The revelations that have come from the shuttering and review of the Obama era USAID program are as eye-opening as they are sad, but there are a few in there that are downright infuriating.
Of course, there is the idea that these tax dollars were used just about everywhere except in the U.S., and to promote alphabet lifestyles through a variety of ridiculous means, such as musicals, comic books, drag shows and lots of seminars.
Then, there was silly ideas that your tax payment was going to build electric charging stations for EVs in Vietnam, or to help Indonesian coffee companies become climate- and gender-friendly, or to pay off the bin Laden family, or provide condoms to the Taliban.
The millions of misspent funds are bad enough, but what got my dander up, and in a way that hasn’t happened in a long while, was the fact that through this supposed organization’s charter of aid to international development, U.S. and other media outlets have been receiving this largesse, most notably The New York Times, Politico and the Associated Press.
There have been other international news organizations that have received funds — the BBC, Thomson Reuters, etc. As predictable as sunrise, the two sides have made their camps by calling this either a conspiracy theory or a travesty, but to my mind, this is tantamount to being criminal.
Much of the money has been called subscriptions costs, but as in the case of Politico, it raked in more than $8 million for something along the lines of 37 subscriptions. (Imagine what small-town newspapers could do with that kind of money.)
The one thing that allows the Fourth Estate to keep tabs on governments is objectivity, but when media outlets accept funds from those governments, they have to toe the line or lose the funding.
There has been hue and cry about the bias of mainstream media outlets — one side saying they have the truth while the other says, well, we have the truth — but now it seems that the truth was paid for by your tax dollars, hard at work to keep you in the un-know.
At that point, without disclosing the connection, a media outlet ceases to deliver news and instead delivers propaganda and party lines. An example of this is this state’s own Texas Tribune, which tags every story with a paragraph describing the connections it has with the sources.
In my mind, though, any such connection is suspect, but at least the reader understands there may be a perceived conflict.
The funneling of money into news organizations by government officials, whether benign or not, will always leave the stain of bias (since you don’t bite the hand that feeds you), and makes the jobs that journalists, particularly local journalists, harder, because that brush of bias paints more than just the national news groups.
Better to leave the tax dollars for a better purpose, such as veterans, or victims of natural disasters, or to help lower the cost of food.
Tony Farkas is editor of the Trinity County News-Standard and the San Jacinto News-Times. He writes opinion articles and his views don’t necessarily reflect those of this newspaper.He can be reached at tony@polkcountypublishing.com.
