November 16, 2007


Swiftboat on the Rocks: the failed smearing of Hugo Chavez

By Elizabeth Ferrari

By now, the American public knows that Hugo Chavez is a dictator, that he suppresses free speech and that he shoots college students that dare to protest against his regime. We know that the constitutional reforms sponsored by his party are up for a vote on December 2 and we know they will destroy Venezuela.

We know that, don’t we – because our most respected media outlets say so.

The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have all issued dire predictions about the reforms now being debated in Venezuela. Who can we trust if not our most reliable media outlets -- who did such an outstanding job of informing us, for example, on the immanent threat posed by Iraq?

We can trust them because they have misrepresented the constitutional reforms up for a vote in Venezuela, because they have misrepresented the protests there and because they persist in their misrepresentations even when solid reporting proves them not only wrong, but willfully wrong as the evidence of the inaccuracies of their “reporting” are posted to the net, let alone, admitted in print. In other words, we can trust them to be inaccurate with a great deal of consistency.

Edit: to add a sentence +, fyi, having framed the argument, I'm planning this as a series ahead of 12/2. So sorry, burning rubber today.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_el...