In May, Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) announced that the Bangladesh-focused media outlet Netra News was the recipient of the 2025 Shorenstein Journalism Award.
Left unmentioned was that Netra News received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA-front organization founded in the 1980s to advance U.S. global geopolitical interests under the guise of “democracy promotion.”[1]
Additionally left out was that Netra News was at the forefront of a media propaganda campaign supporting a violent regime-change operation that ousted a Bangladeshi leader, Sheikh Hasina, who had established strong relations with China and resisted U.S. efforts to establish a military base on a strategic island off the coast of Bangladesh, and to allow use of its ports by the U.S. military.
In building momentum for Bangladesh’s “color revolution,” Netra News depicted Hasina—the daughter of Bangladesh’s founding father Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman—in the worst possible light, and repeatedly called for her resignation.
Approving of the right-wing Bangladeshi National Party (BNP), which is known for its alignment with Islamic extremists, Netra News was founded by Tasneem Khalil, a one-time stringer for CNN who also worked for George Soros’s Human Rights Watch.
Khalil’s animus toward Sheikh Hasina results from the fact that he was detained and allegedly tortured by the Bangladeshi intelligence services in 2007 after being accused of being a spy.
Review of its website makes clear that Netra News was established by Khalil with NED backing as a partisan outlet.
While publishing exposés about corruption under Sheikh Hasina’s government, it failed to spotlight the corruption of BNP figures such as Tarique Rahman, the son of BNP leader Khaleda Zia, whom a 2009 State Department cable said had a “reputation as a corrupt thug” and who has been investigated by the FBI.[2]
Netra News’s pro-U.S. bent was apparent in its offering a tribute to U.S. Ambassador Peter Haas, a staunch critic of Hasina’s party, the Awami League, who pressed for sanctions against Bangladeshi officials. Netra News did not report that after his retirement from the State Department, Haas was appointed as a strategic adviser to Excelerate Energy, a Texas based Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) company, which signed a major deal to supply Bangladesh with LNG and to develop a floating LNG terminal, and was poised to benefit from the friendly investment climate promised by Sheikh Hasina’s successor, Muhammad Yunus.
Indian intelligence agencies identified Haas as a key coordinator of the regime change operation in Bangladesh working in close coordination with Donald Lu, the Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, who masterminded a coup in Pakistan that ousted Imran Khan. In 2023, Haas made secret visits to Sri Lanka and Mumbai to coordinate with U.S. security officials; groomed student leaders through international networks, and privately met with Yunus who was said to be influenced by U.S. advisers.
Reporting on none of these intrigues, Netra News instead condemned “Western inaction” in the face of a supposedly popular student-led uprising that ousted Sheikh Hasina in August 2024.
This latter claim was mendacious since the U.S. and other Western countries supported and helped to incite the uprising[3], which Bangladesh’s former ambassador to Morrocco, Mohammad Harun Al Rashid, described as “one of [Bangladesh’s] darkest hours—a meticulously coordinated terrorist onslaught that shattered [the country’s] foundations.”[4]
Netra News’s function as a propaganda outlet was apparent in its failure to report anything critical about Yunus, a darling of the Clinton Foundation and global ruling elite because of his support for micro-finance credit loan schemes through his Grameen Bank.
The loan schemes offered a potential solution to poverty without the need for traditional leftist solutions involving the raising of taxes on the wealthy, land reform, higher wages, better social programs and other measures that could cut corporate profits.
In his bid for power in Bangladesh, Yunus made a devil’s bargain with Islamic fundamentalists who have carried out a reign of terror since Hasina was removed from office.
A fact-finding report by the UN Human Rights Office provided evidence of violent mob attacks, including assaults on Hindu places of worship. Lynchings were carried out along with savage acts of revenge against Hasina’s Awami League supporters and minority groups that backed Sheikh Hasina.[5]
Netra News never reported on these atrocities and published an editorial that criticized The New York Times—which itself grossly underplayed the atrocities—for being too harsh in its criticism of Yunus.
The Netra News editorial suggested that Yunus had tried to rein in the Islamic zealots, but had only limited ability to do so. This is simply untrue as, according to Al Rashid, Yunus has not just shielded the terrorists but “empowered them. His government includes terrorists as ministers, and those he couldn’t install, he patronized—allowing them to form a political party.”
