Some things that jumped out at me...
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According to the documents, PADF’s objective is to “strengthen independent journalists by providing them with training, technical assistance, materials and greater access to innovative internet-based technologies that expand and diversify media coverage and increase their capacity to inform the public on a timely basis about the most critical policy issues impacting Venezuela”.
However, while on paper this may appear benign, in reality, Venezuela’s corporate media outlets and journalists, together with US agencies, actively manipulate and distort information in order to portray the Venezuelan government as a “communist dictatorship” that “violates basic human rights and freedoms”.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Not only do media and journalists in Venezuela have a near-absolute freedom of expression, during the past decade, under the Chavez administration, hundreds of new media outlets, many community-based, have been created in order to foster and expand citizens’ access to media. Community media was prohibited under prior governments, which only gave broadcasting access to corporations willing to pay big money to maintain information monopolies in the country.
Today, corporate media outlets and their journalists use communications power to publicly promote the overthrow of the Venezuelan government. The owners and executives of these media corporations form part of the Venezuelan elite that, under the reigns of Washington, ran the country for forty years before Chavez won the presidency in 1998.
What these documents demonstrate is that Washington not only is funding Venezuelan media, in clear violation of laws that prohibit this type of “propaganda” and “foreign interference”, but also is influencing the way Venezuelan journalists perceive their profession and their political reality.
The State Department funding not only is used to create and aid media outlets that promote anti-Chavez propaganda, but also to capture Venezuelan journalists at the core - as students – in order to shape their vision of journalism and ensure their loyalty early on to US agenda.
FUNDING FOR ANTI-CHAVEZ WEB PAGES
One of the PADF programs, which received $699,996 USD from the State Department in 2007, “supported the development of independent media in Venezuela” and “journalism via innovative media technologies”. The documents evidence that more than 150 Venezuelan journalists were trained by US agencies and at least 25 web pages were created with US funding.
During the past two years, there has been a proliferation of web pages, blogs, and Twitter, MySpace and Facebook users in Venezuela, the majority of whom use these media outlets to promote anti-Chavez messages and disseminate distorted and false information about the country’s political and economic reality.
Other programs run by the State Department have selected Venezuelan students and youth to receive training in the use of these new media technologies in order to create what they call a “network of cyber-dissidents” against the Venezuelan government.
For example, ***in April 2010, the George W. Bush Institute***, together with Freedom House and the State Department, organized an encounter of “activists for freedom and human rights” and “experts in Internet” to analyze the “global movement of cyber-dissidents”. Rodrigo Diamanti, anti-Chavez youth activist, was present at the event, which took place in Dallas, Texas and was ***presided over by George W. Bush himself***, along with “dissidents” invited from Iran, Syria, Cuba, Russia and China.http://www.chavezcode.com/2010/07/documents-reveal-multimillion-dollar.html(my emphasis)
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Um, so Hillary and President Obama are pushing the "George W. Bush Institute"'s viewpoint on Venezuelan media, "presided over by George W. Bush himself"? That's lovely, ain't it? Is this part of our need "to look forward not backward" as to investigating and prosecuting a heinous war criminal like George W. Bush? I thought a Harvard law school grad could come up with a better line than that. Lame, Barack. Really lame. But THIS! FUNDING this war criminal's institute! Putting him on display as an exemplar of democracy! Jeez. If we had any doubt about our state of flattened servitude, as a people, this confirms it. No matter who ES&S/Diebold tells us we 'elected,' this kind of corpo-fascist/war profiteer bullshit continues in every sphere of U.S. policy!
Also, it is one of the bigger lies of the Big Lie campaign against the Chavez government that it represses free speech, when, in fact, it is ENHANCING free speech by empowering and funding local community broadcasting! It is no surprise that this DEMOCRATIC challenge to corpo-fascist media monopolies drives the media barons nuts, there and here, and inspires THEIR lies about it--but WHAT IS THE INTEREST OF OUR STATE DEPARTMENT in perpetuating these lies and suppressing the truth? And how come our State Department is not touting community media and all the other efforts--including TRANSPARENT vote counting--that Venezuelans have worked so hard for, to improve their democracy?
WHY is the Obama administration and Sec of State Clinton CONTINUING Bush Junta policy?
This is kind of like the little boy's shout that "the emperor has no clothes on!", I know. But somebody needs to say it. What U.S. interests are being served by hundreds of thousands of our tax dollars being used to control the media in Venezuela, and to undermine and topple its democratic government? Who is being served by touting George W. Bush's "institute"? Not you and me, that's for sure.
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