The West in white hats

There was an odd article on Uzbekistan in today's Guardian. John Laughland wrote:

Take the source of Friday's atrocity reports from Andijan: one "opposition journalist" from the website ferghana.ru, which seems to be a shop window for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. IWPR, which has since provided the bulk of reports in the western press, is overwhelmingly funded by western governments and private foundations close to them: the US state department, USAid, the National Endowment for Democracy, the US Institute for Peace, George Soros's Open Society Foundation, the British Foreign Office, the European commission, the OSCE, Unesco, and other European governments, among others.

I am not sure what he is arguing here. Is he saying that any news reports from Western-financed sources are inherently unreliable, or that it is illegitimate for the West to support democratic movements at all?

Either way, it looks like a classic example of Western liberal self-hatred to me. Sometimes we are the good guys and we should not be embarrassed by it.

Democracy is better than tyranny, and the more money we spend on saying so the better.