NPR is a racket

In fact, if the [propaganda] system functions well, it ought to have a liberal bias, or at least appear to. Because if it appears to have a liberal bias, that will serve to bound thought even more effectively. In other words, if the press is indeed adversarial and liberal and all these bad things, then how can I go beyond it? They're already so extreme in their opposition to power that to go beyond it would be to take off from the planet. So therefore it must be that the presuppositions that are accepted in the liberal media are sacrosanct -- can't go beyond them. And a well-functioning system would in fact have a bias of that kind. The media would then serve to say in effect: Thus far and no further. -Noam Chomsky speaking in the 1992 documentary film Manufacturing Consent Even vile and murderous actions tend to come from somewhere, and if they are extreme in character we are not wrong to look for extreme situations. It does not mean that those who do them had no choice; far from it. But there is sentimentality too in ascribing what we don't understand to "evil"; it lets us off the hook, it allows us to avoid the question of what, if anything, we can recognize in the destructive acts of another. -From the 2002 essay "End of War" by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury During the November 29 broadcast of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Saturday, host Scott Simon informed listeners that he is "uncomfortable with the convention of journalism that requires us to say that so far, we don't know the motives of the people who carried out this week's attacks in Mumbai.…[A]fter covering too many killings, as a reporter or host, in Bosnia, Kosovo, Oklahoma City, or Somalia, I've come to the conclusion that the perpetrators of such crimes might just be evil." Paraphrasing Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, Scott went on: "Evil people are not dumb. They simply use the power of their mind to cut off their conscience." Indeed, Simon (a Quaker, who announced in 2001 that "in confronting the forces that attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon… [there is] no sane alternative now but to support war.") is well qualified to comment on intellectual suppression of conscience. NPR journalists are experts at fogging the minds of listeners who might otherwise be moved to protest the "evil" regularly perpetrated by their government in their name. When Russia invaded Georgia this summer, NPR senior news analyst Daniel Schorr found himself recalling "when Hitler's armies marched into Czechoslovakia" and "when Hitler invaded Poland." "The Russian's have been intent on dominating what they call 'the near-abroad'," he explained on August 11 during NPR's flagship news program All Things Considered. "That is, former republics and satellites the Russians regard as key to Russia's defense. If that requires regime change in a country like Georgia, the Russians have no compunctions." Like Simon's, Schorr's comment was followed by a few bars of melancholy music, provided presumably to prompt listeners to nod gravely in appreciation of NPR's expert analysis of this frightening world. For American listeners, Bush II's criminal invasion of Iraq and 2005 overthrow of Haiti's Jean Bertrand Aristide or Bush I's 1990 invasion of Panama are obviously much more appropriate and relevant comparisons to the invasion of Georgia, as are past US plots against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatamala or murderous US interventions in Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and Guyana, among others. Further, Putin's military ambitions and achievements are dwarfed by the more than 700 US military bases outside the United States and US military spending likely greater than the rest of the world's combined. Had a Russian journalist commenting on US human rights violations in Iraq recalled the Nazis rather than his own country's atrocities in Chechnya, he'd be rightfully called a propagandist. But it is inconceivable that Schorr be held to the same standard on NPR. Another telling incident occurred on January 5, 2007 during Diane Rehm's call-in show, a program with 1.7 million weekly listeners who, according to Rehm's website, tune in for "a civil exchange of ideas" and "thoughtful and lively conversations on an array of topics with many of the most distinguished people of our times." During that Friday's "News Roundup", Rehm and her guests, Washington Post foreign editor Keith Richburg, New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger, and BBC Washington correspondent Katty Kay, discussed Saddam Hussein's execution the week before. Rehm took a call from an Iraqi woman in Michigan. "As an Iraqi," the woman explained, "I would have preferred that [Saddam] wasn't executed until he got through all the trials because there are a lot of questions that are not answered yet. …Where did he get his chemical weapons that he used against his own people? Who financed him all these years? That is important. We, as Iraqis, we know who financed him, but we wanted the whole world to know that ." She went on to declare that Saddam's crimes against the Iraqi people were so atrocious that she had no problem with the character of his trial and execution. "That's a very powerful and eloquent statement," observed Rehm. Richburg agreed. "It was an incredibly powerful statement," he said. However, he thought the execution should have been delayed until Saddam had been tried for all his crimes, in order to give an "opportunity to his victims to come forward, to