- Dictionaries define "yellow journalism" variously
as irresponsible and sensationalist reporting that distorts, exaggerates
or misstates the truth. It's misinformation or agitprop disinformation
masquerading as fact to boost circulation and readership or serve a larger
purpose like lying for state and corporate interests. The dominant US media
excel in it, producing a daily diet of fiction portrayed as real news and
information in their role as our national thought-control police gatekeepers.
In the lead among the print and electronic corporate-controlled media
is the New York Times publishing "All The News That's Fit To Print"
by its standards. Others wanting real journalism won't find it on their
pages allowing only the fake kind. It's because this paper's primary mission
is to be the lead instrument of state propaganda making it the closest
thing we have in the country to an official ministry of information and
propaganda.
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- Singlehandedly, the Times destroys "The Myth of
the Liberal Media" that's also the title of Edward Herman's 1999 book
on "the illiberal media," the market system, and what passes
for democracy in America Michael Parenti calls "Democracy For the
Few," in his book with that title out earlier this year in its 8th
edition.
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- In his book, Herman writes about the "propaganda
model" he and Noam Chomsky introduced and developed 11 years earlier
in their landmark book titled "Manufacturing Consent." They
explained how the dominant media use this technique to program the public
mind to go along with whatever agenda best serves wealth and power interests.
So imperial wars of aggression are portrayed as liberating ones, humanitarian
intervention, and spreading democracy to nations without any. Never mind
they're really for new markets, resources like oil, and cheap exploitable
labor paid for with public tax dollars diverted from essential social needs.
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- In "The Myth of the Liberal Media," Herman
explains the "propaganda model" focuses on "the inequality
of wealth and power" and how those with most of it can "filter
out the news to print, marginalize dissent (and assure) government and
dominant private interests" control the message and get it to the
public. It's done through a set of "filters" removing what's
to be suppressed and "leaving only the cleansed (acceptable) residue
fit to print" or broadcast electronically. Parenti's "Democracy
For the Few" is democracy-US style the rest of us are stuck with.
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- Books have been written on how, going back decades, the
New York Times betrayed the public trust serving elitist interests alone.
It plays the lead and most influential media role disseminating state and
corporate propaganda to the nation and world. In terms of media clout,
the Times is unmatched with its prominent front page being what media critic
Norman Solomon calls "the most valuable square inches of media real
estate in the USA" - more accurately, anywhere.
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- Examples of Times duplicity are endless showing up every
day on its pages. The shameless Judith Miller saga is just the latest
episode of how bad they can get, but she had her predecessors, and the
beat goes on since she left in disgrace. Through the years, the Times
never met a US war of aggression it didn't love and support. It was never
bothered by CIA's functioning as a global Mafia-style hit squad/training
headquarters ousting democratically elected governments, assassinating
foreign heads of state and key officials, propping up friendly dictators,
funding and training secret paramilitary armies and death squads, and now
snatching individuals for "extraordinary rendition" to torture-prison
hellholes, some run by the agency and all taking orders from it.
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- CIA, as Chalmers Johnson notes, is a state within a state
functioning as the president's unaccountable private army with unchecked
powers and a near-limitless off-the-books secret budget we now know tops
$44 billion annually. It menaces democratic rule, threatens the Republic's
survival and makes any notion of a free society impossible as long as this
agency exists. Not a problem at New York Times. It worked closely with
CIA since the 1950s allowing some of its foreign correspondents to be Agency
assets or agents. It no doubt still does.
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- The Times is also unbothered by social decay at home,
an unprecedented wealth disparity, an administration mocking the rule of
law, a de facto one party state with two wings and a president usurping
"unitary executive" powers claiming the law is what he says it
is making him a dictator. It practically reveres the cesspool of corrupted
incestuous ties between government and business, mocking any notion of
democracy of, for, or by the people. That's the state of the nation's
"liberal media" headquartered in the Times building in New York.
