Ever since he became president, Barack Obama has had it out with the press—from the White House’s own press corps, which has been reduced to acting as stenographers feeding on every press release fed to it by Obama’s press secretary, to recent calls for a federal agency to combat “disinformation” from foreign news sources.
After Obama’s recent trip to Argentina, which coincided with the 40th anniversary of that nation’s fascist military coup, Argentina’s neo-fascist president and Obama’s newest best friend Mauricio Macri, announced that Argentina was pulling out of the Latin American consortium of nations that fund TeleSur as a rival to Western-controlled news media.
No sooner had Air Force One left Buenos Aires, Argentina’s U.S.-backed right-wing government announced that it was selling its shares in TeleSur, a Caracas-based news network started in 2005 by Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chavez. In addition to Argentina and Venezuela, TeleSur was financed by Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.
Hernán Lombardi, Macri’s handpicked crony named as head of the government’s public media department, complained that TeleSur prevented Macri supporters from having input on TeleSur’s financial and editorial decisions. A number of Latin American journalists have criticized Argentina for its actions against TeleSur, especially since Argentina’s Televisión Digital Abierta (TDA) cable service, which provides cable TV service to 80 percent of Argentina’s television viewers, is dropping TeleSur from its offerings.
The Argentine decision resulted in Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to liken the Macri government to the Argentine military dictatorship. “It’s the same as when 30,000 young people disappeared in Argentina between 1976 and 1983; they are trying to make Telesur disappear. It’s the same media oligarchy,” Maduro said in response to Argentina’s move. Maduro is currently facing a recall attempt by the right-wing opposition-controlled Venezuelan National Assembly that is supported by Washington and the complex of George Soros-linked NGOs in Venezuela. If Maduro is ousted by the opposition, TeleSur will either be scrapped by the rightists or privatized and become indistinguishable from Spanish-language commercial networks like Univision.
One of Macri’s first moves was to fire all the long-time hosts on Argentine Public Radio and replace them with his right-wing and Zionist cronies, many of them from the pro-fascist newspaper La Nacion. The same purge has also been waged against the Argentine Public Broadcasting Corporation. Macri’s actions against the press resulted in not one complaint from Obama, who has been waging a similar battle against independent media at home and abroad.
In Washington, Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman and Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy are sponsoring a Senate bill titled the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act” that seeks to counter “foreign propaganda and disinformation” and establish foreign networks and news sources to counter foreign propaganda abroad. The bill would also create a Center for Information Analysis and Response within the State Department that would work with the Department of Defense, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (that board that oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and others), the U.S. intelligence community, and other relevant agencies.”
Murphy, who would not have sponsored the legislation without a wink and nod from the Obama White House, said the new agency would be “telling counter-narratives to the Russian story, to the Chinese propaganda stories all around the world.” The U.S. effort is particularly aimed at the state-owned RT satellite news network of Russia and CCTV satellite news network of China. The U.S. has already shown what it is prepared to do by supporting Argentina’s decision to help cripple TeleSur. Iran’s PressTV and some independent Arab networks are also in the gun sights of Portman’s and Murphy’s new propaganda agency. Al Jazeera America, seen by millions of Americans on cable, is due to go off the air in April after Qatar decided to end the American venture, which has been based in Washington, DC. Al Jazeera’s Arabic service from Doha will continue.
The new legislation would effectively recreate the of U.S. Information Agency (USIA), which was scrapped under the Reagan administration. However, unlike the USIA, the new U.S. propaganda agency would not be bound by the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibited the distribution or broadcast of USIA propaganda within the United States. U.S. audiences would be subjected to the same degree of U.S. government propaganda as foreign audiences under the Portman-Murphy bill.
The Obama administration drove the last stake into the heart of the Smith-Mundt Act in 2013 when the National Defense Authorization Act had a rider attached to it by Representatives Mac Thornberry (R-TX) and Adam Smith (D-WA) that permitted U.S. funded media operations like the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio and TV Marti to provide to the American public programming that Smith-Mundt previously permitted only for foreign audiences.”
The Portman-Murphy bill is backed by George Soros’s and the CIA’s network of contrivances in Washington, including the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Atlantic Council. Critics of the bill claim that it represents a clear violation of First Amendment rights of freedom of the press and freedom of speech. The involvement of the Pentagon and CIA in the new U.S. propaganda agency is to ensure that U.S. propaganda and counter-propaganda efforts contain a heavy dosage of psychological warfare operations (PSYOPS) and military deception (MILDEC) to ensure U.S. control over the information space.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
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Obama’s war with the news media goes international
Posted on April 1, 2016 by Wayne Madsen
Ever since he became president, Barack Obama has had it out with the press—from the White House’s own press corps, which has been reduced to acting as stenographers feeding on every press release fed to it by Obama’s press secretary, to recent calls for a federal agency to combat “disinformation” from foreign news sources.
