Al Jazeera illustrated its story on Panama’s truth commission with an image of US Gen. Colin Powell touring the occupied country.
Writing in Al Jazeera (1/31/16) about Panama’s establishment of a truth commission to investigate the consequences of the 1989-90 US invasion of that country, Belén Fernández cites FAIR’s 1990 critique of invasion coverage (Extra!, 1-2/90):
As media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) noted at the time, Just Cause saw the impoverished Panama City neighborhood of El Chorillo pulverized to the point of being referred to by ambulance drivers as “Little Hiroshima.” In other words, no surgical strikes here….
Consider a passage from FAIR’s critique of the US media’s leap onto the Just Cause bandwagon—from which vantage point said media determined that Panamanians were, in fact, totally in favour of the death and destruction being rained upon their country:
Few [American] TV reporters seemed to notice that the jubilant Panamanians parading before their cameras day after day to endorse the invasion spoke near-perfect English and were overwhelmingly light-skinned and well-dressed.
In case we, too, missed the moral of the story, FAIR reminds us that Panama is “a Spanish-speaking country with a largely mestizo and black population where poverty is widespread.”
This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.