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Related: About this forumThe New York Times on Venezuela and Honduras: A Case of Journalistic Misconduct
The New York Times on Venezuela and Honduras: A Case of Journalistic Misconduct
May 8 2013
Keane Bhatt
The day after Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez died, New York Times reporter Lizette Alvarez provided a sympathetic portrayal of outpourings of raucous celebration and, to many, cautious optimism for the future in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Her article, Venezuelan Expatriates See a Reason to Celebrate, noted that many had come to Miami to escape Chávezs iron grip on the nation, and quoted a Venezuelan computer software consultant who said, bluntly: We had a dictator. There were no laws, no justice.(1)
Photo Credit: The Guardian
A credulous reader of Alvarezs report would have no idea that since 1998, Chávez had triumphed in 14 of 15 elections or referenda, all of which were deemed free and fair by international monitors. Chávezs most recent reelection, won by an 11-point margin, boasted an 81% participation rate; former president Jimmy Carter described the election process in Venezuela as the best in the world out of 92 cases that the Carter Center had evaluated (an endorsement that, to date, has never been reported by the Times).(2)
In contrast to Alvarez, who allowed her quotation describing Chávez as a dictator to stand uncontested, Times reporter Neela Banerjee in 2008 cited false accusations hurled at President Obama by opponentshe is a Muslim who attended a madrassa in Indonesia as a boy and was sworn into office on the Koranbut immediately invalidated them: In fact, he is a Christian who was sworn in on a Bible, she wrote in her next sentence.(3) At the Times, it seems, facts are deployed on a case-by-case basis.
The Times editorial board was even more dishonest in the wake of Chávezs death: The Bush administration badly damaged Washingtons reputation throughout Latin America when it unwisely blessed a failed 2002 military coup attempt against Mr. Chávez, wrote the paper, concealing its editorial boards own role in blessing that very coup at the time. In 2002, with the resignation [sic] of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator, declared a Times editorial, bizarrely adding that Washington never publicly demonized Mr. Chávez, that actual dictator Pedro Carmona was simply a respected business leader, and that the U.S.-backed, two-day coup was a purely Venezuelan affair.(4)
The editorial boardan initial champion of the de facto regime that issued a diktat within hours to dissolve practically every branch of government, including Venezuelas National Assembly and Supreme Courtwould 11 years later brazenly criticize Chávez after his death for having dominated Venezuelan politics for 14 years with authoritarian methods. The newspaper argued that Chávezs government weakened judicial independence, intimidated political opponents and human rights defenders, and ignored rampant, and often deadly, violence by the police and prison guards. After lambasting Chávezs record, the piece concluded that the United States should now make clear its support for democratic and civilian transition in a post-Chávez Venezuelaas if Chávez were anyone other than a fairly elected leader with an overwhelming popular mandate.
But there is a country currently in the grip of an undemocratic, illegitimate government that much more closely corresponds with the Times editorial boards depiction of Venezuela: Honduras, which in 2009 suffered a coup détat that deposed its freely elected, left-leaning president, Manuel Zelaya.
While the Times criticized Chávez for weakening judicial independence, the newspaper could not be bothered to even report on the extraordinary institutional breakdown of Honduras, when in December 2012, its Congress illegally sacked four Supreme Court justices who voted against a law proposed by the president, Porfirio Lobo, who himself had came to power in 2009 in repressive, sham elections held under a post-coup military dictatorship and boycotted by most international election observers.
When it comes to intimidation of political opponents and human rights defenders, Venezuelas problems are almost imperceptible compared with those of Honduras. Over 14 years under Chávez, Venezuela has had no record of disappearances or murders of such individuals. In post-coup Honduras, the practice is now endemic. In one year alone2012at least four leaders of the Zelaya-organized opposition party Libre were slain, including mayoral candidate Edgardo Adalid Motiño. In addition, two dozen journalists and 70 members of the LGBT community have been killed since the coup, including prominent LGBT anti-coup activists like Walter Tróchez and Erick Martinez (neither case was sufficiently notable so as to warrant a mention in the Times).
