Elite media don’t see Human Rights Watch’s closeness to power as a problem

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http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/a-shared-culture-of-conflict-of-interest/

A Shared Culture of Conflict of Interest
Elite media don’t see Human Rights Watch’s closeness to power as a problem

By Keane Bhatt

In late 2010, a US District Court judge threw out a case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights against President Barack Obama. The groups had argued that the administration was violating the Constitution and international law in attempting to assassinate Muslim cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki, a US citizen residing in Yemen, without providing him with charges, evidence or due process.

“If the court’s ruling is correct, the government has unreviewable authority to carry out the targeted killing of any American, anywhere, whom the president deems to be a threat to the nation,” explained ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer (CNN, 12/7/10).

A little over a month later, Obama hosted a state dinner for President Hu Jintao of China—an event “highly choreographed,” supposedly, to raise human rights concerns, according to Voice of America (1/24/11). The dinner was to take place on the heels of a joint news conference in which Obama “gently but pointedly prodded China to make progress on human rights,” wrote the New York Times (12/19/11) unquestioningly.

Emerging as a victor in an “intense winnowing-down process by a White House confronted by some of the toughest jockeying for invitations in recent memory” (New York Times, 1/19/11), Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth arrived at the function, which also hosted the leaders of Microsoft, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, JP-Morgan Chase and Disney. (The administration also aimed to “press China to open its markets to goods made by American companies,” reported the Times.)
Roth saw a nobler rationale for his own presence: “I knew that I was being used as a symbol—to signal a tougher approach on human rights,” he wrote in the L.A. Times (1/23/11), and he took on his US-appointed role with gusto.

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Part of the answer for Roth’s dutiful performance rests with Human Rights Watch’s institutional history, whose Cold War framework fit well with Obama’s task for the group. HRW’s first incarnation in 1978, as Helsinki Watch, was “designed to support the citizens groups formed throughout the Soviet bloc” and engage in “publicly ‘naming and shaming’ abusive governments” throughout “the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe” (“Our History,” HRW.org).

But a second reason lies in HRW’s present-day conflicts of interest, which contribute to a culture of normalizing and accommodating the extreme power that the United States arrogates to itself. Only under such a worldview could President Obama have the moral standing to advocate for human rights improvements in China—a country whose head of state could never maintain a secret international extrajudicial kill list, for example.
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