The CPJ made such a blatantly false claim about Venezuela recently that the only conclusion one can draw is that the CPJ is run by people with no integrity. Ignorance is not a plausible explanation for the CPJ to have said that “Nearly all TV stations in Venezuela are either controlled or allied with the government of Nicolás Maduro and have ignored the nationwide protests.”
It is child’s play to refute this nonsense as Mark Weisbrot did in this piece. He provides links to very recent interviews with the hardline opposition leaders of the protests:
- Interview with Henrique Capriles on Venevisión
- Venevisión coverage of opposition protests
- Globovisión report on student protests
- Interview with Juan Guaido, member of Leopoldo López’s political party, on Globovisión
- Venevisión interview with Tomás Guanipa, leader of the opposition Primero Justicia (Justice First) party
- Globovisión interview with María Corina Machado
Additionally, by carefully examining the Carter Center’s analysis of TV news coverage during last year’s presidential election campaign, Weisbrot shows that both the government and opposition candidate (Henrique Capriles) received roughly equal levels of coverage. Capriles received three quarters of his coverage in the private media which, according to the Carter Center, has about 75% of the audience share for news – and that is probably conservative as Weisbrot explains in his piece.
The CPJ has no justification for alleging that “Nearly all TV stations in Venezuela are either controlled or allied with the government”. Journalists based in Venezuela should be demanding that the CPJ retract this lie. Will they?
A further note about integrity
I wrote very recently that “I do not believe that most corporate journalists are below average in their intelligence or in their capacity to empathize with others” and that “There are rotten people in all walks of life, but I don’t think such people are necessarily a majority within rotten institutions.”
One of the rotten people, James Bloodworth, just took to calling me a “genocide denier” and “genocide truther” on Twitter. That was his excuse for not addressing the points I made in response to a piece he wrote about Venezuela. He doesn’t’ debate “genocide deniers” you see.
The term “genocide denier” is clearly meant to invoke “Holocaust denial”, just as “genocide truther” is intended to insinuate “9/11 truther”. In fact, Oliver Kamm, another one of the sleaziest corporate pundits around, tweeted the following
- @J_Bloodworth is right not to debate with someone whose message & methods, though not intellect, are same as David Irving’s.
The evidence these two geniuses cite to justify their libelous outbursts is a review I wrote of a book about the Srebrenica Massacre. I’m happy with the review and I won’t insult anyone’s intelligence by explaining why it doesn’t have a neo-Nazi message as they allege. However, I would ask people to reflect on the kind of liars who thrive, minority or not, within the corporate press.
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