FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
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 […]
Author and blogger Nikolas Kozloff has a BuzzFlash posting (7/1/09) about how, if you “read or listen to the mainstream media these days,” you get the impression that [last] Sunday’s coup in Honduras was all about a simple disagreement over the constitutionality of presidential term limits. But as the coup unfolds, it’s becoming clear that […]
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 […]
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin021309 Lori Wallach and Dan Beeton @https://eadn-wc04-3257648.nxedge.io/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin021309.mp3″] Download MP3 This week on CounterSpin: The debate over the White House-backed economic stimulus package has featured all kinds of media misdeeds—an overreliance on Republican rejectionists and an absence of actual economists talking about the plan, just for starters. Pundits and editorial writers have warned us about […]
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 […]
Anyone who followed the results of Venezuela’s regional elections last Sunday will know that President Hugo Chavez’s party won 17 out of 22 contests up for grabs, garnering 52.5 percent of the popular vote to the opposition’s 41.1 percent. Unless, that is, they were relying on New York Times Latin America correspondent Simon Romero. Despite […]
It isn’t easy to find U.S. press coverage of Venezuela that isn’t colored to some extent by the official U.S. distaste for President Hugo Chávez and his populist policies. Coverage of Venezuela’s recent referendum (12/2/07) on proposed constitutional amendments was no exception. In the wake of the narrow defeat of the reforms by a national […]
This week on CounterSpin: A conversation about the National Intelligence Estimate with lawyer Asli Bâli. Also on the program: Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research discusses the constitutional referendum in Venezuela and how this has been covered by the U.S. press corps.
A February 25 report in the New York Times on Venezuela‘s international arms purchases (“Venezuela Spending on Arms Soars to World’s Top Ranks”) used selective information and an alarmist tone to suggest that Venezuela’s military spending was a potential threat to regional stability. Reporter Simon Romero’s alarming lead read, “Venezuela’s arms spending has climbed to […]
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 […]
Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, and prevailing media myths, with Chesa Boudin. Also on the show: Marjorie Heins of the Free Expression Policy Project joins to discuss “fair use” rights and what that means for journalism and documentary filmmaking.
After televangelist Pat Robertson publicly called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frias (700 Club, 8/22/05), the editors of several major newspapers were quick to denounce his outrageous incitement to violence. However, in criticizing the conservative televangelist, the prestige press overlooked its own highly antagonistic treatment of Venezuela’s president, which surely contributed to […]
[Note: This piece is a sidebar to The Op-Ed Assassination of Hugo Chávez] A common charge in U.S. op-ed pages is that Venezuela is muzzling journalists who are critical of the government. For instance, the San Diego Union-Tribune (4/5/05) claims that Chávez “has pushed press gag laws through a compliant National Assembly.” There are reasons […]
On October 9, Parade magazine—the Sunday newspaper supplement with a circulation of 34.5 million, making it the country’s most widely distributed magazine—published an inaccurate smear against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The smear, appearing in the Q&A column “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade,” was a response to a letter writer who wanted to know “where Fidel Castro […]
In January, New York Times Venezuela correspondent Francisco Toro resigned his post after acknowledging that he “can’t possibly be neutral” about the political situation in that country (Narco News Bulletin, 1/14/03). Now the same reporter is covering Venezuela for another prestigious paper, the Financial Times, contributing reports on May 29 and June 3. The Financial […]
