Home > Why NPR Sucks Ass—An Analysis of NPR’s Coverage of Bush’s Latin American Tour

Why NPR Sucks Ass—An Analysis of NPR’s Coverage of Bush’s Latin American Tour

by Open-Publishing - Saturday 10 March 2007
9 comments

Governments USA South/Latin America

By Flávio Américo dos Reis

Source Links:

<a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7755010">Bush Set for Weeklong Tour of Latin America

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>By Juan Forero

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'><a
href="rtsp://real.npr.org:80/real.npr.na-central/day/20070307_day_04.rm?v1st=2445790D2F10A53&mt=1&primaryTopic=1012&assignedTopics=1012,1014">Real
Media Audio Stream

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'><a
href="mms://wm.npr.org/wm.npr.na-central/day/20070307_day_04.wma?v1st=2DFDF0291EE203BD&mt=1&primaryTopic=1012&assignedTopics=1012,1014">Windows
Media Audio Stream

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>NPR’s Day to Day – Wednesday, March 7, 2007

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>President Bush heads to Latin
America
on Thursday for a week long visit. The trip is meant to
build support for the United
States
, and to respond to Venezuelan
president Hugo Chavez’s increasing power in the region. <span
style='color:red'>[Uh, in case you haven’t noticed, NPR, all over Latin
America, governments opposed to the Washington
consensus have been popularly elected!
 It didn’t take President <span
class=GramE>Chávez’s being re-elected five times in his country for that
to happpen. Again, NPR’s reporting begins this very morning, with
no contextualization, no history, nary a mention of MERCOSUR—q.v. in Wikipedia.]

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Rush Transcript:

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>This is Day to Day, I’m Madeleine Brown
I’m Alex Chadwick.

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Alex Chadwick

President Bush begins a week-long, Latin America tour tomorrow, with a<span
class=GramE> visit
to <st1:place
w:st="on">Brazil
. He’s also going to <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Mexico, Uruguay,

Guatemala, and <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Colombia
The Bush administration is hoping to build stronger ties throughout the
region. [Read: “The Bush administration is
hoping to foster divisions between Latin Americans by pitting countries of
the region agains each other.”
]

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Madelein Brown

…And counter some of the effects of the anti-American Hugo Chávez in Venezuela <span
style='color:red'>[only Venezuela’s five time, freely-elected president, whom
the US tried to overthrow in a botched military coup in April of 2002,
funneling money to the right-wing through the US right-wing think tank, the
Orwellianly named National Endowment for Democracy]. <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Venezuela’s
president has been spending billions of dollars on social programs there, and
he’s earmarked billions more for foreign aid for his neighbors. <span
style='color:red'>[But the US
is free to prop up right-wing, fascist dictatorships like <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Colombia!] 
Juan Forero reports from Caracas

on the motivation behind Chávez’s big foreign agenda. <span
style='color:red'>[Chávez has a big foreign agenda, but Bush does
not? I rather like Chávez’s agenda—the economic and political integration
of Latin America, support for programs to aleviate poverty, the integration of
the region’s energy grid, the economic integration of the region through a Bank
of the South
—to counter that international equivalent of a payday loan
outfit, the IMF—even a University of the South, to train professionals
in engineering, medicine, other sciences and diplomacy. I like
that. I think that is very cool. It was all omitted—purposely,
recklessly and shamelessly by NPR’s <st1:place
w:st="on">US
government propaganda minions.]

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Juan Forero

A group of young men play baseball [Subtext: The
natives are really peaceful and all are aficionados of <st1:country-region
w:st="on">America’s
pastime, baseball. They really don’t hate us—unlike Chávez.]
<span
class=GramE>at
the Pantheon, the most Venezuelan of sports at the most
hallowed of the nation’s grounds. Here, on a rebuilt colonial church
overlooking downtown Caracas, rests the body of
the most revered of Latin America’s heroes,
Simón Bolívar. Armando Rosales offers tours. He says it was
Bolívar’s dream to form one big country. 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Armando Rosales

He wanted to form Gran Colombia, to unite all of the
South [Bolívar wanted to unite all of the <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Americas, from North to South—not just <st1:place
w:st="on">South America.]
. If his mission had been
accomplished, Chile and <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Argentina would’ve joined <span
style='color:red'>[Brazil, <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Haiti, Central America, etc., etc., even the <st1:country-region
w:st="on">US
, believe
it or not.]

