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Showing Original Post only (View all)The New Yorker Corrects Two Errors on Venezuela, Refuses a Third [View all]
The New Yorker Corrects Two Errors on Venezuela, Refuses a ThirdBy KEANE BHATT - NACLA, April 9th 2013
Thanks to readers responses to The New Yorker following my last post (LINK), On Venezuela, The New Yorkers Jon Lee Anderson Fails at Arithmetic, the magazine has amended two errors in two separate articles.
The first correction involves an online piece that Anderson wrote on the eve of Venezuelas elections in October of last year. As was pointed out almost immediately after (LINK) Andersons entry was published, he had incorrectly claimed that Venezuela leads Latin America in homicides in his The End of Chavez? (LINK) (the headline was changed to Chavez the Survivor after the late Venezuelan president handily won his reelection).
Actually, it is Honduras that leads Latin America (LINK)and indeed the entire worldin per capita homicides: 92 per 100,000 people are killed annually there, while Venezuelas figure stands at 45.1, according to the most recently available United Nations data. And unlike the Venezuelan government, the Honduran government contributes to this body count by regularly murdering its own civilians through its military and police, both of which (LINKS) receive tens of millions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers. (The New Yorkerhasnt published a single article referring to Hondurass current post-coup regime, headed by Porfirio Lobo, who came to power in January of 2010.)
Reacting to readers complaints, the magazines editors issued an addendum to Andersons October 7 piece, which reads (LINK):
*An earlier version of this post said that Venezuela led Latin America in homicides; globally, it was in fourth place, but third in Latin America (behind Honduras and El Salvador), according to U.N. statistics (LINK) on intentional homicides for 2010-11.
Another Anderson articleSlumlord: What has Hugo Chávez wrought in Venezuela?also misled the print magazines readers by giving the impression that Chávezs presidential tenure was predicated on a coup detat rather than his victories in over a dozen internationally vetted elections. The New Yorker released a correction (LINK) for the inaccuracy in its April 1 issue, two months after the original piece had been published:
In Slumlord, by Jon Lee Anderson (January 28th), Hugo Chávez is described as having been concerned with preventing a coup like the one that put him in office. In fact, Chávezs coup attempt, in 1992, failed; he was elected to office in 1998.
For Jon Lee Andersons most recent factual error, unfortunately, The New Yorker has thus far refused to issue a clarification or retraction. One month agothe day Chávez diedAnderson wrote a third piece (LINK), for NewYorker.com, claiming:
What (Chávez) has left is a country that, in some ways, will never be the same, and which, in other ways, is the same Venezuela as ever: one of the worlds most oil-rich but socially unequal countries. . .
As I pointed out in Anderson Fails at Arithmetic (LINK)," this allegation misleads the reader in two ways. Inequality has been reduced enormously under Chávez, using its standard measure, the Gini coefficient. So one can hardly say that in this aspect, Venezuela remains the same as ever. Making Andersons contention even worse is the fact that Venezuela is the most equal country in Latin America, according to the United Nations (LINK). Andersons readers come away with exactly the opposite impression.
To The New Yorkers credit, a senior editor sent me an email regarding my articles criticisms, and flatly conceded the first two misstatements in Andersons pieces. However, the note offered a strained defense of Andersons position on inequality, arguing that Andersons point was valid, given that his claim supposedly combined Venezuelas conditions of being both oil-rich and socially unequal as one assertion.
I pointed out in my response that any reasonable reading of the statement would portray Venezuela as both one of the worlds most oil-rich and one of the worlds most socially unequal countries. And the fact of the matter is that the CIAs World Factbook ranks (LINK) the country 68th out of 136 countries with available data on income inequalitythat is to say, Venezuela is exactly in the middle, and impossible to construe as among the most unequal.
I also explained that when Anderson was confronted with this evidence on Twitter, the magazines principal correspondent on Venezuela expressed extreme skepticism (LINK) toward publicly available, constantly used, and highly scrutinized data; he instead cited his own reporting and impressions as the authority for his assertions. Given Andersons defiant admission not to even pretend to care about empirical dataafter his magazine had already retracted two of his articles factual claimsit was incumbent on editors and fact-checkers to uphold The New Yorkers reputation as a trustworthy and evidence-based journal by addressing the issue immediately.
