Final Word from Monday, November 4, 2019

The Czech public media are biased against Donald Trump and would be elated to see him removed from office as part of the impeachment process. The unstated logic behind this prejudice is that Trump's policies go against the interests of the CR, the European Union and Western society as a whole. It should go without saying that what is good for the U.S. president is not necessarily good for Czechs living thousands of miles away, but the Czech media are extremely selective in applying this principle. It's highly unlikely, for example, that Czech TV or Czech Radio will address the issue of whether emigrant Pavel Tigrid, who later became culture minister, was a CIA asset. Even Respekt acknowledged that he probably was, and last week ex-French spy Jaroslav Vrzala told Echo that every dime Tigrid had for his exile magazine in Paris, Svědectví, came from the CIA. By ignoring such a delicate issue as the 30th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution approaches, the public media are pretending - or perhaps even naively believing - that whatever was good then for the CIA was good for Czechs and Slovaks. [ Czech Republic Television Central Intelligence Agency France ]