Victims of U.S. “Drug War” Mount as Media Yawns
March 19, 2012
Fast & Furious
Victims of U.S. “Drug War” Mount as Media Yawns
by DANIEL KOVALIK
Last week, you would have been lucky to find even a small blurb in a few newspapers about but another journalist killed in post-coup Honduras — the 19th in the last two years, making Honduras by far the most dangerous country in the world to be a journalist. Indeed, Honduras is now the murder capital of the world.
It is important to note the comparative silence about the mass killing of journalists in Honduras with the mass outpouring of grief the media showed for the two Western journalists (Marie Colven & Remi Ochlik) killed in Syria recently, with the photo of Ms. Colven donning the front page of every paper in the U.S. the day after her killing. Of course, Ms. Colven and Mr. Ochlik deserved a proper mourning, no doubt, but so did the journalists in Honduras. Yet, the latter never received their due, and no photo of any of those Honduran journalists ever made the front page of the newspaper.
The reason for the disparate treatment of these journalists is easy to explain. First and foremost, the two journalists killed in Syria were from developed countries of the West – the journalists of Honduras were certainly not. In addition, the two Western journalists were killed in a country the U.S. now wishes to attack, and therefore to vilify, thus making the killing of the two journalists critical to the running media account of atrocities in Syria to justify military intervention.
In the case of Honduras, ruled now by an illegitimate coup government supported by the U.S. and a key player in the U.S.’s “drug war,” the killing of journalists is actually an inconvenient fact which, if pondered over too much, might delegitimize the U.S. role (both military and political) in that country.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/19/victims-of-u-s-drug-war-mount-as-media-yawns/
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