Tag Archives: rewriting history

Rewriting History For Political Purposes

Posted on by

The Washington Examiner posted an article today a news report posted on the U.S. taxpayer-funded Voice of America website.

The Washington Examiner reports:

By pure chance I stumbled recently on a news report posted on the U.S. taxpayer-funded Voice of America website. It was a news feature story about the personality cult of Argentine Communist Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

He is described as a “Marxist revolutionary” in a complimentary narrative that would make any antifa sympathizer proud. Americans who know something about the history of communist atrocities of the last century might find it shocking and wonder how their tax money is being spent. What VOA failed to mention is that Che was a ruthless communist, directly and indirectly responsible for brutal murders of tens of thousands of innocent human beings in Cuba and elsewhere.

I discovered through further research that this news feature report was originally prepared by Reuters, but VOA posted it on its main desktop website without giving credit to the news agency. VOA staff even put VOA letters on a Reuters photo showing the famous image of the communist hero. Whether or not it gives proper credit to Reuters, VOA is still responsible for everything it offers for public view under its name. The feature glorifying a Communist mass murderer was presented by the U.S. government as VOA’s own work.

The article details the changes in the VOA in recent years:

Much of the blame for the return of journalistic bias and chaos to the Voice of America in recent years rests with the recent and current leadership of the agency, which seems have a distorted view of VOA’s past and its mission, in addition to being managerially challenged.

But the biggest problem is the political bias, partisanship, and the ineffectiveness of many VOA programs. VOA still has a few excellent and unbiased journalists, but they are deeply unhappy being unable to practice their craft the way they think most Americans would want to support with their tax money. “Professionalism at VOA is dead, because [VOA Director] Amanda Bennett and [USAGM CEO] John Lensing killed it,” a VOA employee was reported to have said.

…An ahistorical Voice of America can be a dangerous anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-conservative and anti-humanist propaganda tool both abroad and in the United States, regardless of which party controls the White House. VOA needs much better oversight from Congress and American taxpayers than it has now.

Please read the entire article. It is time for new leadership at the VOA. President Trump is moving in that direction.

The article concludes:

The current Obama administration officials in charge of VOA have demonstrated their partisanship and remarkable managerial incompetence. Haroon Ullah, a top aide recruited and frequently feted by USAGM CEO John Lansing as a strategic planner, recently pleaded guilty to federal charges of stealing tens of thousands of dollars from the agency.

Award-winning PBS film documentarian and former federal government official Michael Pack is President Trump’s nominee to become the next agency head. He is conservative, but from what I can tell from his documentaries, he possesses a good grasp of history and seems ideologically less dogmatic than some of the current agency leaders and editors. He appears to have much more public service experience to run a government media program than any of the holdover officials currently in charge of USAGM. However, he and any other future VOA officials also need to be constantly watched and scrutinized to make sure that they fully obey the VOA Charter, which is U.S. law.

Hopefully the change in leadership will happen soon.

Rewriting History For A Political Purpose

Posted on by

I thought only Russian dictators rewrote history, but now American journalists seem to be doing it. There has been quite a kerfuffle about Donald Trump‘s remarks about Arabs celebrating 9/11. The news media is claiming that he is lying, but he keeps on coming up with their own stories that detail the celebrations. It wasn’t hundreds of thousands, but it was thousands.

The Conservative Treehouse posted a story yesterday giving a few examples of what is happening to the news media in America. They are becoming campaign workers–not news reporters. I need to say here that I am not voting for Donald Trump in the Republican primary. However, if he is the candidate, I would vote for him before I would vote for Hillary Clinton. But that is not the point.

The article at The Conservative Treehouse is reporting that The New York Post has removed articles about the Arab celebrations of 9/11 from its website. Donald Trump exaggerated, but told the truth. The New York Post and other media have attempted to alter the truth.

The story at The Conservative Treehouse includes the following:

[…]  The PC concern is that the Israelis will somehow “take advantage” of the attacks and therefore that negative stories about Palestinians are to be handled as gingerly as stories about American Arabs and Muslims.

That’s why you probably don’t know about the Palestinian Authority’s death threat against a videographer who took footage of a 4,000-person celebration on Sept. 11 – which led to the seizure of the news footage and its erasure. The fact that bin Laden’s allies on the West Bank targeted a news photographer for death for filming Palestinians dancing at the news of the death of 7,000 Americans didn’t make it anywhere near the front pages.

The news media usually make a stink when the media are threatened. Not this time.  (link)

Follow the link to The Conservative Treehouse to see screenshots of the stories that have been deleted.

Rewriting History Subtlely

Posted on by

This is the opening paragraph in an article about President Obama’s second term posted by the New York Daily News:

This wasn’t a war started on a lie about weapons of mass destruction the way Iraq was for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Affordable health care for all Americans was Barack Obama’s war, one started with noble intent, the way so many big ideas all the way back to Social Security have started.

The opening sentence of that paragraph is amazing. First of all, America’s intelligence organizations showed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Britain’s intelligence organizations showed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and Israel’s intelligence showed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. There is also a book called Saddam’s Secrets which details Saddam Hussein’s wmd program. The book was written by one of Saddam Hussein’s top generals and details the program and the exportation of those weapons during the run-up to the war. Regardless of whether or not you believe the weapons existed, the President did not lie. He spoke based on the information he had at the time.

ObamaCare is a very different situation. As reported on rightwinggranny yesterday, four years ago it was obvious to many people that people would lose their health insurance under ObamaCare. Christina Romer did an amazing job of avoiding that very question in her testimony before a House Education and Labor Committee hearing of June 23, 2009.  You could make the argument that President Obama was not told that people would lose their insurance, but that would lead to the question of his basic competence.

The article at the Daily News points out that many Democrats are already supporting Hillary Clinton for President in an effort to distance themselves from the debacle of ObamaCare. The Democrats are also very anxious to change the subject.

The comparison of the ObamaCare roll-out to President Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina does not work either–President Bush did not create Hurricane Katrina–President Obama did create ObamaCare (or at least he allowed Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy to create it).

The article continues, smashing Republicans as it goes, but the bias is obvious. The rewriting of history is inexcusable, but until voters learn to do their own research, history will remain rewritten. Welcome to 1984.

Enhanced by Zemanta