Sunday, March 25, 2012

Fair and Balanced from 1% Radio

Last Monday (3/19/12) on Morning Edition, Steve Inskeep and Sylvia Poggioli presented a casebook study in NPR's contempt for popular democracy and its use of false equivalency to smear leftists.  I heard this report last Monday, but was headed off for a vacation and so am posting on it late.

Poggioli was reporting on the economic crisis in Greece and how it has upended the political system there.   Inskeep introduces the report with this little frame:
"the old political system is collapsing and extremist parties are rising in popularity."
Early in the report Poggioli reports on a demonstration by the police officers' union against the austerity measures approved by the Greek Parliament.  She comments,
"They ominously waved their handcuffs at Parliament, shouting take your bailout plan and get out of here."
She does tell us that the head of the union "accused Greece's international lenders of plundering his country and even called for their arrest." Yes, so extreme and unhinged; why would anyone think that the international financiers are plundering Greece?

Poggioli presents poll results showing that "the four small leftist parties are ahead by 43 percent and could win a majority and in theory form a governing coalition."  Poggioli then states the following completely antidemocratic idea as if it were basic commonsense: "That terrifies Greece's creditors, some of whom have questioned the wisdom of holding elections."

Apparently, "the four small leftist parties" are the left side of the "extremist parties" that Inskeep warned of in the opening.  Equating these leftists with the extreme right, Poggioli states,
"And it's not just the left that's gaining popularity. So are two new far-right movements. One is the ultranationalist and neo-fascist Golden Dawn, which preaches the superiority of the white race.....Its bookshop is filled with tracts on Nazism and sells t-shirts of Hitler."
Brilliant really, how a neo-fascist, supremacist party which sells Hitler t-shirts is put on the same footing as leftist parties that oppose the austerity measures.  In case your not convinced that Poggioli and NPR want listeners to equate leftist parties (and individuals) who oppose 1% predatory, job-killing rule with Nazi-loving genocidal rightists, here's Poggioli to hammer home the point:
 "At the other end of the political spectrum, one of the parties doing well in the polls is far-left Syriza that wants to re-negotiate the terms of the bailout."
Indeed, the oh-so-scary leftist SYRIZA party which wants to "re-negotiate the terms" (such extremism!) of the rapacious and suicidal "bailout" package being forced on Greece by the international banking community (with Germany in the lead) is on the other end of the spectrum from a genocidal, Hitler adoring party!

6 comments:

Nate Bowman said...

Thank you myT

Again, I learn more from one of your posts than I do from a slew of NPR pieces on a topic.

gDog said...

It seems that the Nazis are, in fact, in positions of power in the new "technocrat" government of Greece.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/mark-ames-austerity-fascism-in-greece-%E2%80%93-the-real-1-doctrine.html

Mytwords said...

That is an awesome find gDog!

Patrick Lynch said...

And all delivered in that sneering contemptuous tone that Paggioli patented a long time ago. I couldn't listen to all of it, had to shut the radio off. Without listening to it critically, between Morning Edition and Marketplace one would get the idea that the Greeks are a bunch of ungrateful layabouts and how dare they challenge their enslavement by the financial system.

larry, dfh said...

I can't believe I'm the first to post
this
total Sampsonizing of the dina Temple-of-Doom. She got smug with him some time back; he's got a long memory and a vicious, but accurate, pen.

gDog said...

Dina's handlers are no doubt worried that some 70% of U.S. citizens think the Afghan war is a waste and want out. Time to stoke some fear into the collective amygdala. She'd promise us sleep deprivation, mental torment and muscles so sore that we want to puke, but she doesn't want to sugar coat things.