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Juan Forero

Instead, Simón Bolívar died a broken man, bitter that his country Gran <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Colombia had
fractured, and that his former associates had turned against him. <span
style='color:red'>[Correction: If you read his letters, you will learn that
he was embittered that the US
and Britain

had been successful in dividing Latin American countries to their
advantage. Bolívar liberator himself, said in
1825 that "the United States of North America is destined by providence to
plague the people of the Americas
with hunger and misery in the name of freedom." Quoted
in Uruguayan journalist and author’s book Open Veins of Latin America.
 
Again, NPR fails again and again from contextualizing or fleshing out the
history of what came before to illuminate what came after. Are these
people, in their innermost selves, ever ashamed of what they do?]

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Now Hugo Chávez, flush with oil dollars <span
style='color:red'>[that he is channeling to help the poor of his country, the
rest of Latin America, and even the US, through its PDVSA subsidiary Citgo’s
donations of steeply discounted heating oil to
the Bronx in New York, Massachussets, and Louisiana…], is trying to
unite the region—not into a country, but into a bulwark against what he says is
yankee imperialism. According to the Central Bank, <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Venezuela has
funneled billions in aid to its Latin neighbors. He’s bought Argentine
bonds [absent an explanation that the purchase of these
bonds meant Argentina was able to repay its debt to that international
equivalent of a payday loan outfit, the IMF, ahead of schedule in 2005,
prompting it to permanently close its offices in Buenos Aires, there being
nothing left for it to do—its sordid business closed…]
, sent oil at
cut-rate prices to Cuba, and offered energy cooperation to Bolivia. 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Thousands gathered after Chávez won another six-year
term. Now with new decree-making powers and control over the country’s
purse strings, he is reaching out to other, newly-elected leftists. <span
style='color:red'>[All of these leaders, left-wing or not, were freely
elected
. In Venezuela,
in point of fact, there is electronic voting. An American company—Smartmatic,
Inc.
—even furnishes the machines. The key difference: these
machines emit paper receipts.]

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>In Nicaragua, Chávez promised Daniel Ortega, the
newly-elected president and one-time, cold war rival of the Reagan
administration [popularly elected by the people of
Nicaragua, and a defender of his country during the illegal siege of his
country by US-backed counterrevolutionaries for over ten years of bombings of
clinics, schools, waterworks, the internationally condemned mining of its
harbors, etc., until that exhausted nation voted for the preferred US-backed
candidate in 1991…]
, plenty of aid: there’s oil on preferential
terms, a refinery, roadway construction, even housing for the poor. <span
style='color:red'>[Mr. Forero, please explain to me why this is a bad thing,
and in your explication, please contrast this with the <st1:country-region
w:st="on">US’s response
to its own disaster, viz., Katrina.]

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Chávez also visited <st1:place
w:st="on">Ecuador
. His close ally,
Rafael Correa, a leftist economist [<span
style='color:red'>Correa received a Master’s degree in <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics" title=Economics><span
style='color:red'>Economics from the <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universit%C3%A9_Catholique_de_Louvain"
title="Université Catholique de Louvain">Université
Catholique de Louvain
( title=Belgium>Belgium) and a <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ph.D." title=Ph.D.>Ph.D.

in Economics from the <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Illinois_at_Urbana-Champaign"
title="University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign">University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(<a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States" title="United States"><span
style='color:red'>United States) in 2001.—I love it how folks at NPR
tarnish people with but one epithet, leftist, as though that could
honestly sum up people!], was also
inaugurated [instead of freely elected! 
Everything at NPR happens vaccum-packed]
in January.

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<st1:country-region
w:st="on">Venezuela<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> is promising one billion in loans.

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Chávez celebrated the rise of his friends at Correa’s
inauguration ceremony.

