Is there anything these people won't screw up? Yeah, I know. It's purely rhetorical.
Sanford Ungar was the Voice of America Director from 1999-2001:
Meanwhile, employees in the VOA's battered newsroom have tried to fend off directives from VOA director David Jackson and other political appointees, who have suggested that the network report more favorably on the actions of the Bush administration in Iraq and the Middle East and more deliberately try to enhance the United States' reputation around the world. Editors have repeatedly been asked to develop "positive stories" emphasizing U.S. successes in Iraq, rather than report car bombings and terrorist attacks, and they were instructed to remove from the VOA Web site photographs of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, even though they were already widely available elsewhere. On several occasions since 2002, VOA management has objected to stories quoting Democratic politicians or newspaper editorials critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy.
Ungar writes that the former newsroom director was "punished for refusing to make the daily news report more overtly sympathetic to" President George W. Bush. This charge is also not true and is unsupportable by the facts.
And that's it. No facts are given to put the lie to Sanford Ungar's charge. So Ungar cites a few of his own:
On November 17, 2003, Jackson objected to a report that $9 million had been spent on the security and 5,000 policemen deployed for President Bush's visit to London, saying VOA listeners had no interest in such details.During an escalation of pressure in January 2004, he ordered the news division to stop reporting from Baghdad on car bombings and terror attacks, urging that it instead do "positive stories" emphasizing U.S. successes in Iraq. (Eventually, after being resisted by editors, this order was rescinded.) In a series of internal e-mails during January and February of that year, Jackson systematically passed along memos from the White House and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad reporting, for example, that the Iraqi postal service had resumed operation and would issue stamps without Saddam Hussein's picture, that cell-phone service was being introduced in Iraq, and that thousands of Iraqi teachers were being trained to return to the classroom. "This story offers so many angles," he wrote glowingly in the e-mail about cell-phone service. Jackson insisted that these press releases from the CPA did not require independent verification by VOA reporters on the ground in Iraq.
Don't forget that our boy Tomlinson at CPB is also one of the members of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which runs VOA.
The whole point of VOA as it was set up is to report news of and from America honestly and objectively, but these clowns seem to think that those two adverbs mean propaganda and slanted news is just fine.
Posted by Linkmeister at August 16, 2005 12:41 PM | TrackBack