Manufacturing Contempt

Blogger Francisco Toro claimed in the New York Times that Venezuelan "government pressure ensured that no broadcast media carried coverage" of a speech made by opposition leader Henrique Capriles. But the two largest private media outlets did in fact cover the event.

Al Jazeera America boasts a new, advertiser-revenue-driven dynamic; it has taken compromising stances in its courtship of U.S. cable distributors; its recruitment of management and on-air personnel demonstrates conservatism; and it has paid for close consultation with lobbying firms with deep rightwing ties. All of these factors threaten to guide it toward the most insipid and insular tendencies of U.S. cable news.

In its treatments of Guatemalan and Honduran violence and instability, NPR's This American Life edited out essential lines of inquiry and concealed the countries' relevance for U.S. listeners: It is as if Washington's continuous support of the Central American countries' brutal security forces had never happened.

On Friday, I participated in a panel discussion hosted by Al Jazeera English's weeknight news program "Inside Story Americas," along with Latin America scholars Gerardo Munck of the University of Southern California and Diana Villiers Negroponte of the Brookings Institution, on the ramifications of the U.S. hunt for whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Over a dozen experts on Latin America and media studies have signed a petition encouraging New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan to probe the paper's double standards in covering Honduras, a U.S. ally, and Venezuela, an official enemy.

As a result of many dozens—possibly hundreds—of messages from readers over the past few weeks that criticized The New Yorker's inaccurate coverage of Venezuela, reporter Jon Lee Anderson issued a response in an April 23 online post. This marks the first time the magazine has publicly addressed its controversial and erroneous labeling of Venezuela as one of the world's most "socially unequal" countries.

While issuing a correction to reporter Jon Lee Anderson's third Venezuela article over the past year would have been embarrassing for The New Yorker? magazine, the continued silence and inaction of the elite intellectual journal is perhaps a greater indictment.

The New Yorker Magazine's Jon Lee Anderson has provided coverage on Hugo Chávez and Venezuela that is rife with errors and distortions, some of which are exposed through simple arithmetic.

NACLA writer Keane Bhatt speaks to Al-Jazeera about the legacy of Chávez for the youth of Venezuela.

The New York Times reinforces attitudes that Latin American politics can be little more than a primitive charade, starring authoritarian leaders and a hoodwinked public, punctuated by laughable distractions. Thankfully—at least within the paper's coverage—this "political theater of the absurd" isn't commonplace here at home.

José Cárdenas has concealed the financial benefits he's accrued from lobbying precisely because they make his espoused views both easily predictable and utterly dismissible. Fortunately for him, mainstream news organizations like The Miami Herald, Foreign Policy, and NPR accommodate this charade.

Renowned linguist, political analyst, and activist Noam Chomsky offered his thoughts on the hemisphere and the role of the United States last month. Among his many observations, he considered Honduras as "a kind of a horror story," and Haiti "an NGO dependency."