NBC News Whitewashes Colombia’s Right-Wing President
NBC News readers were given no indication of Ivan Duque’s unpopularity or the opposition movement against him.
WSJ’s Epic Distortion of Colombian and Venezuelan Refugees
In reporting that Venezuelans are leaving “in Numbers That Echo Syrians to Europe,” the Wall Street Journal picked the wrong country to compare to Syria.
‘Peace With Justice Is Still a Long Way Away’
“We have to celebrate the fact that this negotiation has happened, that we’re that much closer to ending the conflict between the FARC and the government. But it should not be celebrated as a victory, considering the thousands of people who were killed as a result during this process, the millions displaced and the devastation it has caused to Colombia.”
Mario Murillo on Colombian Accord, Kevin Miller on Gender Wage Gap
After more than a half century of bloody conflict that saw more than 200,000 mostly poor civilians killed, Colombia has a chance at a peace accord between the government and the FARC, the region’s oldest insurgent movement.
Humanitarian Nightmare for Colombia’s Wayuu Fails to Awaken Corporate Media
The documented deaths of more than 4,700 Colombian indigenous children in just the last eight years are a humanitarian nightmare, but corporate media appear unmoved.
Colombian Report on US Military’s Child Rapes Not Newsworthy to US News Outlets
Explosive claims that US military soldiers and contractors had sexually abused at least 54 children in Colombia thus far seem to have received zero coverage in the mainstream US press.
Prostitution Scandal Is the Big Government Story You Were Waiting For
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. […]
NYT: Trade Deals Are Big Job Creators
A New York Times story today (10/28/11) by Jennifer Steinhauer on the state of bipartisanship in Washington noted: Outside of a few recent flashes of light–the passage of three trade bills this month, and an agreement on patent reform–there have been no big bipartisan jobs initiatives in this Congress. The idea that trade deals with […]
Bait-and-Switch Boosterism on Trade Pacts
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 […]
Corporations Want to Create Jobs (and Other Myths)
New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer takes a look (8/26/11) at U.S. trade deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama that are currently languishing in Congress. The piece calls them “free-trade” agreements, which is generally misleading: Trade deals usually involve complicated horse-trade negotiations regarding tariffs, patent protection and the like–meaning they make trade in some […]
Sonali Kolhatkar on Afghan War & women, Laura Carlsen on Venezuela & Colombia
Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The release of the Afghanistan WikiLeaks documents brought the Afghan war back onto the front pages, but much of the attention went to Time magazine’s cover, featuring a disfigured Afghan woman and the headline “What Happens if we leave Afghanistan.” Suddenly the Afghan War debate reverted back to its […]
Guerrilla Armed With Beer Sighted in Venezuela
The Washington Post‘s latest attack on Venezuela comes in an editorial headlined: “Colombia Proves Again That Venezuela Is Harboring FARC Terrorists.” The editors don’t say why a point already proved needs be proved again, but before offering the new evidence, they recount the old claim that laptops captured by Colombia from FARC guerrillas have clearly […]
For Newsweek’s Latin America Correspondent, It’s the Stocks That Count
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 […]
WSJ ‘Scumbag’ Columnist Gets Predictably Slimy
Noticing that Democratic strategist Mark Penn “is the Wall Street Journal‘s ‘Microtrend’-spotting columnist” and “also CEO of PR giant Burson-Marsteller,” Gawker blogger Hamilton Nolan (8/26/09) posits that “only a scumbag would abuse the former to drum up business for the latter.” Alas, “Scumbag spotted!” is Nolan’s cry when writing that Penn’s latest (old, and none […]
Knocking Down Big Media’s Hugo Chavez ‘Caricature’
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 […]
L.A. Times Editors’ Colombia Fantasyland
The capacity for U.S. editorial writers to twist reality when it comes to “free trade” is astounding. But when “free trade” collides with Colombia policy in the minds of the same editorialists, the potential for illogic becomes truly Orwellian. Take Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times editorial (“Obama Should Press for Colombia Free-Trade Pact”) pushing for passage […]
FAIR Study: Human Rights Coverage Serving Washington’s Needs
Click here to download pdf. Any evenhanded comparison of the Colombian and Venezuelan governments’ human rights records would have to note that, though Venezuela’s record is far from perfect, that country is by every measure a safer place than Colombia to live, vote, organize unions and political groups, speak out against the government or practice […]
Selling the Colombia Trade Pact
In an April 10 editorial headlined “Drop Dead, Colombia,” the Washington Post excoriated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for holding up passage of a proposed trade promotion deal with Colombia. With the hyperbole the paper seems to reserve for this issue, the Post declared, “The year 2008 may enter history as the time when the Democratic […]
New York Times Changes Take on Colombian Death Squads
In January, the already bleak human rights situation in Colombia was reported to be in a state of “alarming degradation,” according to United Nations human rights observers (Associated Press, 1/20/01). A joint report from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Washington Office on Latin America (“Colombia Human Rights Certification II,” 1/01) found that “political […]