And although the Times editors decried police violence in Venezuela, the Honduran police systematically engage in extrajudicial killings of their own citizens. In December 2012, Julieta Castellanos, the chancellor of Hondurass largest university, presented the findings of a report detailing 149 killings committed by the Honduran National Police over the past two years under Porfirio Lobo. In the face of over six killings by the police a month, she warned, It is alarming that the police themselves are the ones killing people in this country. The public is in a state of defenselessness and impunity.(5) Such alarm is further justified by Lobos appointment of Juan Carlos El Tigre Bonilla as director of the National Police, despite reports that he once oversaw death squads.(6)
Finally, the Times editorial board lamented Venezuelan prison violence. But consider for context that the NGO Venezuelan Prisons Observatory, consistently critical of Chávez, reported 591 prison deaths in 2012 for the country of 30 million.(7) In Honduras, a country with slightly more than a quarter of Venezuelas population, over 360 died in just one incidenta 2012 prison fire in Comayagua, in which prison authorities kept firefighters from handling the conflagration for 30 crucial minutes while the inmates doors remained locked. According to survivors, the guards ignored their pleas for help as many burned alive.(8)
Given the contrast in the two countries democratic credentials and human rights records, obvious questions arise: How has The New York Times portrayed Venezuela and Honduras since Hondurass 2009 coup détat? If, in both its news and opinion pages, the Times regularly prints accusations of Venezuelan authoritarianism, what terminology has the Times employed to describe the military government headed by Roberto Micheletti, which assumed power after Zelayas overthrow, or the illegitimate Lobo administration that succeeded it?
The answer is revealing. For almost four years, the Times has maintained a double standard that is literally unfailing. Not a single contributor in the Times over 100 news and opinion articles has ever referred to the Honduran government as autocratic, undemocratic, or authoritarian. Nor have Times writers ever once labeled Micheletti or Lobo despots, tyrants, strongmen, dictators, or caudillos.
At the same time, from June 28, 2009, to March 7, 2013, the newspaper has printed at least 15 news and opinion articles in which its contributors have used any number of the aforementioned epithets for Chávez.(9) (This methodology excludes the typically vitriolic anti-Chávez blog entries that the paper features on its website, as well as print pieces like Lizette Alvarezs, which quote someone describing Chávez as a dictator.)
During this period, the papers news reporters themselves have referred to Chávez as a despot, an authoritarian ruler, and an autocrat; its opinion writers have deemed him a petro-dictator, an indomitable strongman, a brutal neo-authoritarian, a warmonger, and a colonel-turned-oil-sultan. On the eve of Venezuelas October elections, a Times op-ed managed to call the Chávez administration authoritarian no fewer than three times in 800 words.(10) And Chávezs death offered no reprieve from this tendency: On March 6, reporter Simon Romero wrote about Chávezs gaithe strutt[ed] like the strongman in a caudillo noveland concluded that Chávez had become, indeed, a caudillo.(11)
These most basic violations of journalistic standardsreferring to a democratically elected leader as a ruler with absolute powerdoes not simply end with its writers. On July 24, 2011, Bill Keller, then the newspapers executive editor, wrote the piece, Why Tyrants Love the Murdoch Scandal, which included a graphic of Zimbabwes Robert Mugabe side by side with Chávez. Keller referred to them both when he concluded, Autocrats will be autocrats.(12)
But if despotism, defined as the cruel and oppressive exercise of absolute power, is to have any meaning, it must apply to the Honduran government, whose militarynot just its policeroutinely kills innocent civilians. On May 26, 2012, for example, Honduran special forces killed 15-year-old Ebed Yanez, and high-level officers allegedly managed its cover-up by dispatching six to eight masked soldiers in dark uniforms to the teenagers body, poking it with rifles, and [picking] up the empty bullet casings to conceal evidence that could be linked back to the military, according to the Associated Press.13
The paradox of the Timesits derisive posture toward what it considers antidemocratic tendencies in Venezuela as it simultaneously avoids the same treatment of Hondurass inarguable repressioncan only be explained by one crucial factor: Honduras has been a firm U.S. ally since Zelayas overthrow.
