February 20, 2005

Canadian Press: The New Pravda

The Canadian corporate media positively loves the story about grassroots democracy blooming in former Soviet republics. They love it so much, in fact, that they're willing to leave out central, established facts about the "potential wave of democratic activism".

The elephant (or Bear?) in the living room is that the US and other western countries (like Canada) have been funding these "grassroots" "democratic" movements to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. If these are grassroots movements, they're genetically modified and doused with high power fertilizer, with a bit of pesticide to take care of any, uh, undemocratic weeds.

No, seriously. The prime beneficiary of the "rose revolution" in Georgia has use police to violently crack down on demonstrators and put constraints on the press (not that it can have been particularly unconstrained before). He has also put in place an unpopular program of privatization, which newly elected "grassroots" Ukrainian president Yuschenko has also backed from the beginning.

This is as close as the Canadian press comes to mention this huge factor in the movements it is reporting on:

"Akayev is lost," says Alexei Malashenko, another expert with the Carnegie Centre in Moscow. "Kyrgyzstan's population is disillusioned with the elite. The opposition is strong, well-organized and has international as well as domestic backing."

Not exactly full disclosure.

No one can deny that there is an overwhelming need for grassroots democratic movements in the former Soviet republics, nor can anyone deny that these movements have a lot of popular support.

But if we had anything approaching a sane, free press, there would be some debate about the effect that tens of millions of dollars in funding will have on democracy. Imagine if the NDP was given $20 million by the Swedish Government. Wouldn't there be just a bit of speculation about their legitimacy as a democratic party representing Canadians?

The equivalent is happening in the Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, and it elicits no concern at all from journalists in Canada. What's more, these "democratic" revolutions have a track record in Georgia and Serbia, and it's being keenly ignored.

For more on this, read Manufacturing Democracy: The politics of media coverage: Haiti, Ukraine, Georgia, from the December issue of the Dominion.

It's worth nothing, finally, that coverage of similar popular movements in countries that don't get Canadian and US funding is systematically repressed in the Canadian Press (even when it is reported stateside). Journalists and editors are liberal in their manipulation of facts to tell the story they want to tell.

Is that what we have in mind when we say it's a free country?