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Hugo Chávez

[In the voice of an awful translator at NPR]: The Latin American people
have been resuscitated! The dream of the fatherland has been
resuscitated! This was the original Colombia,
the Colombia
that was born from Bolívar’s sword! [Corrected
translation: The Latin American people have come back to life. The
dream of our homeland has come back to life! This was the original <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Colombia, the <st1:place
w:st="on">Colombia
to which Bolívar’s sword
gave birth! Translator’s note: notice, the English translation is
in the passive voice, whilst the actual Spanish is in the active

voice.]

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Juan Forero

But Chávez seeks ties beyond the <st1:place
w:st="on">Americas
. Of particular
concern to Washington is Chávez’s recent dalliance

[Why is this word here, except to malign a foreign
leader’s reputation?]
with <st1:place
w:st="on">Iran
, which has rebuffed the Bush
administration’s demands that it dismantle its nuclear program. With <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Chávez
recently announced a two-billion dollar development fund for Latin
America
. For Chávez, it all means that <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Venezuela and
its allies are closer to Bolívar’s grand dream. [<st1:country-region
w:st="on">Venezuela is a
member of OPEC, and, as such, even before Chávez, has long had relationships
with other Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC. This
is disingenuous on Forero’s part, to say the least! 
<st1:country-region
w:st="on">Iran<span
style='color:red'> has a right to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes
under the NPT!]

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Chávez mentions Bolívar in nearly every speech. 
He says that the national anthem [of <st1:place
w:st="on">Venezuela
] needs to be changed<span
class=GramE> to mention Bolívar. 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Bolívar is, as any Latin American will tell you, the
biggest of heroes. His likeness, nearly always on horseback, graces
plazas. There’re films about him—like I am Bolívar, about an actor
who rides a horse around town who thinks he’s The Liberator.

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Chávez speaks so much about Bolívar that critics
charge that the president thinks he is Bolívar. <span
style='color:red'>[Again, this is an ad hominem attack. It is a
personal attack that neither illustrates what came

before, nor what came after.]

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Chávez paints The Liberator as a modern-day
thinker. He says Bolívar was a socialist, that his principles were
egalitarian.

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Not everyone agrees. Demetrio Boersner is a
historian who has studied Venezuelan history. He says Bolívar was no
socialist, nor did he opposed the rigid caste system
of his time.

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Demetrio Boersner
11.0pt'>: Undoubtedly, Simón Bolívar was a very great man. He
played an enormous role in the liberation of Latin America
from Spanish domination in the early 19th century. It’s a
mistake, on the other hand, to overemphasize his influence in modern
times—after all, Bolívar was a man of his time. [All
I have to say here is ask yourselves! Who is Demetrio
Boersner
, and you will find out that he is an ex-ambassador of Venezuela—a faux

leftist—touted by NPR and other US news outlets, and a member of the faux
(false) MAS (Movement toward Socialism) puppet<span
style='color:blue'> opposition party to Chávez. Even
though Venezuela’s
own Jewish community came out in defense of Chávez when he was accused of
anti-Semitism.
 Demetrio was one of the signers of a declaration by
some fifty or so right-wing intellectuals abjuring Chávez’s supposed
anti-semitism—even though Venezuela’s
own Jewish community came out in Chávez’s defense. You can read all about
it at Fairness and
Accuracy in Reporting
.]

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Juan Forero

Don’t tell that to Venezuela’s
president. In a recent speech, Chávez recounted that when Bolívar died,
the liberator lamented that the great day for Latin
America
had not arrived. Now, Chávez says the time has
come. [Study the history: US, and before
that, British intervention in the <st1:place
w:st="on">Americas
go back as early as
shortly after 1776. As late as the US Civil War, the US was already
sending emissaries to Latin America to find out how it could get an upper hand
on trade matters and geopolitics—all you have to do is read Eduardo Galeano,
the author of Open Veins of Latin America, the Uruguayan journalist, and
his sources, which date back to Alexander von Humboldt, Chamberlain, Boxer, et
al. No mention is made by NPR of the Monroe Doctrine, the Platt
Amendment, etc. Anyone who thinks NPR is liberal has to read more
history.]