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- The New York Times v. Hugo Chavez
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- This article focuses on one example of Times duplicity
among many other prominent ones equally sinister and disturbing - its venomous
agitprop targeting Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez this writer calls the
leading model democratic leader on the planet even though he's not perfect,
nor is anyone else. That's why after "Islamofascist terrorists"
he's practically "enemy number one" on the Times hit list and
Washington's. Besides Venezuela being oil rich, Chavez is the greatest
of all threats the US faces - a good example that's spreading. His governance
shows how real social democracy works exposing the fake American kind.
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- That's intolerable to the masters of the universe and
their leading media proponent, the New York Times. It always plays the
lead media role keeping the world safe for wealth and power. So on June
6, it hauled out former Peruvian president and first ever indigenous Andean
one in the country's history - Alejandro Toledo (2001 - 2006). His electoral
campaign promised a populist vision for Peruvians, to create new jobs,
address dire social needs of the country's poor, and end years of corruption
and hard line rule under Alberto Fujimori, now a wanted man on charges
of corruption and human rights abuses.
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- Toledo was little better, failing on all counts pushing
the same repressive neoliberal policies he was elected to end. He was in
tow with Washington's agenda of privatizations, deregulation, IMF/World
Bank diktats, debt service, and overall contempt for the essential social
needs of his people. He was also tainted with corruption, and during his
tenure violence was used against protest demonstrators, criminal suspects
in prisons were beaten and tortured, and dozens of journalists were threatened
or attacked for criticizing local politicians or him.
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- No problem for the New York Times that published his
June 6 op ed piece titled "Silence = Despotism." In it, he said
"Political democracy will take root in Latin America only when it
is accompanied by economic and social democracy (under) political systems....free
and fair for all." As Peru's president, he thwarted efforts to do
what he now says he champions. Toledo continued saying "our citizens"
must be heard, and if free speech is silenced in one country, "silence
could spread to other nations" pointing his hypocritical finger squarely
at Hugo Chavez.
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- Venezuelans, he says, "are in the streets (today)
confronting repressions. Courageous students raise the flags of freedom,
refusing to mortgage their future by remaining silent." He quickly
gets to the point citing Hugo Chavez's refusal to renew RCTV's Channel
2 VHF license saying "This is about more than one TV station. President
Chavez has become a destabilizing figure throughout the hemisphere because
he feels he can silence anyone with opposing thoughts (by) silencing them
through repression or government decrees." He then called on other
Latin American leaders to confront "authoritarianism" and "stand
up for continent-wide solidarity" citing his own presidency and how
"it never occurred to (him) to silence (critical) media outlets (or)
nationalize them."
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- Toledo's tainted record as president belies his shameless
pieties on the Times op ed page. He did more than try silencing critics.
He stayed mute when they were attacked or when two or more of them were
killed. The New York Times knows his record even though it suppressed
the worst of it while he was in office. Yet it gave him prominent space
to denounce Hugo Chavez's social democracy and legal right not to renew
the operating license of a TV channel for its repeated illegal seditious
acts. RCTV was a serial abuser of its right to use the public airwaves.
It was then guilty of supporting and being complicit with efforts to foment
insurrection to overthrow Venezuela's democratically elected government.
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- Toledo ignored this saying, as Peru's president, he was
"always....respectful of opinions" differing from his own. He
would "never agree with those who prefer silence instead of dissonant
voices. Those....who embrace liberty and democracy must stand ready to
work in solidarity with the Venezuelan people." He failed to say
which ones he meant, surely not the 70% or more backing Chavez. And by
failing to denounce RCTV's lawlessness, he showed he condoned it. He also
forgot his successor as president, Alan Garcia, lawlessly silenced two
Peruvian TV stations and three radio stations, apparently for supporting
a lawful strike Garcia opposes.
