Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Wrong Juan Forero, Guajira Wrong Juan Forero

I could use one of those 20,000 Cuban doctors that were mentioned in Juan Forero's piece on Morning Edition yesterday - because NPR is killing me! The unsavory (spooky?) Forero spends his three minutes of reporting on the tiny minority of Cuban medical workers who have defected from their assignments in Venezuela in "recent years."

Guess what? I'm actually more interested in hearing from the 20,000 doctors who are not trying to get to the US. What are they doing? How is it affecting the health of the Venezuelans? Do they like their work? What do they think of Castro, Chavez, the US?

It's really amazing to live in this country where medical care is such an insurance racket and so devoid of wholistic attitudes--and then to hear Forero zero in on such an agenda-driven non-story as the one he produced. You've got to wonder what organization he's really working for...

*Apologies to fans of "Guantanamera," I just couldn't resist.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I, too, was sickened by Juan Forero's piece. I was so incensed, I called up the ombudsman line--but you know they've been flying without one for a while, so I doubt they really care about what we think.

By the way, I am really grateful you are keeping on top of NPR's business. I had long suspected NPR--I think they are a roundabout way the US government circumvents the law barring it from beaming propaganda to its own peopl. It's telling that many of the principals at NPR (Stern and Klose, for example) directed Radio Free Europe and Radio Martí before coming to work at NPR.

I listen to possibly the oldest public broadcasting station in the nation--Wisconsin Public Radio. Their saving grace is that their programs are mostly locally produced and all views are aired. I wish they´d drop most of their NPR content, like TOTN and On Point (which never is).

What´s creepy about NPR is that, after you´ve been listening to it for a while, the people in it all sound like automatons, automatons who all (male or female) sound like one another. They all sound sickly chirpy and upbeat: in a word, fake.

Flavio

Porter Melmoth said...

Well-observed, Flavio. The fakery is rife at NPR. We should all beware of the creeping technique of blandness as far as infiltration into the 'intelligent' listener's mind is concerned. The powers behind NPR know that public broadcasting audiences tend to disdain ostentatiousness, as well as Limbaugh, Imus, and Fox etc. So how to get into their minds? First off, copy BBC's sobriety, and infiltrate via white-bread on-air personalities, who can indeed put a coherent sentence together, but not in too sophisticated a way. Find that middle ground, so that listeners can say 'I heard it on NPR' so that the content is what is talked about, rather than the on-air personality who delivered said content. That's why I brand NPR as insidious: their versions of ideas and reality are slanted, as this blog has shown many times. Beware, intelligent listeners everywhere!

Anonymous said...

The health of children's teeth in Cuba is far superior to that in the US, an absolute fact. And by the time you finish with a dentist here, you're about as broke as if you lived in Cuba. 20,000 Doctors? When my Brother in Law got his pediatric dental certification in MD they were accepting 2 per year. He told me it's now up to 4 per year. MD dental school is the oldest in the US, what a legacy of theft.