Photo Credit: SOA Watch
In fact, the unit accused of killing Yanez was armed, trained, and vetted by the United Stateseven its trucks were donated by the U.S. government. As the AP further reported, in 2012, the U.S. Defense Department appropriated $67.4 million for Honduran military contracts, with an additional $89 million in annual spending to maintain Joint Task Force Bravo, a 600-member U.S. unit based at Soto Cano Air Base. Furthermore, neither the State Department nor the Pentagon could provide details explaining a 2011 $1.3 billion authorization for exports of military electronics to Honduras.14
The Times scrupulous, unerring record of avoiding disparaging characterizations of Hondurass human-rights-violating government may explain why it has never once made reference to 94 Congress members demand that the Obama administration withhold U.S. assistance to the Honduran military and police in March 2012. Nor has the paper reported on 84 Congress members letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later that year, condemning Hondurass institutional breakdown and judicial impunity.15
When evaluating the newspapers relative silence on Honduras, it is worth imagining if Chávez were to have ascended to power in as dubious a manner as Lobo; if for years Venezuelas government permitted its security apparatus to regularly kill civilians; or if the Chávez administration presided over conditions of impunity under which political opponents and human rights activists were disappeared, tortured, and killed.
As a careful examination of the language and coverage of nearly four years of New York Times articles reveals, concern for freedom and democracy in Latin America has not been an honest concern for the liberal media institution. The papers unwavering conformity to the posture of the U.S. State Departmentconsistently vilifying an official U.S. enemy while systematically downplaying the crimes of a U.S. allyshows that its foremost priority is to subordinate itself to the priorities of Washington.
----
Notes:
1. Lizette Alvarez, Venezuelan Expatriates See a Reason to Celebrate, The New York Times, March 6, 2013.
2. Keane Bhatt, A Hall of Shame for Venezuelan Elections Coverage, Manufacturing Contempt (blog), nacla.org, October 8, 2012.
3. Neela Banerjee, Obama Walks a Difficult Path as He Courts Jewish Voters, The New York Times, March 1, 2008.
4. Hugo Chávez Departs, The New York Times, April 13, 2002.
5. Policías de Honduras, Responsables de 149 Muertes Violentas, La Prensa, December 3, 2012.
6. Katherine Corcoran and Martha Mendoza, Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares, Honduras Police Chief, Investigated In Killing, Associated Press, June 1, 2012.
7. Fabiola Sánchez, Venezuela Prison Deaths: 591 Detainees Killed Countrys Jails Last Year, Associated Press, January 31, 2013.
8. Hundreds Killed in Hellish Fire at Prison in Honduras, Associated Press, February 16, 2012.
9. Authors research, using LexisNexis database searches for identical terms in reference to the two countries. For a detailed list of examples, contact him at keane.l.bhatt@gmail.com.
10. Francisco Toro, How Hugo Chávez Became Irrelevant, The New York Times, October 6, 2012.
11. Simon Romero, Hugo Chávez, Leader Who Transformed Venezuela, Dies at 58, The New York Times, March 6, 2013.
12. Bill Keller, Why Tyrants Love the Murdoch Scandal, The New York Times Magazine, July 24, 2011.
13. Alberto Arce, Dad Seeks Justice for Slain Son in Broken Honduras, Associated Press, November 12, 2012.
14. Martha Mendoza, US Military Expands Its Drug War in Latin America, Associated Press, February 3, 2013.
15. Office of Representative Jan Schakowsky, 94 House Members Send Letter to Secretary Clinton Calling for Suspension of Assistance to Honduras, March 13, 2012. Correspondence from Jared Polis et al. to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, June 26, 2012.
