{"id":41792,"date":"2013-06-14T09:27:22","date_gmt":"2013-06-14T08:27:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/morning-propaganda-edition\/41792\/"},"modified":"2013-06-14T09:27:22","modified_gmt":"2013-06-14T08:27:22","slug":"morning-propaganda-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/morning-propaganda-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Morning Propaganda Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday\u2019s episode of \u201cMorning Edition\u201d on NPR, a\u00a0segment<\/a>\u00a0was devoted to exploring the extreme violence that has engulfed Honduras in recent years. Indeed, if\u00a0measured by per\u00a0capita\u00a0murder rate, Honduras is now the most dangerous in the country in the world. There are many reasons\u00a0why<\/i>\u00a0Honduran civil society has broken down like this, but let\u2019s suspend that discussion for the moment in order to focus on one particular aspect of this story on NPR that was quite revealing.<\/p>\n

At one point in the segment, Carrie Kahn, the NPR correspondent reporting from Honduras,\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0the following:<\/p>\n

\n

Last year, the U.S. Congress held up funding to Honduras over concerns of alleged human rights abuses and corruption, particularly in the Honduran police force. Part of the funds are still on hold.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is an astonishing statement for someone who purports to be a journalist. Unless Ms. Kahn has psychic powers, she cannot know\u00a0why<\/i>\u00a0the U.S. Congress held up funding to Honduras. She can only know why Congress\u00a0said\u00a0<\/i>it was holding up funding to Honduras. There is often a profound difference between why politicians\u00a0say<\/i>\u00a0they are implementing policy X and why they are\u00a0actually<\/i>\u00a0doing it. As you might have heard, politicians are occasionally dishonest and insincere, and their decisions are informed by a number of factors that have nothing to do with their personal beliefs. For a journalist, someone who is supposed to adversarially cover politicians and express skepticism at everything they say, this kind of blind faith is inexcusable.<\/p>\n

The problem, though, is that Ms. Kahn\u2019s statement is actually quite a bit worse than that. Even if she\u00a0had\u00a0<\/i>said, \u201cthe U.S. Congress held up funding to Honduras over\u00a0what it claimed<\/i>\u00a0were concerns of alleged human rights abuses and corruption,\u201d instead of just mindlessly repeating what the government claimed, that would\u00a0still\u00a0<\/i>be wildly insufficient for any journalist who takes her profession even the slightest bit seriously. Why? Because the United States government provably does\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0base its decisions on allocating foreign aid on \u201cconcerns about human rights and corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n

For decades, the U.S. has provided aid to some of the most repressive and corrupt governments on Earth. Going down the list would be trivial, but, for the sake of comparison, let\u2019s stay relatively close by and just look at Colombia. The U.S. government ships hundreds of millions of dollars to the Colombian government every year; in FY 2012,\u00a0$443 million<\/a>\u00a0was provided, making Colombia the leading recipient of U.S. aid in the hemisphere.<\/p>\n

In a strange twist, though, Colombia is also\u00a0widely considered<\/a>\u00a0to be the most repressive violator of human rights in the hemisphere, and corruption there is\u00a0rampant<\/a>. This is quite a conundrum. Ms. Kahn tells us that the U.S. withheld aid from Honduras \u201cover concerns of alleged human rights abuses and corruption.\u201d But the U.S. evidently has no such \u201cconcerns\u201d in Colombia and continues to send hundreds of millions of dollars in annual aid. One is almost tempted to conclude that the U.S. government makes these decisions based not on noble and selfless \u201cconcerns\u201d about human rights and corruption, but, rather, on what it perceives to be U.S. interests.<\/p>\n

Ms. Kahn\u00a0must<\/i>\u00a0know that the government claim she dutifully parroted is transparently fraudulent and, in fact, downright comical. She cannot be a working journalist and not know this. Presumably, she follows the news, she is knowledgeable regarding basic facts about U.S. aid, and she knows that the U.S. has always cheerfully sent aid to brutal regimes around the world. She\u2019s not a wide-eyed poly-sci 101 student who is shocked to find out that U.S. government decisions are not invariably and solely based on considerations of Good and Evil.<\/p>\n

Ms. Kahn is a highly educated reporter, and she obviously does know these things, but the culture of obedience and submissiveness in American journalism is so profound that she probably doesn\u2019t even consciously realize that she\u2019s serving state power instead of doing journalism. The U.S. government told her that aid is being withheld to Honduras because of concerns about human rights and corruption, therefore aid is being withheld to Honduras because of concerns about human rights and corruption. That\u2019s that. Then she goes on NPR, unquestioningly repeats government claims, and she\u2019s done her job. We would call this \u201cpropaganda\u201d if it happened in the Soviet Union, but it\u2019s called \u201cjournalism\u201d when it happens here.<\/p>\n

Justin Doolittle<\/strong>\u00a0writes a political blog called\u00a0Crimethink<\/a>. He has\u00a0an M.A. in public policy from Stony Brook University and a B.A. in political science from Coastal Carolina University.<\/em><\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday\u2019s episode of \u201cMorning Edition\u201d on NPR, a\u00a0segment\u00a0was devoted to exploring the extreme violence that has engulfed Honduras in recent years. Indeed, if\u00a0measured by per\u00a0capita\u00a0murder rate, Honduras is now the most dangerous in the country in the world. There are many reasons\u00a0why\u00a0Honduran civil society has broken down like this, but let\u2019s suspend that discussion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-41792","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41792\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}