Uncle Sam Got a Shiny New Propaganda Bullhorn for Christmas

[newthinking]

[font size=3]Uncle Sam Got a Shiny New Propaganda Bullhorn for Christmas
The Nation Magazine
http://www.thenation.com/article/uncle-sam-got-a-shiny-new-propaganda-bullhorn-for-christmas/


[center] A new partnership is turning Radio Free Europe into an
anti-Russia propaganda machine. [/center]

As we begin 2016, with the American mainstream media’s anti-Russia bias as deeply entrenched as never before, comes the news that the US government–funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) has partnered up with the online magazine the Interpreter.

Previously, the Interpreter had been a “special project” of the Manhattan-based Institute for Modern Russia (IMR), a think tank funded by the exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khordorkovsky. In announcing the change, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, the journalist and CNN fixture Michael Weiss, said his organization was “excited to serve as an outpost of such a venerable news organization.”

An RFE/RL official told The Nation that the deal stipulates that RFE/RL will have exclusive rights to publish and translate articles from the Interpreter for RFE/RL’s audience abroad, while The Interpreter will be, in turn, obligated to publish each installment of ITS intractably Russo-phobic “The Power Vertical” blog.

According to Weiss, given his “magazine’s trajectory, a partnership with RFE/RL makes perfect sense.” That is only too true, given the marked decline in RFE/RL’s standards since the heyday of the Cold War.

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were founded in 1950 by the State Department’s first Director of Policy Planning, George F. Kennan, in coordination with the postwar Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). In founding RFE and RL (the two entities merged in 1976), Kennan and the OPC, according to Kennan biographer John Lewis Gaddis sought “to provide financial support and employment opportunities for Eastern European émigrés, as well as anti-Soviet broadcasts to their homelands.”

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Continued:
http://www.thenation.com/article/uncle-sam-got-a-shiny-new-propaganda-bullhorn-for-christmas/

[malthaussen]

1. The sub-head does not compute.

RFE was always an anti-USSR propaganda machine. Granted, Russia is not the USSR, but the focus of RFE hasn't suddenly become anti-Russian.

-- Mal