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Demeter
(85,373 posts)Those NYT scandals involving the reporters making shit up didn't happen in a vacuum...it's just that local and domestic "news" propaganda is much more easily debunked than concocted reports on events outside the country, where average Americans don't have many eyes on the ground to refute the wild and crazy stories spread deliberately by sleazy operators to embarrass and manipulate Congress and public opinion.
That's the whole Bradley Manning /Julian Assange / Wikileaks affair in a nutshell.
Catherina
(35,568 posts)Last edited Fri May 10, 2013, 02:17 PM - Edit history (1)
I had bookmarked some horrible, horrible things they wrote about Martin Luther King but lost them.
Even without going back that far, what you just wrote is clear to anyone paying attention.
Yellowcake! WMDs! Communists! Hezbollah! Iran! Terrorists!
Sunday, 23 September 2012 19:00
New York Times a Propaganda Megaphone for War, Says Former Reporter
Written by Alex Newman
The New York Times has essentially become a propaganda megaphone to peddle the establishments narrative especially when it comes to war charged foreign correspondent Daniel Simpson, who resigned from the paper in disgust. According to Simpson, the paper, which is often lambasted and ridiculed by conservatives and libertarians for its blatant liberal bias, is actually just a propaganda tool for the ruling establishment.
In an explosive interview with the Kremlin-funded RT media broadcaster, the former Times correspondent, who was based in the Balkans during his stint at the newspaper, offered an inside look at how it all works. What appears to have bothered him more than anything was how the supposed paper of record was so determined to sell the Iraq war to the American people, even if it meant basically lying or repeating government lies to do so.
"It seemed pretty glaringly obvious to me that the 'news fit to print' was pretty much the news that's fit to serve the powerful," Simpson explained, citing the warmongering over Iraq as a prime example. "The way that the paper's senior staff think is exactly like those in power in fact, it's their job to become their friends."
...
Of course, the Times is hardly the only establishment news outlet to peddle propaganda as truth. Amber Lyon of CNN, for example, recently exposed censorship at the Cable News Network and accused her employer of making me put what I knew to be government lies into my reporting. Former reporters at Fox and other media outlets have made similar accusations.
...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32557.htm
Demeter
(85,373 posts)1) Praised Reagan to the skies
2) Pursued Clinton's impeachment
It was horrifying. And hard to justify delivering it.
Catherina
(35,568 posts)I'm happy to see them discredited and exposed but there's still a ways to go.
cprise
(8,445 posts)That New American website is a John Birch Society affiliate (Tea Party). Key John Birch members actually stormed Florida election offices in 2000, physically stopping a recount that was taking place.
Those people are bad news.
Catherina
(35,568 posts)I'll happily change it. I just looked but couldn't find one for this. I don't even remember how I found that one.
Catherina
(35,568 posts)I meant for the Alex Newman article which I didn't see on the roughguidedarkside link but I could be blind too. I just found one on info clearing house and updated the link.
This, from your link, is interesting
This letter is based on extracts from my memoir. For further heresies, see here.
An Open Letter To The New CEO
By Daniel Simpson
Dear Mark,
Congratulations on your latest promotion. Whod say no to the chance to run the New York Times? When they headhunted me 10 years back, I thought I was made. OK, I was only their Balkans correspondent. I didnt make $1 million, plus sign-on bonus. But I did think Id joined the best newspaper in the world.
To quote the former editor, Howell Raines:
it misses the point to say that the Times is an elite publication. It is the indispensable newsletter of the United States political, diplomatic, governmental, academic, and professional communities, and the main link between those communities and their counterparts around the world.
This meant jump to heel and take dictation. When George W. Bush said: either you are with us or you are with the terrorists, Times reporters opened up their notebooks. To prove they werent liberally biased against his government, they hyped its most blatant pro-war lies, and buried the facts that could have exposed them. The worst offender was Judith Miller, who ran scoops on Saddam Husseins purported arsenal, sourced from Iraqi front groups and spooks. Smeared across the Times front page, these phony factoids spread like herpes.
...
