Within the U.S. Federal Government there is an agency called the Kazakhstan USAID Almaty which has been giving [grants](http://www.federalgrants.com/Agency/Kazakhstan-USAID-Almaty.html) for various programs since at least 2003.  On of the latest is called the [Central Asia Media Program (CAMP)](http://www.federalgrants.com/Central-Asia-Media-Program-CAMP-70823.html).  The grant award will be worth $15,000,000 over a five year period between October, 2018 and September, 2023 and is targeted at Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.  From the website the goal is:

>The Central Asia Media Program (CAMP) aims to develop a more balanced information environment in Central Asia to increase openness among youth and adults for differing ideas, opinions, and perspectives and, in turn, increase their engagement in civic participation.

My first thought when reading this is that we need to make improvements in these areas here in the U.S., I didn't find a grant for that.

The documentation for the grant includes Annex 1 which is a memorandum to file (MTF).  One of the purposes of the MTF includes 

>Document that the new USAID’s Central Asia Media Project (CAMP) is covered by the Programmatic Democracy and Governance IEE Amendments #6 and #7 (P-IEEs) that was not explicitly mentioned in these amendments.

So, with a few minutes on a computer and a signature the reach of the federal government is expanded.  This MTF declared this new grant to be part of a previous program even though it wasn't detailed in that previous document.

Going through the objectives of CAMP the first is to  

> Improve media capacity to provide balanced, informed and unbiased reporting on key policy and public interest issues. 

Looking at our national new outlets I don't believe there is one that provides "balanced, informed and unbiased reporting".  I'm not alone in that belief either.  The [Pew Research Center](http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/trust-and-accuracy/) indicates that only 22% of Americans trust local new outlets and only 18% trust national news outlets.  Only one out of every five people trust what is reported on the news.  They go on to say that 74% of Americans believe news outlets are biased to one political party or the other. 


The second objective is to 

>Increase media and information literacy among youth and adults to become critical consumers and producers of information.

Media in the U.S. tends to work with the government to shape the news that we see.  Two examples of this include the Clinton campaign being given debate questions ahead of a CNN presidential debate and James Comey leaking information to the press to prompt a special counsel investigating President Trump.  

As citizens, we need to be more critical of the news we see and be more suspicious of that we are being led to believe things that may or may not be true.  The Clinton campaign had time to shape answers to questions in the debate to fit what they thought they needed politically, not what the campaign believed in necessarily but what people wanted to hear.  Comey's leak(s) to the media led to a special counsel that has dug around everything for a year and found no evidence.  Meanwhile, Comey has admitted to leaking the information, a felony, and we never hear of an investigation into his action and haven't seen him in handcuffs.

One of the potential activities recommended under this objective is 

> Improve people’s ability to identify misinformation and disinformation efforts and increase understanding of media messaging analysis / smart reading 

Seems like the grant (from the U.S. government) wants to enlighten the people of Central Asia to be able to recognize when the media is misleading them.  At the same time, seems like the government wants to dumb us down so that we believe anything we are told.

In 1841, Thomas Carlyle called the press the fourth estate in front of the English Parliament and indicated that they were more important than the government because of their "watchdog" role in keeping the government honest.  Maybe instead of preaching what we don't practice to other parts of the world we should spend a few million dollars to get political activism, on both sides, out of the news media.  Currently our watchdog is more like a lapdog.