No Strings Attached?

[Joanne98]

How U.S. funding of the world press corps may be buying influence

Domestic propaganda campaigns like the “Pentagon Pundits” fiasco have been exposed and decried. Mainstream media outlets hired high-ranking military officers to provide “analysis” about the war in Iraq. Turns out they had ties to military contractors with a vested interest in continuing the war.

Below the radar, another journalism scandal is brewing: the U.S. government is secretly funding foreign news outlets and journalists. Government bodies — including the State Department, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP) — support “media development” in more than 70 countries. In These Times has found that these programs include funding hundreds of foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), journalists, policy-makers, journalist associations, media outlets, training institutes and academic journalism faculties. Grant sizes can range from a few thousand to millions of dollars.

“The bottom line is that we are teaching the mechanics of journalism, whether it be print, television or radio,” USAID spokesman Paul Koscak says. “How to do a story, how to write with balance … all of those types of things that you would expect in a professional piece that is published.”

But some people, especially those outside the United States, see it differently.

“We think that the real issues here are the foreign policy objectives behind these media development programs,” says a high-level Venezuelan diplomat who asked not to be identified. “When the objective is regime change, these programs have proven to be instruments for the destabilization of democratically elected governments that the United States doesn’t support.”

Isabel MacDonald, communications director at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a New York-based media watchdog nonprofit, is also critical. “This is a system that, despite its professed adherence to norms of objectivity, has often worked against real democracy,” she says, “by stifling dissent and helping the U.S. government spread misinformation serviceable to U.S. foreign policy goals.”
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3697/no_strings_attached/