tell their stories, to get it on the public and historic record what happened." Rehm asked of her guests, "And her other question about who was financing Saddam?" Sanger explained "Saddam had, it seemed, multiple finance methods, including diverting a good amount of money from the UN Oil for Food Program. But that wasn't his only source. One of the few perks you get of being a dictator is you have lots of ways to move money around…" Kay wrapped it up. "It was an extraordinary, eloquent statement of the suffering of a broken people and what a broken country Iraq was and still is," she said. "And you still talk to Iraqis who are living here or living in Europe about the terror of Saddam's regime and I think that sometimes we forget that. Sometimes three years after the invasion we are so consumed understandably with the state of Iraq today. But clearly for the Iraqi people, they haven't forgotten it and they won't forget it for a long time." And that was it. Rehm moved on to a listener's email asking about a change in the US military hierarchy. Listening to this bit of "thoughtful and lively conversation," one would be forgiven for thinking the "multiple finance methods" of Saddam's WMD programs to be obscure. However, as these professional journalists are certainly aware, the "public and historic record [of] what happened" exists. It's called United States Chemical and Biological Warfare Related Dual-Use Exports and their Possible Impact on the Health Consequences of the Gulf War and it was written by the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs in 1994. "The United States," it tells us, "provided the Government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological, and missile- system programs, including: chemical warfare agent precursors; chemical warfare agent production facility plans and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans); chemical warhead filling equipment; biological warfare related materials; missile fabrication equipment; and, missile-system guidance equipment." Beyond this blatantly selective amnesia, so desperate are these four employees of news agencies virtually synonymous with "The Liberal Media" to obscure US complicity in Saddam's crimes, that the suggestion that his WMD program of the 1980's was paid with funds siphoned from the 1995 UN Oil for Food Program is not only seriously proposed but apparently found to reasonable. Saddam's use of "chemical weapons on his own people" was, along with absolutely disingenuous claims that he had some hand in the 9/11 attacks, the centerpiece of the Bush II administration's promotion of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. If past WMD use was sufficient to justify war, certainly it would be reasonable to expect that those who provided Saddam the tools of mass murder should face justice. Likewise, if Putin's invasion of Georgia is heinous enough to stir memories of the Nazis, surely US aggression far beyond Putin's is worthy of being remembered aloud by an American journalist speaking to his fellow citizens. But these ideas, like the notion that Scott Simon could have as easily opened his essay with a list of atrocities committed in his name rather than in strangers', is as unacceptable on liberal NPR as it at ultra-conservative FoxNews. That "commercial free" NPR and commercial saturated Fox share an overall worldview, if not aesthetic, may be unexpected, but NPR's donor list suggests that the very name "National Public Radio" is as ironic as Fox's slogan "Fair and Balanced". The list of contributing "Corporations and Associations" in National Public Radio's 2005 Annual Report (the most recent publicly available) is topped, at the "1 Million +" level by: Acura; Capella University; Farmers Insurance Group of Companies; American Honda Motor Co; Raymond James Financial; Prudential Financial; Saturn Corporation; Sodexho; and Wal-Mart. Other contributors, each giving hundreds of thousands of dollars, include: AT&T, TIAA-CREF, Archer Daniels Midland, ConocoPhillips, Jeep, Toyota, and Subaru. Regular NPR listeners will know that the Department of Homeland Security (pushing it's "E-Verify" illegal-immigrant catching program) is now a contributor. Any listener to an NPR pledge drive knows that as donation levels rise, so does compensation: coffee mug to T-shirt to tote bag and so on, all marked with the grateful station's ID. Once "pledges" cross the six-figure line, there no doubt exists a similar hierarchy of editorial influence, as it is unlikely Wal-Mart and Sodexho are donating millions of dollars for proportionate numbers of thank-you-gift coffee mugs. Scot t Simon would do well to liberate his own conscience and admit, like Marine Major General Smedly Butler, two-time recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, and Simon's fellow Quaker, did, in his 1935 book War is a Racket, to being "a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.. a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." NPR's far reaching disinformation is influential among the political classes and not without consequences. The question "why do (any given) they hate us?" will not be answered in any meaningful way by simpletons in radio booths or the White House who conclude that the problem is simply "evil". NPR listeners will do well to deny themselves yet another pledge-drive mug memorializing their complicity in NPR's campaign of ignorance and direct their donations and attention elsewhere. Nick Holt works as a legal advocate for poor and low-income people in Charlotte, NC. His website is gritsandroses.org