September 12, 2005

Have you ever wondered why much of the daily media coverage about the United Nations reads more like a feel-good press release than a hard-hitting news story?

The answer is easy - just pay a visit to the website of the United Nations Correspondents Association, the UNCA. There you'll see a gaggle of reporters grinning ear-to-ear, hob-nobbing with none other than UN secretary general Kofi Annan.

Life is good when you're on a first-name basis with the S.G. himself. Go through the UNCA's Calendar of Events for this past year, and you can't help but notice the Leftist bias. In February socialist Noam Chomsky came to town to enlighten the reporters about his latest book, "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance."

In June, the correspondents learned how extreme ocean noise kills dolphins and whales. Another issue for PETA to jump on.

In the former Soviet Union, the official party line was considered to be synonymous with truth. The Russian word for truth, "Pravda," was also the name of the official publication of the Soviet Communist Party. That meant journalists reported only the news that put the state in a favorable light, or else they were obviously telling a lie.

The UNCA guys and gals sanitize the news in the same way. But this time, no one is holding a gun to their heads or threatening to ship the correspondents to Siberia. So whatever happened to journalistic integrity?

Thirty years ago UNESCO unveiled its New World Information Order, a scheme that entailed a press code and government-controlled licensing system for reporters. Soon journalists around the world were up in arms. Eventually UNESCO dropped the Orwellian idea.

But the spirit of the New World Information Order lives on. It's alive and well at the UN Correspondents Association. Case in point: the Oil-for-Food scandal.

News of the imbroglio began to leak out in April 2004 with a General Accounting Office report and an exposé by Claudia Rosett in the Wall Street Journal. Despite credible allegations that Saddam Hussein had diverted billions of dollars under the noses of the UN auditors, the UNCA members chose to look the other way.

Why? Because Mr. Annan tried to thwart the media investigation by playing the race card. "It's a bit like lynching, actually," the secretary-general claimed in a June 2004 interview.

Besides, the UNCA annual Awards Dinner and Dance was coming up on December 3, and Mr. Annan had been invited to be the Guest of Honor. Why risk offending your Guest of Honor by asking him delicate questions about Oil-for-Food?

See-No-Evil journalism continues to this day.

Beginning Wednesday the UN will be hosting its Summit on the Millennium Development Goals - MDGs for short. As this article goes to press, radical feminists are poised to seize control of the Summit and force the delegates to endorse abortion on demand as a recognized right under international law.

These abortion rights would respect no age limits. A recent report from the UN Population Fund advocates abortion rights be granted to girls as young as 10 years old, arguing for the need for "preventive action in relation to young people's sexual and reproductive health and achieving the MDG targets."

Earlier this summer the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) reported how pro-life groups were arbitrarily excluded from hearings held in June in preparation for the MDG Summit.

And this past Friday C-FAM revealed that a pro-abstinence group in Nigeria had been turned down for membership in a UN program. The reason? The African group had posted a warning on its website that UN-sponsored safe-sex programs provide a "sense of false security" and "subtly engenders sexual initiation/experimentation by young people who otherwise were abstinent, and emboldens the already sexually active into multiple sexual partnering."

If these shenanigans had happened in your local city hall, they would have attracted front-page media coverage and citizen outrage. But to the UNCA, this is business as usual at the United Nations -- so don't expect to find anything about this in your local newspaper.

In democratic societies, the free press is a linchpin institution in educating the public, investigating bureaucratic wrong-doing, and holding the government accountable. But at the United Nations Correspondents Association, there is a notable absence of moral clarity to question the prevailing leftist mindset.

The UNCA correspondents have become de-fanged and emasculated. The UN watchdogs have become tail-wagging lapdogs.

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