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Hugo Chávez

[NPR’s Spanish translator again]: Three-hundred years later, here we
are! The hour has come for the liberation of the people of <st1:place
w:st="on">Latin America! The hour of our great fatherland <span
style='color:blue'>[country]
has come!

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Juan Forero

Chávez says Bolívar’s dreams for Latin America remain, but that he’s committed
to his vision, and uniting South America
 Juan Forero, NPR News, <st1:City
w:st="on">Caracas, Venezuela
.

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Madeleine Brown

And Juan Forero joins us now from <st1:place
w:st="on">Colombia
, one of the stops on the
president’s trip. Hi, Juan! 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Juan Forero

Hi! [This chirpiness on the part of NPR’s
announcers is annoying to no end. Notice nothing is said of the recent
history—all the way from Plan Colombia, to <st1:place
w:st="on">US
support of right-wing death
squads in that country. Thanks for nothing, NPR!]

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Madeleine Brown

Juan, in that story, you said that Chávez has a dream of uniting South America,
and it’s interesting, isn’t it, exactly what his sworn enemy president Bush
wants to do, but from, from an economic perspective, from free trade
agreements. [No mention here of MERCOSUR, the South
American Common Market that intends to be an alternative to the US’s FTAA (Free
Trade Area of the Americas), the latter which is bereft of a social charter,
workers’ rights protections, etc. Ask yourselves: where are the
folks at NPR coming from?

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Juan Forero

Yes, the Bush administration already has a trade pact with Central America that
was very important to the Bush administration [Banana
Republiquettes over the barrel of US trade policies, incapable of opposing US
trade policies…]
, and now the Bush administration is trying to get
Congress to approve trade pacts with both Colombia and Perú, both of which are
very close allies of the United States [in fact, Banana
Republiquettes, terribly powerless against the US’s aegis…]
. But
the Bush administration, really from its beginning, and, we, actually, have to
go back even further to the Clinton

administration, has wanted to get a hemispheric-wide trade pact approved. 
Right now, that is really on the back burner, there are countries in <st1:place
w:st="on">Latin America that are just not interested right
now. [In late 2005, when Bush went to <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Argentina’s <st1:place
w:st="on">Mar del Plata
seaside reasort to argue in
favor of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), riots broke out, store
fronts were vandalized, people assembled en masse to protest Bush’s
presence in the country. 
Bush was publicly
reprimanded by Néstor Chávez during that trip. There’s footage of it on
the BBC’s website.
But the Bush
administration’s basically going down to Latin America to talk about trade, but
also to tell governments that, “Hey, we are still interested in having ties
with you, we’ve not forgotten about you
.” Uh, a lot of countries, a
lot of people in Latin America feel that the United
States
has focused too much attention on <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Iraq, and its early promises to have ties and
make Latin America a priority have fallen by
the wayside. [I don’t need to comment here,
except to say that the US

has been terribly obsessed with Latin America, has never let go of Latin
America, has never left Latin America alone, <span
class=GramE>has for nearly two centuries interfered in the sovereign
affairs of its nation-states. Again, NPR does a complete hatchet job,
purposely ignoring the real history, in favor of the official
history.]s

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Madeleine Brown

And Juan, is it going to be enough for him to come, uh, bringing all
these goodies
to Latin America when, as I read in may accounts, his
approval ratings across the board in many Latin American countries are  very
low
[Madeleine, you stupid bitch!, those
so-called goodies have always come at an awful cost—imposed by the US
Depatment of the Treasury’s arm, the International Monetary Fund, and the World
Bank. Never were the terms in favor of Latin Americans, but always in
favor of US corporations and US

corporate interests, defendend by the IMF and the World Bank. Who the
fuck does she think she’s fooling, except the hoodwinked listeners of NPR!]