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- The New York Times has an ugly record bashing Hugo Chavez
since he was elected with a mandate to make participatory social democracy
the cornerstone of his presidency. That's anathema to Washington and its
chief media ally, the New York Times. Since 1999 when he took office,
it hammered Chavez with accusations of opposing the US-sponsored Free Trade
of the Americas (FTAA) without explaining it would sell out to big capital
at the expense of his people if adopted.
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- Following his election in December, 1998, Times Latin
American reporter Larry Roher wrote: (Latin American) presidents and party
leaders are looking over their shoulders (worried about the) specter....the
region's ruling elite thought they had safely interred: that of the populist
demagogue, the authoritarian man on horseback known as the caudillo (strongman)."
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- The Times later denounced him for using petrodollars
for foreign aid to neighbors, equating promoting solidarity, cooperation
and respecting other nations' sovereignty with subversion and buying influence.
It criticized his raising royalties and taxes on foreign investors, never
explaining it was to end their longtime preferential treatment making them
pay their fair share as they should. It bashed him for wanting his own
people to benefit most from their own resources, not predatory oil and
other foreign investors the way it was before Chavez took office. No longer,
and that can't be tolerated in Washington or on the pages of the New York
Times.
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- When state oil company PDVSA became majority shareholder
with foreign investors May 1 with a minimum 60% ownership in four Orinoco
River basin oil projects, the Times savaged Chavez. It condemned his "revolutionary
flourish (and his) ambitious (plan to) wrest control of several major oil
projects from American and European companies (with a) showdown (ahead
for these) coveted energy resources...." Unmentioned was these resources
belong to the Venezuelan people. The Times also accuses Chavez of allowing
"politics and ideology" to drive US-Venezuelan confrontation
"to limit American influence around the world, starting in Venezuela's
oil fields."
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- It calls him "divisive, a ruinous demagogue, provocative
(and) the next Fidel Castro." It savored the 2002 aborted two day
coup ousting him calling it a "resignation" and that Venezuela
"no longer (would be) threatened by a would-be dictator." It
reported he "stepped down (and was replaced by (a) respected business
leader" (Pedro Carmona - president of Fedecamaras, the Venezuelan
Federation of Chambers of Commerce).
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- Unmentioned was that Carmona was hand-picked in Washington
and by Venezuelan oligarchs to do their bidding at the expense of the people.
He proved his bona fides by suspending the democratically elected members
of the National Assembly and crushing Bolivarian Revolutionary Constitutional
reforms, quickly restored once Chavez was reinstated in office. Carmona
fled to Colombia seeking political asylum from where Venezuela's Supreme
Court now wants him extradited on charges of civil rebellion. Unmentioned
also was that the Times had to dismiss one of its Venezuelan reporters,
Francisco Toro, in January, 2003 when Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
(FAIR) revealed he was an anti-Chavista activist masquerading as an objective
journalist.
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- Back to the present, the Times claims Chavez is moving
to consolidate his dictatorial powers by shuttering RCTV's Channel 2 and
silencing his critics. It portrays him as a Latin American strongman waging
class warfare with socialist rhetoric. It asks how long Venezuelans will
put up with the destruction of their democratic freedoms? It points to
"evidence Mr. Chavez's definition of the enemy has been enlarged to
include news media outlets....critical of his government....extending his
control beyond political institutions (alone)." This marks a "shift
from the early years of his presidency, when he (also) faced vitriolic
criticism" from the media.
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- The Times speculates how brutal he'll become silencing
critics and quelling protests wondering if he'll use proxies to do it.
It then questions whether Chavez overstepped enough to marshall large-scale
opposition to him to push him past the tipping point that will inevitably
lead to his loss of credibility and power. Might this be a thinly disguished
Times effort to create the reality it supports by wishing for it through
the power of suggestion.
