Reply #23: Reporters Without Borders appears swayed by government funding

[Judi Lynn]

Reporters Without Borders appears swayed by government funding
posted by rtm on Thursday March 24 2005 @ 12:18PM < Govt/War/Propaganda >

by Diana Barahona, The Guild Reporter

Over the past year, U.S. news stories about press freedom increasingly have cited the work of a Paris-based organization, Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans Frontières, or RSF). Indeed, despite its small size and lack of high-profile principals, Reporters Without Borders has achieved nearly the same name-recognition as the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which can boast of having Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw on its board of directors.

To be sure, RSF has embraced many causes near and dear to American journalists. For example, it was among the more outspoken organizations demanding a Pentagon investigation of the shelling of the Hotel Palestine, in which two journalists were inexplicably killed. More recently, it has lambasted federal prosecutors for targeting Judith Miller, Matthew Cooper and other journalists in an effort to force them to disclose their sources.

But RSF, unlike the CPJ, is heavily funded by government grants, raising questions about its objectivity. And a closer examination of the battles RSF wages—and those it ignores—strongly suggests a political agenda colored by its choice of patrons. Unfortunately, the organization appears unwilling to address such concerns: RSF’s New York representative, Tala Dowlatshahi, terminated a telephone interview when asked if the organization had applied last year for any U.S. government grants other than one received from the National Endowment for Democracy.

Most notable, perhaps, is the group’s obvious political bias in its reporting on Haiti. RSF expressed its support for the Feb. 29, 2004, Franco-American overthrow of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide at the same time that it received 11% of its budget from the French government (¤397,604, or approximately $465,200 in 2003). According to Haiti-based journalist and documentary film-maker Kevin Pina, the organization selectively documented attacks on opposition radio stations while ignoring other attacks on journalists and broadcasters to create the impression of state-sponsored violence against Aristide’s opponents.

RSF blamed Aristide for the unsolved murders of two journalists, calling him a “predator of press freedom,” then celebrated his departure in a July 2004 article headlined, “Press freedom returns: a gain to be nurtured.” “A new wind of freedom is blowing for the capital’s radio stations,” it proclaimed, adding that Aristide—who had no army—was planning a “scorched-earth ending” to the crisis that began when 300 paramilitaries armed with M-16s invaded from the Dominican Republic.
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http://www.reclaimthemedia.org/stories.php?story=05/03/...