For the New Yorker, rising standards of living for the Venezuelan poor don't matter much when weighed against the fact that rich people lost some property they weren't using.
Jan
25
2013
Why Do Poor People Living in an Abandoned Skyscraper So Outrage the New Yorker?
By 97 Comments
Jan
11
2013
Hugo Chavez: Why Does He Hate Us?
By 29 Comments
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez might be excused for harboring some hard feelings towards a government that helped to try to overthrow your own. Which may be why U.S. reports rarely bring up the 2002 coup attempt–and when they do, treat Washington's involvement in it as another nutty Chavez conspiracy theory.
Jan
08
2013
Venezuelans Continue to Defy Washington Post
By 36 Comments
The Washington Post has never been fond of left-wing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. As serious questions mount about the state of Chavez's health, the paper's editorial page found it a good time to take another swipe.
Dec
04
2012
Julian Assange, Erin Burnett and the Battle Over Press Freedom
By 38 Comments
There seems to be an expectation in the Assange case that a dissident must take refuge with a government with a sterling human rights record. This message is conveyed by journalists whose own country has detained, harassed and killed their journalistic colleagues.
Oct
12
2012
FAIR TV: Chavez vs. Corporate Media, Greening Fracking, NYT's Mideast Time Machine
By 8 Comments
FAIR TV takes a look at how the U.S. media handled the Venezuelan election, how the Washington Post "greened" fracking and how the New York Times used a time machine to "fix" a headline about Israel/Palestine. Watch it, share it with your friends and please leave a comment below.
Oct
10
2012
CNN Exposes 'Villain' Chavez's Dastardly Plot to House the Poor
By 23 Comments
Corporate media's depiction of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is often cartoonish, but the lead from David Frum's piece from CNN.com (10/9/12) takes the cake: Venezuela's authoritarian president Hugo Chavez is a villain out of a Batman movie: buffoonish and sinister in equal measure. You want to be careful about throwing around words like "buffoonish," though, when you're making arguments like "Hugo Chavez has laid Venezuela's economy to waste." Here's a chart of Venezuela's per capita GDP since 1999, when Chavez was first elected; since 2003, when Chavez took control of the national oil company from its self-enriching management, the purchasing [...]
Oct
10
2012
ABC's Very Efficient Anti-Chavez Propaganda
By 17 Comments
If you're listening to a report on an Official Enemy like Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, you expect to hear a litany of misdeeds, real or imagined, about the leader in question. Just check out ABC World News (10/7/12), where anchor David Muir started out with this: And a fierce enemy of the United States, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, faces the toughest election of his life tonight. It's hard to know what Chavez has done to earn that label, but moments later Muir put this question to correspondent Jorge Ramos: MUIR: We all know that President Chavez has almost made it [...]
Oct
09
2012
What Are Enemies For?: Iran Sham Helps PBS Smear Chavez
By 24 Comments
It's no secret that U.S. media outlets don't have much love for left-wing Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. A PBS NewsHour segment (10/5/12) just ahead of the recent election showed just how far you could go. Correspondent Ray Suarez opened by calling the election "a watershed moment for the world's second-largest oil-producing nation and a critical supplier of crude oil to the U.S"–I guess we know what makes Venezuela important to the United States. Chavez has "openly antagonizing the United States as he's cozied up to the world's most isolated regimes." And Suarez has an example: He's continued to thwart American efforts [...]
Aug
01
2012
The Threat–Again–of Left-Wing Latin American Democracy
By 20 Comments
You can count on U.S. corporate media to express alarm about the threat posed by left-wing governments in Latin America. Sometimes it's military hype (think Soviet MiGs in Nicaragua), but more typically it takes the form of a generalized concern about certain governments' commitment to democratic ideals. But how do you sound the alarm about left-wing threats to democracy when actual elected left-wing leaders are being removed in anti-democratic coups? That's no easy feat, but some reporters are up to the challenge. In the Washington Post on July 22 (under the headline "Latin America's New Authoritarians"), reporter Juan Forero explains [...]
May
21
2012
NYT and Honduras Killings, Take Two
By 7 Comments
On Friday (5/18/12) we noted that the New York Times and Washington Post had long pieces about a drug war shooting in Honduras that reportedly killed four innocent bystanders, including two pregnant women. The story got increased attention here in the U.S. because of the apparent involvement of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Honduran officials and sources claimed the dead were civilians. The Times and Post, though, granted anonymity to U.S. officials to claim that the dead were maybe not civilians at all; in fact, according to some of these unnamed officials, the whole town where the shooting occurred was involved [...]
May
18
2012
NYT, WaPo Let Unnamed U.S. Officials Spin Honduras Killings
By 21 Comments
The details are somewhat murky, but we know the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency is heavily involved in counternarcotics in Honduras. A shooting incident last Friday reportedly left four innocent people dead–including two pregnant women. Questions are being raised about whether they were shot by DEA agents who were apparently going after a boat carrying drug smugglers. The story has become a scandal in Honduras, as the New York Times reports today (5/18/12) Residents of the isolated Mosquito Coast of Honduras have burned down government buildings and are demanding that American drug agents leave the area immediately With a story like [...]
Apr
24
2012
Prostitution Scandal Is the Big Government Story You Were Waiting For
By 6 Comments
The Beltway press is remarkably fixated on two stories: A "scandal" over an $800,000 General Services Administration (GSA) conference in Las Vegas, and the unfolding saga involving prostitutes and some Secret Service and military officers in Colombia. The White House thinks both are bad, of course, but not worth the amount of coverage they're getting. Beltway journalists think otherwise, and seem to want to believe that by paying so much attention to these stories they are a) standing up to the government by exposing wrongdoing; and b) not really talking about prostitutes at all, but telling a larger quasi-morality tale [...]
