The Washington Post using “big lie” strategy against President Hugo Chavez

[leftchick]

http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=75420

Zmag.org (Chuck Kaufman): In the 1980s the Washington Post honed an editorial page style to attack the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua that involved complex and convoluted editorials weaving half truths, total lies, innuendo, and unsupported speculation. These editorials were impossible to respond to with letters to the editor limited to 200 words.

<snip>


The Washington Post is now using the “big lie” strategy against the Bolivarian process in Venezuela and its democratically-elected President Hugo Chavez. An editorial on August 17, 2007 is a textbook example of this strategy. It is entitled “Cash-and-Carry Rule” with a sub heading “Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez cements his autocracy with petrodollars and another push for ‘reform.’”

The US-Venezuela Solidarity Network offers this sentence by sentence deconstruction of the Washington Post editorial as a public service to educate serious readers on important issues of US-Venezuela relations and the campaign to derail the process in Venezuela to use its oil wealth for the benefit of its poor majority.

WASHINGTON POST: The Venezuelan businessman told inspectors there was nothing but books and papers in his suitcase. So imagine everyone’s surprise when Argentine customs officers opened the suitcase -- and found $800,000 in cash. The origin and destination of this money, which was being taken to Buenos Aires on August 4, shortly before a state visit by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, is now the hottest mystery in South America.

FACTS: The Washington Post took a single fact -- a Venezuelan-born resident of Key Biscayne, Florida businessman was caught with $790,550 in undeclared cash entering Argentina on August 4 -- and used innuendo to tie it to President Chavez. In the first place this Venezuelan businessman was described in the first stories about the incident as being US-based. In the second place there has been not one shred of evidence presented tying him to Chavez or the Venezuela government. Chavez officially visited Argentina on August 7, as he has on several occasions this year. The Post editorial commits a post hoc, ergo propter hoc logic fallacy, Latin for "after this, therefore because of this." There is nothing which ties the two incidents to each other.

[Greyhound]

1. Sure there is, both he and Hugo Chavez were in the same hemisphere

at the same time. What other evidence do you need?

These assholes are simply terrified that the Bolivarian Revolution will accomplish real reform and make its citizens prosperous to a degree that the under-classes in other parts of the world demand the same for themselves before they are fully under the boot of The New World Order_®. That would upset their scheme and cause all kinds of trouble for them.

:kick: & R

[leftchick]

2. exactly

:)

[Burma Jones]

3. The Post is a Neo-Con Rag

Only good for Obituaries, Baseball Scores and Movie Times....

[leftchick]

4. Another Lie Debunked

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WASHINGTON POST: He has nationalized telecommunications, electricity and oil enterprises and established a new socialist political party. He has forced an independent television channel off the air while plastering the public spaces of Venezuela with his own smiling portrait.

FACTS: Here’s the crux of the Washington Post hostility to the Bolivarian process in Venezuela. The Washington Post is one of the strongest voices in support of the “Washington Consensus” of free trade and other neoliberal policies aimed at taking governments out of economic policy making and leaving corporation profit unrestrained. These policies have been an absolute disaster for the vast majority of Latin Americans who have seen their standard of living in free fall since the 1980s. Venezuela, thanks to its abundant natural resources, has the economic means to power alternatives to neoliberalism such as the Bolivarian Alternative for Our America (ALBA) in which trade among equals is based on need and solidarity. This is anathema to the Post and its corporate sponsors.

It is surprising that the Washington Post didn’t milk the decision to not renew the public airwaves broadcast license of the right-wing television station RCTV. Every developed country licenses use of the public airwaves and requires that stations follow certain “public good” regulations. Non-renewal of a license for a station that actively supported the 2002 coup and systematically violated broadcast regulations should have been a non-issue. The fact that RCTV continues to broadcast on satellite and cable to a Venezuelan audience required the Post to use the phrase “off the air” to leave the implication that the station had been shut down.