[R-G] Global Media Managers

[Anthony Fenton]

Global Media Managers, Swans Commentary, March 9, 2009.

(Swans - March 9, 2009)   On January 13, 2009, the Center for  
International Media Assistance (CIMA), a recently formed international  
media manipulator, released a report titled, "Soft Censorship: How  
Governments Around the Globe Use Money to Manipulate the Media." The  
report documents the manner in which various governments manipulate  
media systems within their own countries (e.g., the Ukraine and  
Chile). Significantly the report fails to identify the US government's  
extensive efforts to manipulation of media systems in those same  
countries or the conduct of CIMA itself. When it is revealed that CIMA  
is a project of the US government's CIA-inspired National Endowment  
for Democracy (NED) this failure is contextualised.For example, by  
providing strategic support to local media projects the NED played a  
key role in facilitating Ukraine's Orange Revolution (in 2005), and in  
catalysing the ouster of Chile's resident dictator Augusto Pinochet in  
1987. (1)

The first sentence of the executive summary of CIMA's report notes,  
without irony, that: "As once openly authoritarian regimes have moved  
toward more democratic societies -- or at least toward the appearance  
of democratic ones -- an insidious form of censorship has arisen."  
Such a statement expresses the anti-democratic function of the media  
in the United States itself. (2) That is, the media empire in the U.S.  
operates to bring pressures upon mainstream US journalists to self- 
censor and conform to capitalist ideology. Such pressure facilitates  
the transition from pseudo democratic forms of governance to openly  
authoritarian (media-backed) regimes.

This short article does not critique the content of CIMA's latest  
report; however, it is necessary to point out that almost all of the  
"independent" media groups referred to within the report have secured  
support from the National Endowment for Democracy at some point of  
their operations. (3) Instead this article scrutinizes a number of  
rarely mentioned democracy-manipulators whose work can be indirectly  
connected to Don Podesta, the author of the CIMA report. The point of  
this scrutiny is to demonstrate how deeply such media manipulators  
have insinuated themselves into global civil society, so that  
concerned activists can more effectively resist their hegemonic  
influence. ...




CONTINUED HERE http://www.swans.com/library/art15/barker15.html