Whose News?

My clock radio is set to a public radio station that plays National Public Radio news briefs. On the morning after Christmas I woke up to the news that the Chinese had sentenced a dissident to a stiff prison term. The following morning, the top story was that Myanmar was detaining two Reuters news service reporters. These are events worth knowing about, but I found myself wondering whether they really were the top stories of their respective days. It's most likely a matter of perspective, and NPR's perspective is global. Its choice of top stories sustains a narrative of civil liberty and press freedom under attack around the world, implicitly including in President Trump's America. Not merely the right to dissent but the right to tell truths inconvenient to power is in danger everywhere, according to this narrative, which hints strongly that the suppression of dissent and free inquiry anywhere is a threat to the same things everywhere.  If I seem to object to this, it's not because I think repression in other countries is none of our business as individuals. I simply wonder about the priorities of a bastion of the reputedly liberal media when NPR can find nothing domestic worthy of headlining their morning news brief. One of the arguments against America's human rights-oriented foreign policy from the left was that our country had injustices of its own to deal with before it could claim the right to judge other countries. Under Trump, surely, that should be more true than ever, but NPR is more liberal than left and apparently more concerned with a perceived global threat to civil liberty than with actual conditions at home. For them, perhaps, dissent isn't just the health of the state but the health of the world. I could agree that every nation would be better off if rulers were more accountable to responsible criticism, but to see the world primarily as the battleground of a vast struggle for liberty is sometimes to come slightly too close to a neocon stance for comfort.