Though the New York Times broke the story on new military orders in Colombia to double kills, arrests, and surrenders, Colombian magazine Revista Semana had access to the same information. Why didn’t they publish it?
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.
Despite the recent substantial coverage of Latin American “dirty wars” of the 1960s through 1980s, U.S. news outlets have usually ignored the role of the U.S. government in supporting these murderous right-wing regimes through military aid and diplomatic support. This pattern also applies to press coverage of current U.S.-backed “dirty wars,” in Honduras and elsewhere.
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.
The notion of security applied by The New York Times in its disucssion of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and Israel-Palestine obscures much more than it illuminates. In both cases, it helps to legitimate occupation and the associated forms of violence.