I wasnt supposed to report how people thought, but to explain how Western planners thought they should. Once a month, I was asked to write war porn from the 90s, when Yugoslavia was destroyed. A lot of this is about picking the right situation, an editor suggested. A place of hideous atrocities, of course, but also a place where people had been quite friendly. I begged victims to scratch their scabs so Id look good.
Id hit a mirrored ceiling in the media, and what I witnessed through the looking glass repulsed me. I was told to hold Serbs to account for supporting warmongers, while the Times helped enable the invasion of Iraq.
One year after The Day That Terrorists Changed Everything, the foreign editor sent a memo to his staff. To judge by the Presidents plans, he wrote, six months before the war, the first half of next year may be busy. So much for the cliched vow: without fear or favor.
...
http://www.roughguidedarkside.com/2002/09/12/memo-foreign-editor-nytimes-cohen/
Judi Lynn
(160,217 posts)Very glad to see this item regarding a recent Gallup poll result:
Loved the points made that right-wingers always have shrieked about the "liberal" news media, and surely the N.Y. Times while not realizing they literally print what the government tells them to print, and that they have only carried that same load all this time. They have lied their asses off, and given wingers all the ammo they wanted to fire at liberals, and they were pushed to do it by the right-wing governments, while they ((((((( spun )))))))) like dervishes, lied whenever they felt like it, and the rest of the time whitewashed absolutely everything which could the U.S. government look bad.
Ha ha ha ha, gag.
Fortunately, many people aren't as stupid as Republicans, and figured this out long ago.
Peace Patriot
(24,010 posts)Their coverage of Venezuela has been disgraceful.
They have blood on their hands in Iraq.
These are journalistic CRIMES. They are not just bad reporting--biased, without context and with black holes where information should be--they are criminal acts. You can't separate the war from the war propaganda. They are one and the same crime.
Iraq is the more obvious of these two war crimes. A million innocent people slaughtered, by some counts. (Neither the Pentagon nor the New York Slimes bothered to count). Millions of people displaced. A country left in ruin. Billions of dollars stolen--in hand over fist thievery during the war, and billions more in oil revenues--and at least a trillion stolen from U.S. taxpayers (not counting long term impacts like soldier injuries and Great Depression II). The New York Slimes supported it all with war propaganda--lies, lies and more lies.
The 2002 coup d'etat attempt in Venezuela, and all the shit they've shoveled since then about Venezuela, were/are, a) not without casualties (recently, 7 chavistas murdered by rightwing thugs during the latest U.S./New York Slimes-supported coup attempt), and b) the U.S. effort to overthrow Venezuela's democracy, and the New York Slimes' participation in that effort as chief propagandist, is not over yet.
Then there is Honduras, as this article very accurately points out: U.S. supported coup with hundreds of people murdered--teachers, labor leaders, journalists--by the same kind of rightwing thugs that the U.S. and the New York Slimes are emboldening in Venezuela! On-going horrors in Honduras, including probable DEA shootings of innocent Indigenous tribespeople.
I won't go into Colombia in detail, where even more U.S. war crimes have occurred, and other kinds of crimes--if I am right, Bush Junta drug trafficking--and there is evidence for U.S. support of crime boss/ president Alvaro Uribe's illegal domestic spying (including spying on judges and prosecutors!), and there certainly has been U.S. material support--billions in U.S. aid--for Uribe's "scorched earth" war against peasant farmers. Thousands of people have been murdered by the Colombian military or its closely tied death squads, and FIVE MILLION peasant farmers have been brutally displaced from their farm lands.
U.S. supported WAR CRIMES!
The New York Slimes have not just failed in the function of "Fourth Estate"--they are an arm of government. And they obscure the real owners of that government--transglobal corporations, banksters and war profiteers--the real entities behind all of these wars. The war against peasant farmers in Colombia, for instance, is prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich." The war against Venezuela is an obvious grab for Venezuela's oil, as well as a campaign to slander and remove a true government "of, by and for" the people that is providing free health care and free education to all of its people, as well as good jobs and benefits and general prosperity. Can't allow true democracy to impair corporate profiteering!