After Obama’s recent trip to Argentina, which coincided with the 40th anniversary of that nation’s fascist military coup, Argentina’s neo-fascist president and Obama’s newest best friend Mauricio Macri, announced that Argentina was pulling out of the Latin American consortium of nations that fund TeleSur as a rival to Western-controlled news media.
No sooner had Air Force One left Buenos Aires, Argentina’s U.S.-backed right-wing government announced that it was selling its shares in TeleSur, a Caracas-based news network started in 2005 by Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chavez. In addition to Argentina and Venezuela, TeleSur was financed by Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.
Hernán Lombardi, Macri’s handpicked crony named as head of the government’s public media department, complained that TeleSur prevented Macri supporters from having input on TeleSur’s financial and editorial decisions. A number of Latin American journalists have criticized Argentina for its actions against TeleSur, especially since Argentina’s Televisión Digital Abierta (TDA) cable service, which provides cable TV service to 80 percent of Argentina’s television viewers, is dropping TeleSur from its offerings.
The Argentine decision resulted in Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to liken the Macri government to the Argentine military dictatorship. “It’s the same as when 30,000 young people disappeared in Argentina between 1976 and 1983; they are trying to make Telesur disappear. It’s the same media oligarchy,” Maduro said in response to Argentina’s move. Maduro is currently facing a recall attempt by the right-wing opposition-controlled Venezuelan National Assembly that is supported by Washington and the complex of George Soros-linked NGOs in Venezuela. If Maduro is ousted by the opposition, TeleSur will either be scrapped by the rightists or privatized and become indistinguishable from Spanish-language commercial networks like Univision.
One of Macri’s first moves was to fire all the long-time hosts on Argentine Public Radio and replace them with his right-wing and Zionist cronies, many of them from the pro-fascist newspaper La Nacion. The same purge has also been waged against the Argentine Public Broadcasting Corporation. Macri’s actions against the press resulted in not one complaint from Obama, who has been waging a similar battle against independent media at home and abroad.
In Washington, Ohio Republican Senator Rob Portman and Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy are sponsoring a Senate bill titled the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act” that seeks to counter “foreign propaganda and disinformation” and establish foreign networks and news sources to counter foreign propaganda abroad. The bill would also create a Center for Information Analysis and Response within the State Department that would work with the Department of Defense, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (that board that oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and others), the U.S. intelligence community, and other relevant agencies.”
Murphy, who would not have sponsored the legislation without a wink and nod from the Obama White House, said the new agency would be “telling counter-narratives to the Russian story, to the Chinese propaganda stories all around the world.” The U.S. effort is particularly aimed at the state-owned RT satellite news network of Russia and CCTV satellite news network of China. The U.S. has already shown what it is prepared to do by supporting Argentina’s decision to help cripple TeleSur. Iran’s PressTV and some independent Arab networks are also in the gun sights of Portman’s and Murphy’s new propaganda agency. Al Jazeera America, seen by millions of Americans on cable, is due to go off the air in April after Qatar decided to end the American venture, which has been based in Washington, DC. Al Jazeera’s Arabic service from Doha will continue.
The new legislation would effectively recreate the of U.S. Information Agency (USIA), which was scrapped under the Reagan administration. However, unlike the USIA, the new U.S. propaganda agency would not be bound by the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibited the distribution or broadcast of USIA propaganda within the United States. U.S. audiences would be subjected to the same degree of U.S. government propaganda as foreign audiences under the Portman-Murphy bill.
The Obama administration drove the last stake into the heart of the Smith-Mundt Act in 2013 when the National Defense Authorization Act had a rider attached to it by Representatives Mac Thornberry (R-TX) and Adam Smith (D-WA) that permitted U.S. funded media operations like the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio and TV Marti to provide to the American public programming that Smith-Mundt previously permitted only for foreign audiences.”
The Portman-Murphy bill is backed by George Soros’s and the CIA’s network of contrivances in Washington, including the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Atlantic Council. Critics of the bill claim that it represents a clear violation of First Amendment rights of freedom of the press and freedom of speech. The involvement of the Pentagon and CIA in the new U.S. propaganda agency is to ensure that U.S. propaganda and counter-propaganda efforts contain a heavy dosage of psychological warfare operations (PSYOPS) and military deception (MILDEC) to ensure U.S. control over the information space.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2016 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).