A Bangladeshi blogger wrote in CovertAction Magazine that Netra News has repeatedly attempted to “downplay the threat posed by Hizb ut-Tahrir [Islamic extremist group in Bangladesh responsible for acts of violence since the overthrow of Sheikh Hasina], presenting them as somehow ‘less radical’ than al-Qaeda. They even go so far as to claim that Hizb ut-Tahrir’s continued existence in the UK is proof that the organization does not represent a serious terrorist threat.”
Some great news organization that is. Mohammad Harun al Rashid reported that Hizb ut-Tahrir supporters carried out “acts of barbarity not seen in centuries,” including killing members of the Awami League and leaving their bodies on the street as a warning.
A year into his reign, while still trying to map out the atrocities committed by Sheikh Hasina, Netra News belatedly began to criticize Yunus, writing an op-ed on August 8 that characterized him as “arrogant, undemocratic and opposed to human rights,” while stating that he had given “platforms and prominence to misogynistic Islamism.”[6]
Left out of the op-ed—which appears to be an exercise in damage control since things have gotten so bad since the coup—was that Netra News had itself helped set the groundwork for Yunus’ rise to power.
Netra News furthermore, did not report on how Yunus was giving free reign to U.S. corporations and had allowed a team of U.S. Air Force officers to land a large cargo plane in Bangladesh reportedly containing weapons that were likely being shipped to opposition groups in Myanmar intent on destabilizing the country and overthrowing its Chinese-backed military rulers.[7]
Nothing But a Joke
In a press release on its website announcing the Shorenstein Center award, the NED wrote that, following the “collapse of Sheik Hasina’s government, Netra News established a bureau in Dhaka, marking a new era for free expression in Bangladesh. With a talented team, deep local networks, and a commitment to truth and accountability, they have emerged as a leading voice in the transition toward democracy.”
These latter statements are a joke because press freedom has been stifled under Yunus’s government and there is currently no transition to democracy under way in Bangladesh. The Hans India recently reported that more than 420,000 people have been arrested in security crackdowns, over 640 journalists have faced attacks or imprisonment, and that Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League has been banned and will be excluded from planned elections next year.
Netra News’s ongoing investigation into the corruption of Sheikh Hasina’s government is another joke when considering that it refuses to investigate corruption under Yunus.
Among other figures, Netra News has not written anything about Yunus’s appointee as head of Bangladesh’s central bank, Ahsan Mansur, whose daughter has amassed extravagant unexplained wealth that she flaunts online.
Mohammad Harun Al Rashid describes Yunus as “a tax cheat” and a man with boundless “greed” who “plunged countless poor people into debt through his microfinance credit scheme.”
The latter is not something you would read about in Netra News, even though independent Western journalists have verified it to be true.
Tom Heinemann’s documentary The Micro Debt, for example, shows how Yunus’s Grameen Bank charged exorbitant interest rates and only gave people who received loans a seven day window to repay them, which is not nearly enough time to develop a profitable business.
Bias of Committee and Shorenstein Center
Any objective assessment would find little merit in NED Director Damon Wilson’s description of Netra News as a “courageous” media outlet that is “often the first to call out injustice,” and Shorenstein Director Gi-Wook Shin’s description of it as “a vital force for speaking truth to power and defending the rule of law in Bangladesh.”
The Shorenstein Center at Stanford was founded in the 1980s by Walter H. Shorenstein, a San Francisco-based real estate mogul who became a large donor to the Democratic Party beginning in the 1950s and was appointed by Lyndon B. Johnson as an adviser on trade negotiations (later he served as an adviser to both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton).[8]
The Shorenstein Center is part of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, an international affairs school named after two wealthy conservative businessmen who were part of George H.W. Bush’s inner circle. Its current director, former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul, was one of the most zealous champions of Russia-Gate and the war in Ukraine.[9]
The Freeman Spogli Institute’s NED connection is evident in the appointment to its faculty of Larry Diamond, founder of the NED’s in-house Journal of Democracy. Diamond also served as a senior adviser to the U.S. occupying authority in Iraq and joined McFaul on a committee that studied how best to apply sanctions on Russia.[10]
According to the school’s website, the Shorenstein Center receives financial support from multi-national corporations that have major investments in Asia or are part of the military-industrial complex. These corporations include: The Boeing Company, Coca-Cola, Citigroup, Hewlett-Packard, Lehman Brothers, Pfizer, and the Walt Disney Company.
