FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
It’s not a huge surprise that a correspondent for a newspaper that supported the coup that ousted Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez would dislike a film that offers a more sympathetic view of Chavez’s politics. That said, Larry Rohter’s review (New York Times, 6/26/10) of the new Oliver Stone film South of the Border still manages […]
Outside of an anti-Obama “tea party” demonstration, it’d be unusual to see a president being compared to Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin all at once. Crack open the November 2 issue of Newsweek magazine, though, and you’ll find these insults hurled at Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Who would say such a thing? The magazine’s frequent Latin […]
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: Argentina just passed a media law that will severely curb the power of the country’s largest conglomerates by putting a majority of the country’s broadcast licenses in non-corporate hands. How did the law come about, and how is it expected to change Argentina’s media landscape. And what lessons might […]
This week, ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya returned to Tegucigalpa–though not to office. Unfortunately, press accounts are still misreporting the story behind his ouster, relying on those who supported the coup to supply the explanation for their actions. Some of the most misleading coverage has appeared in the Associated Press dispatches that have run in […]
Ousted President Manuel Zelaya has returned to Honduras, though not to office.Unfortunately, press accounts still manage to mangle the story behind his ouster, relying on those who supported the coup to explain what happened. In today’s New York Times (9/22/09): At the time of his removal, Mr. Zelaya was planning a nonbinding referendum that his […]
The pretext for the Honduran coup d’état is nothing new. In a remarkable replay, bogus charges that the corporate media in the U.S. and Europe have repeated endlessly without attempting to substantiate—that Honduran president Manuel Zelaya sought to amend the country’s constitution to run for another term—are virtually identical to the sham justification for the […]
Mac Margolis, who wrote recently about the “selective zeal for democracy” of those who condemned the Honduran coup, wrote another little piece on Latin America for Newsweek this week: “Latin America Rights Itself” (print only). He argues that “the region now looks on the brink of a rightward shift,” pointing to upcoming elections in Chile, […]
Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Conn Hallinan (8/6/09) has yet another debunking of “the story most U.S. readers are getting about the coup” in Honduras, being “that Zelaya–an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez–was deposed because he tried to change the constitution to keep himself in power.” Calling this dominant media narrative “a massive distortion […]
Looking at a June 28 New York Times report that the “Honduran President Is Ousted in Coup,” A Tiny Revolution blogger Bernard Chazelle (6/28/09) writes that “from the byline alone, you know this is going to be good”: “Elisabeth Malkin, in Mexico City, with reporting by Simon Romero from Caracas.” To Chazelle this all “makes […]
Veteran actor and activist Peter Coyote (SFChronicle.com, 5/30/09) writes about big media’s overriding response to the “Largest Environmental Lawsuit in History–Silence.” Taking a look at “the practices that are going on behind Chevron’s carefully cultivated ‘green’ image” as they “drill for oil in the jungles of the Ecuadorian Amazon,” Coyote does give credit to the […]
Observing that Latinobarometro’s 2008 report on Latin American public opinion again “went entirely unreported in almost all of the world’s major media outlets,” with “only small snippets selectively analyzed by writers at the Economist, Christian Science Monitor and Washington Times,” Latin American history major Kevin Young’s ZNet analysis of the survey (5/27/09) gives some probable […]
NACLA has Latin America writer Daniel Denvir’s review (5/11/09) of a new Bart Jones biography of Hugo Chavez. In it, Denvir’s reasons for having “never been a big reader of biographies”–“the product of our most unfortunate and idol-indulging tendencies”–give way to the fact that some leaders’ “images become proxies for larger ideological, social and cultural […]
The North American Congress on Latin America has published (NACLA Magazine, 5-6/09) Dan Beeton’s account of how, following Evo Morales’ huge win in the Bolivian presidential referendum of last August, his opponents instigated “riots, economic sabotage and the massacre of more than 20 indigenous”–during which Bolivia threw out the U.S. ambassador for attempted spying and […]
Noting that, “for the last decade or so, Washington has indulged Pat Buchanan as a sort of crazy political uncle” by having “agreed to forget about his long track record of racially questionable commentary and writing,” TPM Muckraker‘s Zachary Roth and Justin Elliott (4/24/09) have caught a column “for the far-right web magazine, Human Events,” […]
The Washington Post editorial page produced a remarkable editorial on Saturday (3/21/09) headlined “Victory in El Salvador.” It’s not surprising that the Post would try to argue that the victory of left-wing FMLN presidential candidate Mauricio Funes was not another sign that the region’s politics are shifting to the left. No, in fact it was […]
You’ve seen it everywhere. It made the cover of Newsweek, the front page of the New York Times‘ “Week in Review”, and the CBS, NBC and ABC news: Manual Noriega’s mug shot, looking just like the criminals at the end of each “Dragnet” episode after Sgt. Joe Friday had brought them to justice. But what […]
Extra! usually complains about media outlets relying on the same sources again and again, but KTTV-TV in Los Angeles may have gone too far in the opposite direction. Seeking a source to comment on the failed October 1989 coup against Manuel Noriega, the station called what they thought was the Panamanian consulate. In fact, it […]
When it comes to U.S. press coverage of Venezuela, anything goes if it puts President Hugo Chávez and the movement that brought him to power in a bad light. But among the tangle of misinformation that passes for Venezuela coverage, journalists often tip their hand, telling readers something true: Chávez and the political movement that […]
When we arrived in Ciudad del Este, we were petrified. After all, we were in the Paraguayan city known in the American press as a “Jungle Hub for World’s Outlaws” (L.A. Times, 8/24/98), and a “hotbed” “teeming with Islamic extremists and their sympathizers” (New York Times, 12/15/02). The U.S. media’s portrayal of this city, the […]
Urgent Fury, carried out 20 years before Operation Iraqi Freedom, has faded from public and political memory. Yet there is much to be remembered, as there are many cogent parallels between Grenada and Iraq.