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Juan Forero

His approval ratings are very low. [No
shit, Sherlock!] 
People in Latin America are very upset over the
Bush administration because of its war in <st1:place
w:st="on">Iraq
, and because of Guantánamo and
other coverage related to the war on terror. [Uh,
you stupid fuckhead!, it predates 2003! It
predates 2003. We have a better memory than yesterday—our memory, as
Latin Americans, dates back to the early 19th century, when you
assholes backed Britain in its effort to dominate Latin America, precisely
against Simón Bolívars attempts to free the continent from the yoke of Spanish
hegemony!] 
It has not played well in Latin
America
, and also Latin Americans feel that the Bush
administration has forgotten them. [We’re very
thankful the US

has forgotten us, if that be the case. But
that has not been the case, as evidenced by stepped up military intervention in
Colombia, and military
infiltration of weaker members of MERCOSUR, like Paraguay
and Uruguay.]
<span
style='color:blue'> Uh, for instance, after <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Argentina’s economic collapse in 2001 <span
style='color:red'>[in which the US

played a preponderant role through the International Monetary Fund],
there had been hope that the United
States
would come in and bail out the
Argentine government. It did not. [Never
did Latin America think the US was going to bail out Argentina, when the
International Monetary Fund—an arm of the US Treasury Department—and the World
Bank were responsible for Argentina’s economic collapse. What the fuck
are you smoking, Juan?!! And I don’t want it!!] 
Uh, that did
not help the Bush administration in Latin America

Uh, Hugo Chávez has worked hard to fill that void, uh, he’s been very adept at
it [Uh, Juan, it doesn’t take much save intelligence to
outwit Bush and his criminal gang.]
, and that’s been a big problem for,
uh, the United States.

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Madeleine Brown

That’s NPR’s Juan Forero in Bogotá,
Colombia

Thanks, Juan!

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Juan Forero

Thank you!

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
lang=PT-BR style='font-size:11.0pt;mso-ansi-language:PT-BR'>Transcript typed by
Flávio Américo dos Reis<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Translator and writer.

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'> 

<span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>Comments are mine in blue
and red.

Forum posts

  • A far simpler explanation is that NPR’s principals (Mssrs. Sterne, and Klose) previously worked at Radio Free Europe and Radio Martí before coming to manage NPR. NPR is, therefore, a way the US government skirts the law barring it from beaming propaganda to its own people—a National Propaganda Radio, a Voice of America for the Americanos. Occam´s razor, folks: the simplest explanation is nearly always the best. - Flávio

  • I’ve known for years that NPR was zionist controlled. They’re Always pro-Israel. They’ll NEVER do a story on the Palestinians or the Israeli Apartheid Wall. But they’re always ready for chanukkah and Passover.

    I now affectionately call it JPR. You can figure it out.

  • They’ve ALWAYS sucked Ass. Nice to see us goys waking up. I strongly encourage people to go to www.iamthewitness.com and listen to the interviews with Bollyn, Rafiq, Bjerknes, and Pidcock. The rest are excellent but these should get folks out of kindegarten/goy pen and on the way to graduation from the stockyard.

    The link for interviews is on the upper left. page is down at the moment, but there are weeks of educational listening material. Pass it on. Peace

  • Except for a few shows, such as Frontline, Public TV and NPR have, like the mainstream media, followed the Cover Your Ass (CYA) policy governing so much of American life, from Hollywood to Detroit. Sure, there’s a Zionist bias, but what’s far worse is that despite the plethora of abuses too abundant now for anyone to credibly deny, the "Public" media plays it safe with generous servings of infotainment and soft critiques.

    How many times is PBS going to push Motown "specials" on its unassuming viewers, especially during fundraising events? How many times can you appreciate Victor Borge? How many more horrible Austin City Limits (See the recent Rickie Lee Jones show?) can PBS sponsor? Collectively it all seems more like a parody of bad network TV than a viable menu offered by "alternative" sources.

    The simple truth is that the fat cats - whether left or right, right or wrong - don’t want to rock the boat to the point of no longer enjoying their spoils. In the 70s you used to hear a lot about life being a zero sum game and how the truly concerned souls ought to change that into an inclusive society. How long ago that now seems! Life in America, and much of the West, is a zero sum game for those at the top who, despite being surrounded by so much mediocrity, malfeasance and incompetence, have the resources to enjoy the best of life.

    So if you’re in their ($650 Italian) shoes, why not just go along with CYA? Why push for change when you believe that the great unwashed aren’t capable and aren’t willing to pick themselves up to your level? Let ’em rot. And in the meantime, keep giving them that nostalgia that pacifies their weary minds. And keep asking for those $100 pledges for "meaningful" programs. Ha!