Additionally, the Shorenstein Center receives donations from major Asian banks, Silicon Valley tech giants and companies like Hyundai, and from U.S.-based corporate foundations, such as the Alfred P. Sloan and Ford Foundations.
Not surprisingly given this roster, none of the faculty in their scholarly writings—including Gi-Wook Shin—address the topic of U.S. imperialism and corporate colonization of Southeast Asia.
Critical analysis of the Asia Pivot policy and potential looming war with China, and of the genocidal consequences and deceit underlying U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam and other covert operations appear to be further excluded from the curriculum, along with the devastating long-term effect of U.S. neocolonialism in countries like the Philippines.
Faculty colloquia feature speakers from conservative, pro-imperialist institutions like the RAND Corporation (the Air Force’s think tank), the Hoover Institution, and the CIA.
In introducing a colloquium on North Korea in May 2024, Gi-Wook Shin revealed that he himself had ties to the CIA. He stated that he was in touch with very senior people at the CIA and that one of the speakers, Yong Suk Lee, Director of Global Risk Analysis for Google’s Global Security & Resilience Services, was the CIA’s best analyst on North Korea during his 22-year CIA career.
In his talk, Yong Suk Lee, predictably, mimicked the Bush II administration’s axis-of-evil rhetoric, depicting North Korea as a “rogue state” and the U.S. as the good guys trying to enforce international norms against it and trying to save the world from its “nuclear threat.”[11]
This kind of fairy-tale analysis—which, among other things, ignores how the U.S. bombed North Korean nearly back to the Stone Age during the Korean War and has stored nuclear weapons in South Korea—seems par for the course at the Shorenstein Center—like other foreign policy institutions in the U.S.
In another statement right out of CIA talking points, Gi Wook-Shin characteristically praised South Korea’s far-right leader Yoon Suk-Yeol, a favorite of the Biden administration, in May 2022 for joining the U.S. in “defending a liberal international order that is threatened by autocratic leaders like Putin and Xi.” (Yoon has since been deposed after reinvoking martial law).[12]
The Ford Foundation—one of the Shorenstein Center’s donors—has deep ties to the CIA. It has long financed higher educational programs in an attempt to undercut left-wing analysis of U.S. foreign policy, which appears to help explain its funding for the Shorenstein Center.[13]
The bias of the committee that gave the award to Netra News was evident in that it included William J. Dobson, co-editor of the NED’s in-house Journal of Democracy.
Dobson has served as an international affairs editor at National Public Radio (NPR) and wrote the book The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy, which advanced a cartoonish view of world affairs commensurate with that of the State Department, CIA and Pentagon by which the U.S. is in an existential battle for democracy against authoritarian states.
That the U.S. in reality supports many authoritarian states as part of a drive to dominate the world economy and control natural resources somehow escapes notice.
Another member of the award committee, Anna Fitfield, The Washington Post’s Asia-Pacific editor and a 2018 recipient of the Shorenstein journalism award, has made her reputation interviewing North Korean defectors.
The latter serve U.S. foreign policy objectives by demonizing the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), which has been subject to a seventy-five year U.S. regime change operation because of its efforts to delink from the U.S. led global economy and close alliance with Communist China.
Many of the defectors that Fitfield interviews lack credibility because they are given incentives by the South Korean government for speaking badly about North Korea, and some are even paid by the CIA.
The Shorenstein Center’s award to Netra News fits with a pattern of honoring journalists who report on stories and present narratives that advance U.S. foreign policy objectives.
