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Related: About this forumThis American Life Whitewashes US Crimes in Central America, Wins Peabody Award
This American Life Whitewashes US Crimes in Central America, Wins Peabody Award
Saturday, 03 August 2013 02:17
By Keane Bhatt, North American Congress on Latin America | News Analysis
Celebrating 2012s best examples of broadcast journalism, the George Foster Peabody Awards attracted the likes of D.L. Hughley, Amy Poehler and Bryant Gumbel to the Waldorf-Astorias four-story grand ballroom in New York this past May. In a gaudy ceremony hosted by CBS star-anchor Scott Pelley, National Public Radios This American Life received the industrys oldest and perhaps most prestigious accolade. The 16-member Peabody Board, consisting of television critics, industry practitioners and experts in culture and the arts, had selected a particular This American Life episodeWhat Happened at Dos Erresas one of the winners of its 72nd annual awards on the basis of only one criterion: excellence.
This American Lifes host Ira Glass had once conceived of the weekly show, which reaches 1.8 million listeners each episode, as an experiment to do the most idealistic, wide-eyed things that can do
to provide a perspective on this country that you couldnt get elsewhere. As is typical for the program, Glass weaved personal narratives and anecdotes together with broader context in What Happened at Dos Erres, which focused on a 1982 massacre of 250 Guatemalan civilians at the hands of their governments elite military commandosthe Kaibiles.
But in his hour-long treatment of a savage period of Guatemalan history, Glass and his producers edited out essential lines of inquiry and concealed a key aspect of the bloodshed and its import for U.S. listeners: Washingtons continuous support of Guatemalan security forcesincluding the Kaibiles at Dos Erresas they killed tens of thousands of largely indigenous civilians in 1982 alone. Moreover, by distorting the historical record, Glass performed an impressive feat of propagandahe sensitively related Guatemalan victims harrowing personal stories while implying that the only fault of the United States was that it had simply not done enough to help them.
Ironically, What Happened at Dos Erres accomplished Glasss longstanding goal of providing a perspective on the United States that you couldnt get elsewhere. One would be hard-pressed to encounter another contemporary mainstream account of that period so thoroughly sanitized of Washingtons involvement in crimes against humanity.
More:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/17921-this-american-life-whitewashes-us-crimes-in-central-america-wins-peabody-award
Good reads:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101670185