J-School 2004: Enter the War Room

[donsu]

http://www.bigleftoutside.com/

July 16, 2004
Please Distribute Widely

Dear Colleague,

It's the calm before the storm. Two weeks from today, the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism will assemble in Cochabamba, Bolivia, with journalists and scholars from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Italy, Mexico, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela, among other lands, and just as the J-School did in February 2003 we will, together, unleash the famous "Narco News swarm" reporting by more than 60 authentic journalists all at once to break the information blockade and bring you the news from the coca growing lands of the Chapare and elsewhere.

This year there will be a few new twists:

- Live Narco News Midnight Radio, available on the Internet, reporting and commenting on the presentations and interviews of each day. You can attend the J-School without even being there.

- The Narcosphere "War Room" (with a plagiarist apology to my old friend James Carville: a good idea and title is always worth stealing with credit given of course) in which a specialized team of auténticos will review, fact-check, correct, and critique each day's Commercial Media coverage of the drug war and democracy in our América, on a scale not even we have attempted before.

- The Narcosphere War Room (including, okay, I admit: "poolside blogging" by our attractive and fast-class professors and scholars) will pay especially close attention to the international Commercial Media coverage in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, of the upcoming August 15th presidential recall referendum in Venezuela... an important news story that the Commercial Media just can't seem to get right... They need some help... And we're happy to volunteer our services.

- Interviews with and profiles of guest lecturers like former Brazilian drug czar Walter Maierovitch, Bolivian Congressman Evo Morales, coca expert Silvia Rivera, union leader Oscar Olivera, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Gary Webb, High Times editor Annie Nocenti, Freedom of Information Act keymaster Jeremy Bigwood, economist James S. Henry, Venezuela public television director Blanca Eekhout, foreign correspondent-of-the-year Reed Lindsay, the most knowledgeable and cutting-edge journalists covering the War on Drugs, and so many, many, more.

"In war," it has been said, "truth is the first casualty." So every war, especially the Drug War, needs a Carvillesque "War Room" to make sure that no lie shall spread across the world before the truth can put its pants on. Now you will see The Narcosphere participatory element of Narco News hit light speed... and from wherever you are, especially you 200 copublishers of Narco News, you'll be able to participate too.

As an example and prototype of the kind of work "The Narcosphere War Room" (TM!) will offer, I present to you a fact-check on claims made yesterday in Oligarch's Daily (The Miami Herald) by Human Rights Watch Americas Division chief José Miguel Vivanco, who fell a notch even lower on his slippery anti-democracy slope yesterday while pandering to Andrés Oppenheimer:

Vivanco Wants Foreign Money in Venezuela Campaign

Read it on The Narcosphere, at the above link, where you can click the relevant links and see for yourself.

Narco News J-School 2004: Enter the War Room.

from somewhere in a country called América,

Al Giordano
Publisher
The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com/
[e-mail]

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