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- Times business columnist Roger Lowenstein is on board
to make it happen. He claims, with no substantiation, Chavez "militarized
the government, emasculated the country's courts, intimidated the media,
eroded confidence in the economy and hollowed out Venezuela's once-democratic
institutions." Turn this on its head to know the truth Lowenstein
won't report - that Chavez militarized nothing. He put his underutilized
military to work implementing Venezuela's Plan Bolivar 2000 constructing
housing for the poor, building roads, conducting mass vaccinations, and
overall serving people needs, not invading and occupying other countries
and threatening to flatten other "uncooperative" ones.
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- Venezuela's courts function independently of the democratically
elected President and National Assembly. The media is the freest and most
open in the region and the world with most of it corporate owned as it
is nearly everywhere. Further, business is booming enough to get the Financial
Times to say bankers were having "a party," and the country never
had a functioning democracy until Hugo Chavez made it flourish there.
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- Times Venezuelan reporter Simon Romero is little better
than Lowenstein or others sending back agitprop disguised as real journalism
in his Venezuelan coverage, including RCTV closure street protests. He
made events on Caracas streets sound almost like a one-sided uprising of
protesters against Chavez with "images of policemen with guns drawn"
intimidating them. He highlighted Chavez's critics claiming "the
move to allow RCTV's license to expire amounts to a stifling of dissent
in the news media." He quoted Elisa Parejo, one of RCTV's first soap
opera stars, saying "What we're living in Venezuela is a monstrosity.
It is a dictatorship."
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- He quoted right wing daily newspaper El Nacional as well
portraying the RCTV decision as "the end of pluralism" in the
country. Gonzalo Marroquin, president of the corporate media-controlled
Inter-American Press Association (IAPA), was also cited saying Chavez wants
to "standardize the right to information (indicating) a very bleak
outlook for the whole hemisphere." He invented corporate-cooked polling
numbers showing "most Venezuelans oppose Mr. Chavez's decision not
to renew RCTV's license." In fact, the opposite is true and street
demonstrators for and against RCTV's shuttering proved it. Venezuelans
supporting Chavez dwarfed the opposition many times over. But you won't
find Romero or any other Times correspondent reporting that. If any try
doing it, they'll end up doing obits as their future beat.
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- Back in February, Romero was at it earlier. Then, he
hyped Venezuela's arms spending making it sound like Chavez threatened
regional stability and was preparing to bomb or invade Miami. Romero's
incendiary headline read "Venezuela Spending on Arms Soars to World's
Top Ranks." It began saying "Venezuela's arms spending has climbed
to more than $4 billion in the past two years, transforming the nation
into Latin America's largest weapons buyer" with suggestive comparisons
to Iran. The report revealed this information came from the US Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) making that unreliable source alone reason to
question its accuracy and what's behind it.
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- The figure quoted refers only to what Venezuela spends
on arms, not its total military spending. Unmentioned was that the country's
total military spending is half of Agentina's, less than one-third of Colombia's,
and one-twelfth of Brazil's according to Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation
figures ranking Venezuela 63rd in the world in military spending. The
Center also reported Venezuela's 2004 military budget at $1.1 billion making
Romero's $4 billion DIA figure phony and a spurious attempt to portray
Chavez as a regional threat needing to be counteracted. At that level,
he's also outspent by the Pentagon 500 to one, or lots more depending on
how US military spending and homeland security readiness are calculated,
including all their unreported or hidden costs.
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- On June 12, Venezuela Analysis.com reported, in an article
by "Oil Wars," the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
(SIPRI) indicated Venezuela's military spending for 2006 was $1.9 billion.
The report's author voiced skepticism so compared this number to Venezuela's
Ministry of Defense expenditures for that year in its "Memoria y Cuenta."
It's figure was $1,977,179,179 thousand Bolivars that converted to US dollars
comes to $919,618,000. To that must be added another $1.09 billion the
Ministry of Defense got from Venezuela's FONDEN, or development fund. Adding
both numbers together, of course, shows the country's 2006 military spending
at $2 billion.
