FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Left-wing activist and author Noam Chomsky is in the New York Times today: The American linguist Noam Chomsky, a prominent source of intellectual inspiration for President Hugo Chavez, made a new appeal on Wednesday for the release of Maria Lourdes Afiuni, a judge arrested two years ago by the secret intelligence police. If you find […]
The Washington Post‘s Juan Forero comments today (6/30/11) on how Hugo Chavez’s illness means that he’s off television: Chavez governs like the host of a reality show, cameras always rolling as he presides over summits, hectors opponents and warns of diabolical American plots to unseat him. Wherever would he get such ridiculous ideas.
Longtime Hugo Chavez critic Jackson Diehl leads his Washington Post column today (9/27/10): Debate in Washington about Hugo Chavez —to the extent that it exists—generally centers on whether the Venezuelan strongman is a genuine threat to the United States or a buffoonish nuisance who is best ignored. This narrow debate over Chavez’s rule in Venezuela […]
Seeing this headline at the Newsweek website—”Chávez Twists Twitter Into Tool of Repression“—means you’re likely to read the latest dispatch from the magazine’s Latin America correspondent Mac Margolis, who has amassed a stunning record of creating panic about the region’s leftist leaders. (See “Newsweek‘s Name-Calling Neoliberal,” from Extra!‘s January 2010 issue.) Margolis argues that when […]
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 […]
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 […]
In his latest “Dispatch from the Bolivarian Revolution”, blogger Eric Wingerter (BoRev.net, 7/18/09) asks, “Man oh man, how bad does AP reporting have to get before a group of Latin American studies professors from top U.S. universities decides they need to take out a FULL-PAGE AD in the Columbia Journalism Review to respond?” His answer […]
Newsweek has a rather curious take this week (7/20/09) on the Honduras coup in a short piece headlined “The World Goes Bananas Over Honduras”: Poor, hot and fractious, Honduras–the original banana republic–rarely draws a second look from the global community. But on June 28, when President Manuel Zelaya was yanked out of bed by the […]
Robin Varghese’s 3 Quarks Daily link (6/30/09) to a Boston Review piece purporting that, “over the past four years, Venezuela has witnessed alarming signs of state-directed antisemitism, including a 2005 Christmas declaration by President Hugo Chavez himself,” has engendered some homespun media criticism from a commenter logged-in as “Pepito,” who argues that “this canard about […]
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 Washington Post editorial page regularly slams Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, so it was no surprise to see it do the same on April 30. Their real point, though, was to suggest that Barack Obama’s desire to change the tone of the U.S.-Venezuelan relationship wasn’t going to work: The administration’s strategy–to open up a constructive […]
Images of the U.S. media’s longtime foe, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, with Obama at last weekend’s Summit of the Americas in Trinidad prompted some corporate reporters to take the unusual step of questioning the political motivations behind an official photo-op. On ABC‘s World News, Jake Tapper referred to Chavez’s gift of The Open Veins of […]
When Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave U.S. President Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s book The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent at last weekend’s Summit of the Americas, the corporate media appeared to be caught off guard. In its initial report, CNN (Newsroom, 4/18/09) appeared to […]
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 […]
On this morning’s Fox & Friends, the hosts were having a laugh about Mauricio Funes, the new president of El Salvador. Funes won as the candidate of the FMLN, the political party of the former guerrilla group–and he was once a freelancer for CNN. Ergo, Fox couldmake jokes aboutCNN‘s “communist” ties. One of the hosts […]
The author of an upcoming “people’s history of the Bolivarian Revolution entitled We Created Him,” George Ciccariello-Maher tells (CounterPunch, 2/15/09) an eerily “familiar” tale of one unnamed political leader who, after being “in power for nearly eight years,” no longer feels the need to comfort his opponents, and his discourse radicalizes as his view of […]
Hugo Chávez never had a chance with the U.S. press. Shortly after his first electoral victory in 1998, New York Times Latin America reporter Larry Rohter (12/20/98) summed up his victory thusly: All across Latin America, presidents and party leaders are looking over their shoulders. With his landslide victory in Venezuela’s presidential election on December […]
[Note: this piece is a sidebar to “The Repeatedly Re-Elected Autocrat.”] New York Times Latin American reporter Larry Rohter (5/20/05) called Hugo Chávez “stridently anti-American,” one of hundreds of instances of U.S. news reporters branding the Venezuelan president with that epithet. Chávez says it’s not true; he says such reporters are confusing his distaste for […]
It began with a bulletin from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles (1/4/06) accusing Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez of invoking an old anti-Semitic slur. In a Christmas Eve speech, the Center said, Chávez declared that “the world has wealth for all, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, have […]