Lastly, I argued that the awkward formulation of combining oil-rich and socially unequala reading I rejectexposes Andersons contention as even further at odds with reality. Included in my email was the following list showing the top 10 most oil-rich countries ranked in order of their total crude oil production,according to the International Energy Agency (LINK). Each countrys corresponding Gini coefficient from the CIA World Factbook (LINK) appears in parenthesesthe higher the Gini coefficient, the greater the countrys inequality:
1. Saudi Arabia (unavailable)
2. Russia (0.42)
3. United States (0.45)
4. Iran (0.445)
5. China (0.48)
6. Canada (0.32)
7. United Arab Emirates (unavailable)
8. Venezuela (0.39)
9. Mexico (0.517)
10. Nigeria (0.437)
When provided with these arguments and data, The New Yorkers senior editor fell silent in the face of repeated follow-ups. I received a reply only once: a rejection of my request to publicly post our correspondence. While issuing a correction to Andersons third Venezuela article over the past year would have been embarrassing, the continued silence and inaction of the elite intellectual journal is perhaps a greater indictment. Andersons error remains unchanged on the liberal magazines website, while its senior editor has refused to address the matter in private correspondence or offer a public rationale for leaving Andersons claim intact.
When asked to comment on this issue, Branko Milanovic (LINK)a lead economist at the World Bank and arguably the worlds foremost expert on global inequalityinterpreted Andersons quote the standard way: The article says that Venezuela is one of most socially unequal countries, he wrote by email. But The New Yorkers extremely vague formulation, he added, obscured an important reality: What we know is that Venezuela is among two or three most equal Latin American countries measured by income inequality. According to his own research of inequality throughout the world, Venezuela is likely to be ranked somewhere around the middle, or perhaps slightly above (these things do change from year to year).
Prominent macroeconomist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (LINKS) found The New Yorkers factual contention and subsequent unresponsiveness astonishing: This is pretty outrageous, he wrote by email. Do they have any data to support their assertion, or is the argument that because they dont like Chávez they can say anything they want about him?
Readers can pose such questions to The New Yorker by contacting its editors at www.newyorker.com/contact/contactus, by email at [email protected], or on Twitter at@tnynewsdesk. Such media activism plays a crucial role in engendering more careful portrayals of countries like Venezuela, which has long been the target of cartoonishly hostile, slanted, and outright false media coverage. Previous demands for accuracy and accountability have already prompted two admissions of error by The New Yorker, and can lead to a third, in spite of the magazines obstinacy. More importantly, the magazine now faces a real political cost to publishing sloppy reporting, as well as a powerful deterrent to running reckless news and commentary during a politically significant transitional moment for Venezuela.
Source: NACLA
This work is licensed under a Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives Creative Commons license
(My emphasis.)
(LINKS at the site.)
http://www.nacla.org/blog/2013/4/8/new-yorker-corrects-two-errors-venezuela-refuses-third
found at: http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/8562
--------------------------------
My email to the New Yorker:
Not you, too!
I have been flabbergasted by the Corporate Media's propagandistic coverage of the Chavez government in Venezuela and I've held out the hope that The New Yorker would counter this garbage with an intelligent, fact-based article, as it has done on other subjects.
Alas, you instead decided to pile some more (or rather the same) refuse onto the garbage heap, by publishing Jon Lee Anderson's lies about Venezuela's murder rate and about how Chavez came to power--lies right out of the Corporate Media's "talking points" folder on Venezuela; lies for which you then published lame and very late corrections--plus a third lie that you haven't corrected, that Venezuela is now "one of the world's most...socially unequal countries."
According to the UN Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean, Venezuela is "THE most equal country in Latin America," after more than a decade of the Chavez government winning honest elections and implementing "New Deal"-like policies. Furthermore, in the Gallup Well-being poll, Venezuelans rated their own country FIFTH IN THE WORLD on their own sense of well-being and future prospects.
Obviously, Anderson consulted neither easily available, fact-based sources nor the people of Venezuela in his assessment of the Chavez government.
I used to have great respect for New Yorker fact-checkers. What happened? Did you down-size that staff?
Upshot from my point of view: The New Yorker's going onto the garbage heap unless you do a REAL correction of Anderson's lies and bias, by finding an intelligent and objective reporter to explain to the world why the Chavez government keeps winning honest elections by big margins, despite the relentless, monotonous, "Big Lie" campaign against them in ALL Corporate Media, here and there. Answer THAT, and you win the prize for the only honest news source in the western world.
And DO re-hire those fact-checkers, if that's the problem.
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The New Yorker Corrects Two Errors on Venezuela, Refuses a Third [View all]
Peace Patriot
Apr 2013
OP