuelas-press-w_b_650178.html

Your tax dollars are used to create the "information" used in keeping you in the dark.

This happened large scale when Richard M Nixon poured millions into Chile's El Mercurio, owned by Augustin Edwards, and into his other newspapers and radio stations to feed anti-Allende material to the Chilean people about the socialist President, Salvador Allende they had elected in a landslide.

Nixon also had CIA people working in the laqest newspaper in Chile, and they continued the propaganda blitz before the election, during the election, and for a long time after the U.S. supported violent coup, in order to sell the fiendish right-wing monster, the coup-installed General Augusto Pinochet, who tortured and murdered thousands of Chilean imagined leftists, including two U.S. American journalists.

That was a very long time ago, and this manipulation of information has been with us since this, and, in fact, with us from the U.S. overthrow of Guatemala's beloved leftist president, Jacob Arbenz in 1954.