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- Based on The Independent Institute's Senior Fellow Robert
Higgs' calculation of US defense spending for FY 2006 of $934.9 billion,
it still means the Pentagon outspends Venezuela's military by around 500
to one. Higgs includes the separate budgets for the Department of Defense,
Energy, State, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, Treasury's Military
Retirement Fund, other smaller defense-related budgets plus net interest
paid attributable to past debt-financed defense outlays. Even then, he
omitted off-the-books budgets and secret intelligence ones for CIA and
NSA.
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- Back to the Times' Romero and it's clear his reporting
smells the same as Iraq's WMDs and Iran's legal commercial nuclear program
being threat enough to warrant sanctions and a US military response. Romero
is right in step with Bush administration World Bank president neocon nominee
Robert Zoellick. He took aim at Hugo Chavez from Mexico City June 16 with
warnings Venezuela is "a country where economic problems are mounting,
and as we're seeing on the political side it's not moving in a healthy
direction."
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- Romero reports similar agitprop and did it May 17 in
his article titled "Clash of Hope and Fear as Venezuela Seizes Land."
He began saying "The squatters arrive before dawn with machetes and
rifles, surround the well-ordered rows of sugar cane and threaten to kill
anyone who interferes. Then they light a match to the crops and declare
the land their own." He continued saying "Mr. Chavez is carrying
out what may become the largest forced land redistribution in Venezuela's
history, building utopian farming villages for squatters, lavishing money
on new cooperatives and sending army commando units to supervise seized
estates in six states."
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- Violence has accompanied seizures, says Romero, "with
more than 160 peasants killed by hired gunmen in Venezuela (and) Eight
landowners have also been killed...." Since Chavez took office, there
have been peasant and other violent deaths, but most of them have been
at the hands of US-Colombian government financed paramilitary death squads
operating in Venezuela.
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- Romero stays clear of this while making his rhetoric
sound like an armed insurrection is underway in Venezuela forcibly and
illegally seizing land from its rightful owners. What's going on, in fact,
is quite different that can only be touched on briefly to explain. Hugo
Chavez first announced his "Return to the Countryside" plan under
the Law on Land and Agricultural Development in November, 2001. The law
set limits on landholding size; taxed unused property; aimed to redistribute
unused, mainly government-owned land to peasant families and cooperatives;
and expropriate uncultivated, unused land from large private owners compensating
them at fair market value. So, in fact, the government seizes nothing.
It buys unused land from large estates and pays for it so landless peasants
can have and use it productively for the first time ever benefitting everyone
equitably.
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- Nowhere in his article did Romero explain this although
he did acknowledge prior to 2002, "an estimated 5 per cent of the
population owned 80 per cent of the country's private land." By omitting
what was most important to include, Romero's report distorted the truth
enough to assure his readers never get it from him. Nor do they from any
other Times correspondent when facts conflict with imperial interests.
That's what we've come to expect from the "newspaper of record"
never letting truth interfere with serving wealth and power interests that
includes lying for them. Shameless reporting on Venezuela under Hugo Chavez
is one of many dozens of examples of Times duplicity and disservice to
its readers going back decades.
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- Former Times journalist John Hess denounced it his way:
I "never saw a foreign intervention that the Times did not support,
never saw a fare....rent....or utility increase that it did not endorse,
never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate
a raise for underpaid workers. And don't get me started on universal health
care and Social Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?"
And why should anyone think its so-called news and information is anything
more than propaganda for the imperial interests it serves?
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- Robert McChesney and Mark Weisbrot explained it well
in their June 1 CommonDreams.org article on "Venezuela and the Media"
saying: "the US media coverage (with NYT in the lead) of Venezuela's
RCTV controversy (and most everything else) says more about the deficiencies
of our own news media than it does about Venezuela. It demonstrates again
(it's more) willing to carry water for Washington (and the corporate interests
it serves) than to ascertain and report the truth of the matter."
At the Times, truth is always the first casualty, but especially when
the nation's at war.
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- Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
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- Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and
listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com
Saturdays at noon US central time.
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