  • There´s no need to resort to ethnic libel here. Please! Let my comment on Occam´s Razor stand. The simplest explanation is that quite a few of the people that worked for Radio Free Europe and Radio Marti—both propaganda arms of the US government—went on to head NPR.

    Of course, I agree, any ideology that favors one people over another is diseased—from the United States´ Manifest Destiny to Zionism, the belief of a portion of the Jewish people that theirs is a chosen people. I can´t accept that, for as you must know, the chosen people are the Brazilians!!! :-D, of which I am a stellar example. :-D

    I am a Brazilian, and am proud of it—but I tell you, there´s no money in it. LOL.

    But seriously, keep the comments clean and clear. Yes there is an Israeli lobby—as there are many other lobbies—to the US Congress. I think that if you follow the Latin dictum Qui Bono and ask, "Who gains?," you will be closer to the mark. It’s more than AIPAC: they’re but the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

    What I fault NPR for—if it is the independent network it claims to be—is its servility to power. I don’t give a rat’s patoot about the ethnicity of their announcers. What I do care about is the content of their broadcasts, which is, sadly, so devoid of analysis, so inimical of the concerns of the less developed countries of the world, so condescending, and so forth.

    I don’t care if they are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Budhist, Taoist, or what have you: What I care about is that they repeatedly, and ecumenically distort the facts, and I will speak out against that as long as I may.

    Flavio

    • I agree with your sentiments about the relative unimportance of which ethnic group controls NPR, but I can’t agree with your notion that it is "independent." NPR, like PBS, receives most of its funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which is wholly funded by the US Congress. The following excerpt is from Wikipedia’s article on the CPB

      "The CPB annual budget is funded almost entirely by federal appropriations. In 2005, unrestricted revenues summed to $480.4 million, $386.8 million of which come from congress’ allocation to the corporation’s general fund. (Other federal funds were earmarked for particular projects, mostly infrastructure development.)[1]

      About 90% of the 2005 budget was distributed to public broadcasters across the country, including both local and national organizations.[2] CPB also distributes money directly to PBS and NPR to fund both programming and equipment. In 2004, for instance, about US$38 million went to PBS itself and about US$2 million went to NPR itself. Although these direct contributions may seem small, CPB indirectly provides very substantial funding to both PBS and NPR, as public radio and television stations feed a significant portion of their budgets back to PBS and NPR through their purchase of PBS and NPR programming."

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_for_Public_Broadcasting

      Also, it may be of interest for some people who hold to the "Zionist" theory of media control that the most popular show on NPR is "Car Talk" whose hosts are the brothers, Tom and Ray Magliozzi. I don’t think they’re Jewish.

      But, in general, NPR, like privately owned media outlets in the US, will pretty much not stray too far from ranch. It must meet licensing requirements, and one of the unspoken ones is to not bite the hand that feeds it, although it can and does take nibbles from time to time.

      Regarding the Israel/Palestine Conflict, however, it shows an unmistakable and not too surprising bias towards Israel. But, this has more to do with the direction of prevailing US foreign policy needs than the perceived (by some) "overweening" pressure from Jewish pressure groups. The tail does not wag the dog.

    • I never (to my knowledge) implied NPR was independent: what I meant to say is that they «claim» they are independent. (How annoying is it to listen to their roll call of corporate sponsors—including Wal-Mart! Corporate sponsorship there is definitely on the rise.) We all know they aren´t independent. I´m a Brazilian national living in the great state of Wisconsin, and I can tell you, Wisconsin Public Radio is tons more independent than NPR. WPR tends to show many more voices than NPR, and gives them much more air time to boot—not just five minutes, like they once gave Chomsky. I like WPR because it unabashedly gives the extreme right-wing, the extreme left-wing and everybody in between a voice. I urge you to check out their podcasts at www.wpr.org. Against all odds (because it´s actually Minnesota that´s more progressive than Wisconsin), Wisconsin Public Radio is, I daresay, much more progressive than Minnesota Public Radio, which tends to have a pro-business, pro-corporate bias. What a paradox!

      Flávio