America is a dangerous country. It is an unrepentant regime changer. If this isn't enough, the United States has equally unrepentant regime changers as allies.
If the hard power of guns doesn't result in a regime change, then their soft power of influence must do the work. Like hard power, soft power is capital intensive.
And greenbacks aren't an issue. The US is generous when it comes to budgeting for influence. A good slice of the influence budget is used to "purchase" media propaganda. The US government doesn't go around distributing cheques to this or that media company. It does it through so-called "independent" organisations.
Two such are the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and Freedom House. The NED, like Freedom House, thinks it can be independent while doing the bidding of the US government.
One NED official had this to say to the Council of Foreign Relations's publication in 2006: "We are not the US government, really; we just have US money." A distinction without a difference, we say. This unfree Freedom House somehow has no qualms rating freedom around the globe in its annual survey.
It might as well ask the US State Department, which funds Freedom House, to conduct the survey. It has field offices around the world, some of which advocate press freedom. How can the press be free when it is bound by the chains of US agenda pushers?
How can it be a democracy when it is forced onto the people from the outside? Isn't democracy a government voted in by its people? Perhaps the time has come for all media organisations to make a declaration of their funders. Just so the readers know that they are being sold good journalism or propaganda.
Regime change through media propaganda isn't a new US foreign policy tool. It is as old as the nation. A decade ago, the US influence peddlers gave us the Arab Spring. It didn't just happen. It was made to happen.
Ron Nixon of The New York Times makes this clear in his April 14, 2011 expose: "Even as the United States poured billions of dollars into foreign military programmes and anti-terrorism campaigns, a small core of American government-financed organisations were promoting democracy in 'authoritarian' Arab states."
According to Nixon, a number of the groups and individuals involved in the Middle East revolt received training and funding from the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House. Where the Pentagon fails, propaganda is made to work.
Malaysia isn't exempt. And so isn't China. Now with the US-China rivalry gaining momentum, media propaganda is back on overdrive. Even academics-turned-geopoliticians, Washington-like, are beginning to hawk scenarios of the US vs China world. This is a sad state of affairs. Sadder still is the one of journalists who see the world with the spectacles paid for by Washington. Robbed of independence, such journalists and their media organisations fail their readers.
The readers are not wrong. We journalists, no matter where we hail from, do not fail to express our obligation to truth. Absent independence, so will be truth. Self-interest is no public interest. The media as the fourth estate exerts political and social influence. To do so without independence is to misplace the people's trust in journalism.
Unfree journalism is no journalism. It is mere propaganda. The pen must not lose its might this way.