Tony Thomas has an excellent Quadrant essay on how USAID has been corrupting journalists on a global scale.
We are inundated with UDAID information at the moment, but the whole piece is very well worth reading as an insight into the scale of global media corruption. The role of the BBC is in there too - always interesting for Brits, but rarely unexpected.
All the News That’s Fit to Twist
Elon Musk was wrong to say the US Agency for International Development (USAID) had funded ($US32,000) a comic book in Peru promoting trans guys in frocks. My own fact-check shows that the funder was actually the State Department, and the protagonist in Peru’s The Power of Education comic (above) was a gay super-hero, not a transitioner. See here.[1]
My main interest in the USAID boondoggle is how it’s been corrupting journalists on a global scale. That’s what this essay’s about.
USAID from its $US40-billion budget allocated $US268 milion last year alone to propping up global “independent” media, better called “dependent”. USAID was supporting 6,200 journalists in nearly 1,000 outlets. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) unblushingly complained that Trump has plunged NGOs, media outlets, and journalists doing ‘vital work’ into chaotic uncertainty.
All the News That’s Fit to Twist
Elon Musk was wrong to say the US Agency for International Development (USAID) had funded ($US32,000) a comic book in Peru promoting trans guys in frocks. My own fact-check shows that the funder was actually the State Department, and the protagonist in Peru’s The Power of Education comic (above) was a gay super-hero, not a transitioner. See here.[1]
My main interest in the USAID boondoggle is how it’s been corrupting journalists on a global scale. That’s what this essay’s about.
USAID from its $US40-billion budget allocated $US268 milion last year alone to propping up global “independent” media, better called “dependent”. USAID was supporting 6,200 journalists in nearly 1,000 outlets. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) unblushingly complained that Trump has plunged NGOs, media outlets, and journalists doing ‘vital work’ into chaotic uncertainty.
4 comments:
Either there is a conspiracy to smear the world's media, and we are being hoodwinked by some strange new group; or we are gradually uncovering a far bigger conspiracy. Which leaves the question: why were they doing it?
Perhaps it was cock-up after all. Maybe the bureaucracy got so big and poorly managed that different departments went their own way. Nobody was ever responsible.
Sam - I think cock-up and a natural tendency to make comfort zones more and more secure goes some way to explain it. Add in some simple background ideology as a kind of bovine rationale, plus a small minority of hard-nosed ideologues pushing it along and maybe that's it.
For the media it must be easier and cheaper to bang out the stories complete with an approved, digestible angle. More copy and paste than journalism and without the need to find those awkward types who can actually do it.
The number of people involved in this is staggering - I wonder what the recruitment process is; we have seen two offspring and a niece through the post-university job hunt and nothing like this ever appeared where we were looking.
(Incidentally, being creative and good with words, both initially tried to get media jobs but eventually gave up and went into industry; as a proud parent, I may have over-estimated their abilities but I wonder whether their repeated lack of success was not unconnected with the inevitable paragraph in the advertisements welcoming ‘applications from ethnic and other minorities’.)
Macheath - various anecdotal hints over recent years suggest that inevitable paragraph is much more important than applicants might suppose.
It must be a strange business since AI came on the scene, because these systems appear to be quite capable of doing some of the routine media work now and intensive development seems likely to take it further. Maybe the media future will be small teams of creative people and all that USAID funding has been propping up failing businesses.
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