How does NPR report on Bolivia? Here's how:

For a little color, Martin Costi describe what's going on there by frontloading appropriately emphasized and carefully enunciated terms like "sabotage", "rebellion" and "dynamite" in a quick "setting of the scene."

Then they interview the guy in the street who "points contemptuously" at the shiny buildings of capital and finance and complains they get everything, we get nothing.

Then it's on to capital/finance's perspecitve. They find the man on the street "frustratingly irrational". There's 600 years worth of natural gas in Bolivia, and the royalties it would generate would create wealth flowing down to the man in the streets. (Curiously, they use a different interpreter for capital/finance, who has a more sympathetic tone to his voice; the first interpreter sounded like he was doing a parody of a man on the streets.)

We wrap up the discussion by talking with an American hippie weepy liberal woman who tells us this is about race.

I'm not saying this is propaganda. I'm just saying I'd have done the story differently.

Eva Morales, the leader of the opposistion, a radical. I don't think he is a radical (well, he does incite a lot of protests) but he is really a champion for the ingienous people of Bolivia. Nobody speaks up for them because they don't have any money.

Eva Morales won with 22 percent of the vote and the current President won with 23 percent. Kind of amazing. Yet in my opinion, those numbers are too low to receive a overwhelming legitimacy in the country. However, the president doesn't share his power with the opposistion, and that's the problem.

A part of me wishes I'd never picked up on that subtle manipulation. I hear it more and more on NPR all the time. It ruins days.