I know I have a reflexive distrust of certain things. (Like just about everything the last administration said, ever.) When I first saw the stories in the Star Tribune, I thought – hmm, ok, there’s a local connection, but why is it that this activist journalist is getting front page coverage on this increasingly right-wing corporate newspaper’s website? In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Hermann lay out the case that our enemies’ sins are awful, but our friends sins are forgivable in the mainstream corporate press. Reporters Without Borders follows that line, with great criticism for Cuba and Venezuela but much less for US ally states. Nothing too new there.

Then there’s the Pentagon propaganda campaigns, that we caught glimpses of during the Bush administration. We would hear about some crazy thing – like Total Information Awareness – and then it would get bad press, the Pentagon would announce that they’ve stopped doing that, not that they were doing that before, but they had a right to if they had been doing it, and then Rumsfeld would say in a speech that they’re doing the same thing under a different name anyway.

And one of those revelations was that the Pentagon, which is theoretically supposed to refrain from advocating anything to the public (no propagandizing the American people), but which has been doing just that for, well, forever (and certainly domestically regarding defense spending) (see Eisenhower, military-industrial complex) – anyway, the Pentagon had a program relating to the Iraq situation that would make up stories, bald faced lies, but they would place them in the foreign media, and that was ok. And then Fox would pick it up and the lie would jump into the US media.

I don’t know Saberi; I’ve only tangetially followed the story. The above are the things that smell funny to me.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reporters_Without_Borders