'Money can’t buy all airwaves': RT host launches campaign against US media empire
:
RT,
3
March, 2015
RT’s
Anissa Naouai has launched a crowdfunding campaign urging viewers to
send a symbolic message to the US State Department and Washington’s
media empire, donating money to fight autism.
The GoFundMe
project was
launched by the host of RT’s 'In the Now' program, Anissa Naouai,
after the US Secretary of State asked for more money from the
government for propaganda and “democracy
promotion”
programs around the world. Instead, Anissa urges support for Our
Sunny World, a partner foundation with Autism Europe.
Kerry
asked for $639 million “to
help our friends in Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova as they seek to
strengthen their democracies, withstand pressure from Russia”
and over $2 billion more for “democracy,
human rights, and governance programs.” Speaking
at a House Committee meeting, Kerry explained the plea by the fact
that US media is losing the battle for international audiences to RT.
“Russia
Today [now RT] can be heard in English, do we have an equivalent that
can be heard in Russian?” he
said. “It’s
a pretty expensive proposition. They are spending huge amounts of
money, speaking languages other people understand and putting out
information other people understand to other countries around them.
And we are not.”
Kerry
failed to mention that Voice of America has been broadcasting in
Russian since 1947. In addition, if you compare RT’s budget ($220
million in 2015) to the one US government media receives, you find
RT’s pales in comparison.
“Mainstream
media who are backed by American corporations have a hold on almost
all outlets… I'm talking hundreds of billions of dollars,” says
Anissa. “Plus
700 million dollars for government media projects under the US
Broadcasting Board of Governors.”
The
2015 budget was set at $721 million for programs under the US
Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which is a bipartisan agency
that supervises government-sponsored media and targets international
audiences.
“So
RT's open and modest budget of $220 million isn't the real problem
for the American government,”
Anissa says. “This
is the problem: YOU. Our audience. They see through the propaganda.”
This
is not the first time Kerry and other US politicians have lashed out
at RT. During a press conference with the State Department in April
2014, Kerry rounded on RT for its coverage of the Ukraine crisis
saying it’s a “propaganda
bullhorn.”
Back
in 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared the US was
losing a media war with up-and-coming, alternative outlets like Al
Jazeera and RT. “We
are in an information war and we are losing that war,” said
Clinton
Furthermore,
in January the BBG chief Andrew Lack put RT in the same breath as
ISIS and Boko Haram as one of the challenges facing his agency. It
wasn’t the first time the BBG referred to RT as a ‘challenge’.
In August 2014, Jeffrey Shell, BBG chairman at the time, called for
a “plan” detailing
how to“compete
with Russia Today.”
READ
MORE: More
money, more problems?
Anissa
reminded that RT presents another point of view that counters the US
media, adding that viewers should be aware of this.
“People
both in America and abroad need and want to hear about the trillions
spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, about made-up dictators, traitors, and
axes of evil. About the civilians killed with US drones and soldiers
forgotten. Wars started again and again to uphold a military
industrial complex - all to keep a grip on global power.”
"Money
can't buy all the airwaves and RT is not the enemy,"
Anissa states.
This
crowdfunding campaign is a message to corporate US media and the
State Department. However, the cause of the campaign is autism, which
now affects one
in 68 children and one in 42 boys. Autism’s prevalence is growing
and there is no medical detection or cure for the complaint. The US
National Institutes of Health’s total budget in 2012 was estimated
at $30.86 billion, while only a small part, $169 million, went
directly to autism research.
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