Back to Cold War journalism in Pacific

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The US State Department is going to pay large sums of money so that Pacific nations can finally have access to ‘accurate journalism’ to counter the other stuff being dished out by China, for free. What’s surprising about Foggy Bottom’s initiative is that it has all been done before, in the Cold War.

The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week held hearings on the US strategy in the region, which heard from Daniel Kritenbrink, the State Department’s assistant secretary, bureau of East Asian and Pacific affairs, who said they want reliable news, internet connectivity in the Pacific. It would deliver accurate journalism.

‘In every place where we have a presence and we are on the ground, we are active in the local media space and through our own public diplomacy to make sure that there is alternative messaging to the PRC (China) there,’ he said, according to Defenseone.com. ‘So again, our countries, our partners in the region, have choice and have accurate information.’

The State Department was funding increased ‘access to credible newswires and the like, the [Associated Press] and others’ to reduce island countries’ dependence on China-based news organisations like Xinhua, he said.

Fiji Sun and Xinhua get together. Photo Fiji Sun

 The US Agency for International Development was sponsoring journalism programmes, Michael Schiffer, assistant administrator of the bureau for Asia told the hearing.

‘We've also been extraordinarily active working with our Department of State colleagues, supporting free and independent press in the region, including through a number of journalism fellowships, particularly targeting journalists who are interested in working on natural resource management, as that addresses a number of the corruption and governance concerns that we have,’ Schiffer said. ‘We fully recognize that our partners in the Pacific are sovereign and that they—can make their, and should make their own choices. And that our role is to support them in that process. In the Pacific, we see that the PRC is violating many of the rules and norms that have been established by the international community for its own benefit, and that negatively impacts the work that we do.’

Coincidentally Netflix is streaming a nine-part documentary,Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. It features extensively the role of the Central Intelligence Agency and State Department between 1947 to 1991 and its efforts to bring down perceived rivals through the creation of American dominant news streams, much of it actual ‘fake news’ before such a concept existed. The donation of accurate journalism into the Third World by the US resulted, deliberately, in the collapse of governments. Netflix examines the way imported media, planted in local newspapers and radio stations, was able to bring down countries like Iran and Guatemala. There are other well known examples. This has long been known; what is surprising is that Schiffer and Kritenbrink did not at least give a cursory nod toward their own history.

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