The 2024 winner, Chris Buckley, The New York Times’ Asia-Pacific bureau chief, is best known for publishing a story based on leaked documents, exposing Chinese leaders supposed demand for the harsh treatment of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province after a terrorist incident in the spring of 2014 involving a knife attack that left 31 people dead.[14]
Highly problematic was how Buckley and/or his editors at the Times went beyond the content of the documents that were shown with the article (the rest were never made publicly available) to make sweeping claims about Uyghur internment camps/reeducation centers, which have been hotly debated.[15]
Buckley ironically acknowledged towards the end of his article that Xi did not advocate for mass internment, but rather for “educational remolding and transformation of criminals,” and that he instructed provincial officials “not [to] discriminate against Uighurs and to respect their right to worship.”[16]
Because of the way in which the story was framed, Buckley’s reporting was seized on by U.S. government officials as a pretext to ratchet up sanctions, and to whip up anti-China sentiment.
The Cold War undertone of Buckley’s writing was apparent when he accused the Chinese of “brainwashing” the Uyghur.[17] Seventy years earlier, the CIA had falsely accused the Chinese of brainwashing U.S. POWs who had admitted to waging germ warfare on China (a charge CIA documents show to have been true).[18]
Netra News’ articles serve as a good counterpart to Buckley’s in their advancement of U.S. foreign policy interests.
Rather than being an independent outlet, Netra News is funded directly by a U.S. propaganda agency known for the weaponization of human rights and with a long record of subversion in Third World countries.
Predictably as such, Netra News is one-sided in its reporting and obfuscates the geopolitical stakes and neocolonialist underpinnings of U.S. intervention in Bangladesh.
If the Shorenstein Center were intent on awarding genuine journalistic excellence, it should select an outlet whose journalists do not hold any underlying political agendas, who strive to present readers with multi-faceted viewpoints, and who try to expose the crimes of the people who orchestrated Bangladesh’s 2024 coup and so many others like it.
- This article is the first of two this week at CovertAction Magazine that are part of a back-to-school special that spotlights the corruption of higher education and its symbiotic relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies.
In early March, the NED had its funding restored after a successful lawsuit against the Trump administration, which temporarily tried to block congressionally appropriated funds that had been available since late January. ↑
Omnisama, “Imperialist Aggression and the Rise of Extremism in Bangladesh,” CovertAction Magazine, May 10, 2025. When the BNP was in power, it was dogged by “corruption, kleptocracy, the introduction of a culture of extrajudicial killing and the spread of pervasive torture,” according to a Bangladeshi blogger who prefers to remain anonymous. ↑
See for example Jabal Naduvath, “American Regime Change in Bangladesh: A Primer,” Observer Research Foundation, March 27, 2025. As one example, the NED funded artists who railed against Hasina’s government and supported an insurrection that was designed to remove her from power. ↑
As Bangladesh’s ambassador to Morocco, Al Rashid said that he was singled out in Yunus’s campaign of repression for writing a Bengali novel about Bangabandhu’s early years (1920–1942). Al Rashid wrote that “[Muhammad] Yunus’s hatred for our history isn’t mere contempt. It’s a deliberate, calculated attempt to erase Bangladesh’s very foundation.” ↑
More than 2,000 acts of ethnic violence were reported in the immediate aftermath of Hasina’s downfall. Al Rashid stated that the atrocities committed in just 15 days after Hasina’s ouster—under Yunus’s protection—”far exceeded” those of Hasina’s entire tenure. He wrote that “In those two weeks, Bangladesh descended into terror. Mobs lynched hundreds of police personnel—pregnant women begged for mercy, only to be slaughtered. Hundreds of Awami League supporters were beaten to death, their bodies left as warnings. Such barbarity, on such a massive scale, has not been seen in centuries.” None of this was reported by Netra News, which is clearly not deserving of any legitimate journalistic awards. ↑
The op-ed concluded by stating that “Bangladeshis are queasy about how much the immature Yunus tonic tastes like stale Hasina wine.” ↑
Myanmar is a country of high strategic value as an oil and gas producer whose coastline provided naval access off a strategic shipping lane, the Strait of Malacca. The CIA has long backed ethnic minorities linked to the opium trade as part of a campaign to undermine the pro-Chinese government there. ↑
The Shorenstein Center was named in honor of Walter’s eldest daughter, Joan, a producer for CBS News and Face the Nation who died young of cancer. ↑
