PressEthic

Insidious politics corrupt a profile story

perspective

A 180 in the Miami Herald scandal. What do make of this?

Seymour Hersh's dependence on anonymous sources.

In my last blog, I expressed some grievances about the contentious Clinton interview on Fox News. After thinking about this for a few days, and weighing the opinions of a multitude of sage pundits, I realize that my grievances were pretty damn green. Of course, in an ideal world, it would have been great to get the straight news on the Clinton Global Initiative. But perhaps that just isn't the nature of the beast. It's election season, he's the ex-president, Fox News is very political - what else could we reasonably expect to happen? Of course they were going to try to shake things up a bit.

We've been talking and reading about bias so much lately that I'm seeing it everywhere. It's like when you learn a new word and then you start hearing people say it.

This past Sunday, former President Clinton got visibly upset in an exclusive interview on Fox news. The reason: the percieved bias of interviewer Chris Wallace and Fox news in general.

Clinton agreed to be interviewed on Fox to publicize the amazing fundraising success of the Clinton Global Initiative. This humanitarian NGO raised an astonishing 7.3 billion dollars in contributions over the past week.

Can you smell land?

In the past week, I, like many of you, have been following the developing situation at the Miami Herald. I have noticed that the Office of Cuba Broadcasting is often described with the ugly little word "propaganda". This got me thinking about the other projects of the International Broadcasting Bureau (or I.B.B., the parent government agency of all U.S. foreign-broadcast media organizations) and their relative merits, or lack thereof. My question is, put simply: Can propaganda be used for good?

Of the many I.B.B.-sponsored media organizations around the world, one of the most relevant would seem to be Radio Farda - the Farsi-language news network currently beaming it signals into Iran from the Czech Republic. Radio Farda is a division of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and could easily be described as U.S. propaganda.

This week, both Iran and China took significant steps to further restrain their domestic news agencies.

The Iranian reformist newspaper Shargh was one of four publications shut down this week by Iran’s conservative press monitor. The government order to shut down Shargh came after repeated warnings for publishing “heretical articles, insulting religious, political and national figures and revealing information in defiance of the Supreme National Security Council”, according to the Iranian press monitor.

In China, new regulations were enacted on Sunday that gave the government-run news agency Xinhua control over distribution of news and information from foreign media services such as the Associated Press and Reuters. Xinhua said it would prohibit information that it thought might violate national unity or social stability.

The headline of a September 9th New York Times article declares, "U.S. Paid (my italics) 10 Journalists For Anti-Castro Reports". Paid? My God! Do you mean to tell me that journalists don't work for free?

Does the Times believe this to be a shocking revelation? Are we supposed see this as proof of the conspiratorial nature of the Bush Administration?

Apparently the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, a division of the U.S. Government-funded International Broadcasting Bureau, has for several years been hiring Cuban-American journalists in Miami to produce documentaries that are critical of Fidel Castro's communist government. These documentaries are then, through a variety of means, surreptitiously broadcast onto Cuban public television and radio.