The war on Honduras is more puzzling. There are corporate and Pentagon interests, of course. Honduras is part of the U.S. "circle the wagons" region--Central America/the Caribbean--against socialist and New Deal political success in South America. I think the hidden part may be that Honduras needed to be secured as a Bush Cartel/CIA drug route north.
What is very, very clear about Honduras is that it is a "front" in a WAR against the people of Latin America. War propagandists have two functions--to push goddamn lies and to suppress the truth. The New York Slimes is guilty of both, in the U.S. war against Latin America.
Catherina
(35,568 posts)To my sadness, the UK Guardian is on the same path but they're much more finessed about it.
cprise
(8,445 posts)...on Iraq. They are noticeably better than NYT overall.
But they have their prejudices, too. If anything that is socialist is represented by brown skin, they will lean toward a critical tone. I can't call them attacks, because they have rarely addressed subjects like Venezuelan democracy. They seem to just avoid the subject and let negative offhand references creep into their writing.
Another problem I have with the Guardian is their apparent Russophobia. I know they're very critical of America, too, but with Russia its one of those situations where they can't ever bring themselves to say anything nice. 'If you don't have anything negative to say, don't mention the Russians.'
And accessing their site from America, their front page looks like 85% US news (which kind of ruins it).
Peace Patriot
(24,010 posts)Extraordinary bias, including outright lying.
"I can't call them attacks..."? Read any Rory Carroll article on Chavez. I don't know what else this can be called but attack journalism--journalism DESIGNED to slander and deride; journalism that ignores plain facts, time and again, in order to make a FALSE CASE against a democratic leader.
"...they have rarely addressed subjects like Venezuelan democracy." Well, I don't have stats on the Guardian's overall subject coverage, but Rory Carroll's dishonest and viciously anti-Chavez scribblings were quite enough, in my opinion, to rename them "the Guardians of Nothing."
I've ceased to be shocked by the same disreputable so-called journalism from the New York Slimes, the Associated Pukes, Rotters, the Wall Street Urinal, and all the rest, including the BBCons. Their coverage of Chavez is how they earned their new names. But I have to say I was shocked by the Guardian, whose MAIN VOICE on Chavez was Rory Carroll.
This left the English-speaking world with NO objective coverage of the most remarkable democratic leader in the western world, arguably the greatest president in Venezuela's history, and arguably the greatest Latin American leader since Simon Bolivar--and furthermore, NO objective coverage of the people who elected him--an extraordinarily important aspect of the Venezuelan political story. ORDINARY people not only elected and re-elected this leader in the most extraordinary grass roots movement in the last half century, they--millions of Venezuelans pouring into the streets--turned back a U.S.-supported fascist coup d'etat--as far as I know, the ONLY time this has ever happened in U.S./Latin American relations prior to 2002, and an event that was overwhelmingly important to the leftist democracy revolution that subsequently occurred throughout the region. The Venezuelan people got no coverage. Their elected president got only negative, lying, propagandistic, bullshit coverage.
It has been beyond disgusting. It has been mind-boggling. And there is no better case--other than the WMDs that weren't in Iraq--for the utter degradation of western 'news' media and its toady service to the transglobal corporations, banksters and war profiteers who now rule the U.S.A. The Guardian caved to these forces on Latin America and I will never forget it, and I will never trust them again.
We have no one--NO ONE!--providing objective news on Latin America, let alone providing enlightened, pro-social justice and pro-(real)democracy views.
Socialistlemur
(770 posts)It says they do not observe elections in Venezuela for quite a few years, and they think there were abuses by the government in the last elections as far as they could see. I haven't checked lately, but they may have an update.
If the regime expects better coverage it does have to learn to behave a bit more decently. However I see them getting worse. And this type of post blaming the media and letting them think they are on the right path sure hurts the situation. That regime does need to reconsider its behaviour, including the way it pals around with the Iranians, Russians, and just about any bad guy they can find.