For a critical review of McFaul’s memoir, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Drivel of a Diplomat: Michael McFaul’s ‘From Cold War to Hot Peace,’” The Progressive, May 25, 2018. Brad Freeman and Ron Spogli were the two founders. Coit D. Blacker, a past director of the Freeman Spogli Institute, served as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council under National Security Advisor Anthony Lake during the Clinton administration. ↑
Other faculty members at the Freeman Spogli Institute include: a) Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State under George W. Bush; b) Colin Kahl, Undersecretary of Defense under Joe Biden; c) H.R. McMaster, who served as National Security Adviser during Donald Trump’s first term; and d) Francis Fukuyama, a former State Department official who became famous for writing the neo-conservative screed The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that the U.S. Cold War victory showed the superiority of American-style capitalism and democracy and that the U.S. should export this system around the world. ↑
For a counterweight to this view, see CovertAction Magazine articles in North Korea, here and here. ↑
Though expressing hope for normalizing U.S.-DPRK relations, Shin also wrote in an article about the Trump Kim Jong-Un 2018 summit about North Korea’s “threat” to the outside world, but not the U.S. threat to North Korea or the world. Absent in the article was any discussion of how U.S. bombers destroyed much of North Korea during the Korean War, making the country’s nuclear ambitions rational and legitimate. ↑
See David W. Conde, CIA—Core of the Cancer (New Delhi: Entente Private Limited, 1970). The Ford Foundation also finances the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review, which is also a project of a branch of the Shorenstein Center that has been set up at Harvard. The Misinformation Review follows the CIA playbook in labeling critical analysis of U.S. foreign policy as Russian disinformation and also seeks to malign anyone who questions the official government narrative on COVID-19. See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review Promotes Its Own Misinformation,” CovertAction Magazine, September 16, 2023.The Chinese government claimed that the leaked documents Buckley reported on were fabricated. Some of the documents reveal Chinese government fears of terrorism in Xinjiang province emanating from Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East and calls for a determined response. Other past winners of the award include a dissident from the pro-Chinese government in Myanmar, Emily Feng, NPR’s Asia Bureau Chief, and Stanley Karnow, a war correspondent in Vietnam who did some valuable reporting but promoted the myth that the Vietnam War was orchestrated by honorable men in Washington who were supposedly well intentioned. A consistent pattern is the failure to award anyone who carries out hard-hitting exposes of U.S. imperial intervention and U.S. corporate malfeasance in Southeast Asia. ↑
A.B. Abrams, Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2023), ch. 10 provides critical insights that challenge Buckley’s assessment and the mainstream media and political establishment writ large. Abrams points to U.S. covert support for Uyghur terrorists as part of a drive to destabilize China and sow chaos in Xinjiang province, which served as a key hub for the Belt and Road Initiative. Additionally, he emphasizes that the internment camps resemble those in Indonesia, France and other countries dealing with terrorist threats where potential terrorists are provided with educational programs and job training to integrate them into society with the goal of reducing terrorism. ↑
Xi said that China should study how America responded to the 9/11 attacks. This is not a call for the establishment of concentration camps or genocide, as the Bush administration did not intern Muslim-Americans living in the U.S. after 9/11 or establish concentration camps. In another story, Buckley reported uncritically on Trump administration claims that China had committed genocide in Xinjiang. ↑
In the same article Buckley ironically reported that Uyghur were held in the internment/reeducation camp for “weeks or months.” The fact that they would be held for mere weeks (or at most months but not years) indicates that the term concentration camp is not appropriate. Jews, for example, were not held in Auschwitz for weeks but indefinitely. In the camps, Buckley wrote that inmates spend their days “in a high-pressure indoctrination program, where they are forced to listen to lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write ‘self-criticism’ essays.” While people may legitimately object to being there, especially if they were unfairly detained, this does not to me seem like a concentration camp or connote any kind of physical abuse or torture. U.S. POWs in the Korean War were similarly forced to endure lectures offering a communist perspective on world events, which some found to be enlightening. See, for example, Clarence Adams, An American Dream: The Life of an African-American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). ↑
See Thomas Powell, The Secret Ugly: The Hidden History of US Germ War in Korea (Edgewater Editions, 2023). The false accusations against China were used as a pretext for launching the Operation MK-ULTRA mind control experiments. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
