Great article to discover years after it was published: AP’s One-Sided Venezuela Coverage
AP’s One-Sided Venezuela Coverage
On Desk Reporters Who “Phone-in” the Spin
By Dan Feder
Special to the Narco News Bulletin
December 18, 2002
~snip~
The problem with the Associated Press
Some of AP’s other reporters have been producing simply awful journalism since long before Ikeda joined this round of the Venezuelan tug-of-war. AP stories are picked up by thousands of newspapers large and small across the country every day, and are often read by newscasters on the radio and television. So the tone they set and messages they break to the public are no small matter; they lie at the heart of the media-created reality through which most United States citizens and many English-speaking people in other countries experience the larger world.
Associated Press is technically a “non-profit” corporation owned by a cooperative of for-profit United States newspapers and media companies, and governed by the AP Managing Editors Association. No radio news show or daily newspaper editor has the resources to send a reporter to every part of the world she or he wants. So editors use the AP to cut costs; why pay twenty-five different journalists to write on an issue when you can pool your resources and just pay one? According to their website,
the AP is the backbone of the world’s information system. In the United States alone, AP serves 5,000 radio and television stations and 1,700 newspapers. Add to that the 8,500 newspaper, radio and television subscribers in 121 countries overseas, and you’ll have some idea of AP’s reach.
This role obviously gives the AP an unbelievable amount of power over the discussion of global events, especially in the English-speaking world. Yet AP correspondents write under much lower standards and with much less supervision than their counterparts at specific media organizations. In other words, they are largely unaccountable to their editors. At the same time, at a corporate level, the AP is unaccountable to its millions of readers. Unlike many newspapers, there is no AP ombudsman who “speaks for the readers.” There is no letters page for the AP, and individual newspapers rarely print letters responding to wire stories.
The very structure of the AP —the impersonal bureaucracy through which this huge volume of information is filtered—encourages “desk reporting” from foreign correspondents. This means gleaning stories from the local commercial newspapers and taking phone calls from Embassy, political, and corporate spin-doctors rather than going outside and talking to the real people their stories concern. According to many familiar with the organization, AP correspondents are typically wined and dined by the English-speaking elites in the Third World outposts where they are assigned.
A perfect example of what this leads to is the case of Peter McFarren, AP’s 18 year bureau chief in Bolivia. McFarren was exposed by this publication as having moonlighted as a lobbyist for an $80 million dollar water pipeline project. After two weeks of stonewalling, AP finally announced McFarren’s resignation after Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz inquired about the conflict. By the time he resigned, McFarren had become a regular figure among elite circles of Bolivian politicians and businessmen, completely alienated from and hostile towards the masses of people he was responsible for reporting on.
More:
http://www.narconews.com/Issue26/article567.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Copy Cat Journalists Forero and Miller
NY Times and LA Times run identical stories on Venezuelan “strike”
By Dan Feder
Narco News Associate Publisher
December 12, 2002
Juan Forero’s extraordinary dispatch from Caracas for Tuesday’s New York Times is, at first glance, simply the standard parade of half-truths and distortions we’ve come to expect from this correspondent for the “paper of record” when he covers our América. “In Venezuela’s General Strike, the Pinch Becomes Pain” warns the ominous headline. We then meet our sympathetic cast of characters, the suffering but enduring “small business” owners of a town called El Hatillo.
We meet Javier Martín, who manages the quaint-sounding Hannsi folk art market. We meet Gloria Mugarra, who runs a furniture store in the area, and several others who are “on strike,” making the ultimate sacrifice—near to going out of business—to depose their hated poor people’s president. We also meet, briefly, several other small business owners who express similar sentiments. Pretty inspiring stuff, ¿no? And to add legitimacy to Forero’s brilliant conclusions – essentially, that Chavez faces a huge threat from the commitment and patience of the strikers and may be forced to give in – Forero turns to Ricardo Hausmann, “an economist at Harvard” – to give us the big picture.
Great job, Juan! A-plus!
Well, this heroic struggle is not what Forero’s language would make it seem, but we’ll get to that shortly. The truly remarkable thing about this story is nowhere to be found in Tuesday’s New York Times, but three thousand miles away, in the pages of Howell Raines’ bitter rival, the Los Angeles Times.
Opening Tuesday’s LA Times, one comes across the headline “Venezuelan Merchants Feeling Pain of Strike.” Sound familiar? (Forero’s NYT dispatch, again, was titled, “In Venezuela’s General Strike, the Pinch Becomes Pain.”) But this story is purportedly by T. Christian Miller, it must be different. One’s eyes move down to the dateline: “El Hatillo, Venezuela.” Must be a coincidence; keep reading. As the article – much shorter than its counterpart in the NY Times – continues, we are reacquainted with our old friends: furniture vendor Gloria Mugarra, Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann, and art market manager Javier Martín (this time with no accent mark in his last name; I’ll give Forero the benefit of the doubt on the correct spelling), who all give more or less the same quotes.
More:
http://www.narconews.com/Issue27/article560.html
(Those of us familiar with Forero will find this completely to be expected!)
