Reuters Shields OAS Over False Claims That Sparked Bolivia Coup
None of the 114 Reuters articles about Bolivia since the October 20 election mention the extensive technical criticism the OAS complaints have received.
‘Years From Now, It’ll Be Clear to Everyone There Was a Coup in Bolivia’
“The Organization of American States and much of the major media misled public opinion as to what was happening with these elections, and created this belief that there had been severe irregularities in the vote count.”
Unpacking Media Propaganda About Bolivia’s Election
Editorials read as though it were a settled fact that the Morales government stole the election, though there’s a paucity of evidence to believe that that’s what happened.
Ranked Choice Voting ‘Allows You to Vote for the Person You Really Like’
“It really rewards a certain kind of campaigning that…involves direct, virtually a person-to-person connection of earning trust, or at least having your campaign engage directly with people. So it changes incentives in a positive way.”
Rob Richie on Ranked Choice Voting, Netfa Freeman on Police Militarization
The passage of a ballot initiative in New York City will change the way we vote.
‘White Men Have No Electability Advantage’
Election Focus: “The problem here is not, by and large, voters; they are not the reason we don’t have a reflective democracy. They are voting for women and people of color just as often as white men.”
‘This Is Designed to Shape the Electorate to Retain Political Power’
Election Focus 2020: “The people who tend to win out when you remove these forms of balancing tend to be white, entrenched majorities. This didn’t come out of nowhere. These folks have been fighting for years. And it’s pretty nasty stuff, quite frankly.”
Steven Rosenfeld on Gerrymander Ruling, Nathan Schneider on Alternative Economic Visions
The distance between the democracy media talk about and the system we have is wrenching — and a recent Supreme Court ruling highlights right-wing efforts to increase that gap and set it in stone.
Brian Mier on Brazilian Political Scandal
The Brazilian anti-corruption crusade, called Car Wash or Lava Jato, that put popular ex-president Lula da Silva in prison and paved the way for fascist president Jair Bolsanaro—all while being celebrated in the US corporate press—was actually, as critics contended, less interested in corruption than in keeping Lula’s Workers Party out of power.
Distorting ‘Democracy’ in Venezuela Coverage
That corporate media manage to portray Juan Guaidó and his regime-change cohort as a “pro-democracy movement” is both a tragedy and a farce.
Dictator: Media Code for ‘Government We Don’t Like’
The “dictator” label is also a powerful cue, used by media to prime the reader to see a particular country or leader a certain way.
Learning the Downsides of Candidates Is a Big Upside of Modern Media
The ability to communicate horizontally allows us to have conversations about politics that we’ve always needed and never have had until now.
Pathological Deceit: The NYT Inverts Reality on Venezuela’s Cuban Doctors
A New York Times “exposé” of Cuban doctors’ supposed interference in Venezuelan elections was riddled with inaccuracies, omissions and misrepresentations.
Worry About the Old, Not the Rich, HuffPost Tells Readers
There continues to be a large market for pieces saying the big conflict in the US is generational rather than class. The HuffPost made its latest contribution this week.
‘US Administrations Have Been Intervening in Venezuela Since at Least the Early 2000s’
“There’s this absurd idea that the sanctions somehow only hurt the Venezuelan government and Venezuelan government officials.”
Debbie Weingarten on the Borderlands, Alexander Main on Maduro’s Reelection
“Building a wall” at the US/Mexico border is an abstraction for many Americans–but not for people who live in the borderlands, and those who listen to those who do.
‘Republicans Just Don’t Want All the Votes to Count’
“I think we have to be very clear here with what’s happening, which is that Republicans deliberately implemented a strategy to make it harder to vote in states like Georgia.”
‘Ballot Initiatives Show What You Can Do to Bring Working People to the Polls’
“When you ask people about the issues, they’re really clear: They want policies that are going to help working people, and they’ll come out for those.”
Ari Berman on the State of Voting 2018, Jackie Prange on Keystone XL Re-Review
There’s hardly a time more important than elections for media to stop splitting the difference and frankly describe the impact of elections—not just the outcomes, but the processes—on people and their ability to have a say in their circumstances.
‘Voters Have to Remain Vigilant to Make Sure They Are on the List’
“The simple fact is that jurisdictions that have wanted to disenfranchise voters have been raising the specter of voter fraud for more than 100 years now.”
