ABSTRACT

Americans seem to be inoculated with notions of their own moral goodness, believing that they promote noble ideas to a morally debased world that sees them as the Free and the Brave. While the US media highlight expressions of American generosity—from disaster relief to so-called debt “forgiveness”—the vast majority of benefaction occurs within the context of an inequitable economic system and with the overarching goal of maintaining that system. Historians are actually helping perpetuate the illusion that Latin America still has meaningful political and economic choices. In the mid-1980s the media consolidated their foreign operations, and today relatively few US correspondents actually live in Latin America. The business-owned media are in large part responsible for Americans’ views of themselves and the world. A less biased system of distributing significant information would profoundly alter those views.