FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
If you’re covering Latin America for U.S. corporate media, Michael Shifter is the person to turn to when you need a quote. Currently the president of the Inter-American Dialogue research group, Shifter offers soothing centrism about political developments across the region—giving reporters soundbites on everything from a papal visit to Cuba to elections in Argentina […]
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 […]
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 […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin042712 Mark Weisbrot and Justin Elliott @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin042712.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Argentina’s move to re-nationalize its oil company, taking it back from the Spanish company Repsol, is not getting good reviews in the corporate press overseas or here at home. The move will hurt and further isolate Argentina, say the critics. We’ll […]
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. […]
Now here’s an anti-war argument I hadn’t heard before, courtesy of conservative blogger/journalist Andrew Sullivan (on NBC‘s Chris Matthews Show, 3/18/12): SULLIVAN: Again, it just shows that America colonizes without any real colonial talent because this is a country built on escaping colonialism, not actually imposing it. MATTHEWS: Yeah. Well… SULLIVAN: You’re doing something against […]
Political campaign watchers seem to agree that the election will be about the economy, and that Republicans probably won’t have much to say about Obama’s foreign policy (partly because it doesn’t much differ from what a Republican president might be doing). The New York Times‘ Richard Oppel has a piece today headlined, “Republican Candidates Aim […]
Washington Post correspondent Juan Forero has a piece today (11/4/11) that attempts to compare the Greek economic crisis with other similar debt crises, particularly in Latin America. Unfortunately, he draws some misleading conclusions. Forero’s point is that there’s a lot about Greece’s problems that are reminiscent of troubles in Argentina and Uruguay just a few […]
Corporate media’s incredibly uncritical boosterism of so-called “free trade” deals has been remarked on many times, and continues to be remarkable. What else but blind faith would allow a story to carry a line like one in the October 12 New York Times, about textile industry opposition to the new deal with South Korea: “The […]
Two elections, different outcomes, different headlines at the Wall Street Journal (6/6/11). When the left loses: Portugal Decisively Ends Leftist Rule Portugal on Sunday voted decisively to end six years of leftist rule, electing the country’s main conservative party and boosting prospects for austerity measures tied to a $114 billion aid package from the EU […]
CNN/Time pundit Fareed Zakaria is considered one of the smartest guys in elite policy/media circles.Speaking with CNN host Anderson Cooper on Friday(3/4/11), he advocated CIA intervention in Libya. Deriding a no-fly zone as something less than a “magic solution,” he explained: ZAKARIA: There’s a lot of covert stuff we can do. We can effectively fund […]
Today’s New York Times (12/20/10) brings the latest from the WikiLeaks cables, an interesting piece about how Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) went to Honduras after the coup to praise the new government and hopefully arrange business deals for his friends. Unfortunately the Times bungles the story of the coup itself: Honduras had grabbed international headlines […]
NewYork Times (12/3/10): Mr. Karzai first burst onto the international stage in the style of Che Guevara, slipping over the Afghan border from Pakistan in 2001 as United States forces pounded the Taliban, before being installed by the West. President George W. Bush invited him to his first State of the Union speech after September […]
The emerging hero of the Chilean miners’ story–in Latin America and elsewhere, if not in the U.S.–is Luis Urzua, a topographer who took a job at the San José mines as a shift foreman while awaiting the start of new a job in his field. NASA officials working on the rescue called Urzua “a natural […]
After the miners’ rescue Wednesday, talk in Chile turned to mine safety and the conduct of Compania Minera San Esteban, the corporation that owns the San Jose mines where the miners were trapped. On Thursday, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera publicly addressed safety issues, vowing “fundamental changes in how businesses treat their workers.” Stories about San […]
Daniel Hernandez wrote an article for Extra! last year (6/09) about the tendency of U.S. corporate media to treat Mexican violence as a phenomenon that threatens to “spill over” into the U.S.—as in New York Times headlines like “Drug Cartel Violence Spills Over From Mexico, Alarming U.S.” (3/23/09) and “Wave of Drug Violence Is Creeping […]
A year after a military coup removed democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya from office, Hondurans are still living under a repressive government—but the U.S. is pushing Latin American countries to join it in normalizing relations with the regionally ostracized nation. Reporting from a meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS), the New York Times […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Have you heard the one about how the Obama Justice department refused to prosecute voter intimidation of white people by black people? A few days ago you could’ve missed the story just by avoiding Rush Limbaugh but now even the Washington Post is giving ink to the “political bombshell.” […]
Newsweek’s right-wing Latin American correspondent Mac Margolis (7/2/10) is once again playing games with statistics. After the obligatory attack on Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez as a “chest-thumping autocrat,” Margolis gets down to the business of praising his favorite Latin American country, Colombia, as a country that deserves “lead billing” among the “new stars of the emerging […]
L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan (7/2/10), reviewing Oliver Stone’s documentary South of the Border, remarks in passing that “a recent piece in the New York Times pointed out numerous errors” in the film’s discussion of Latin American politics. Turan might have noticed that the Times‘ supposed debunking, by former Latin American correspondent Larry Rohter, […]
