Reply #181: The New York Times Versus Chavez

[Judi Lynn]

May 20 / 21, 2006

Talk About "Meddlesome"
The New York Times Versus Chavez
By GREG GRANDIN

You can tell that the US-led campaign against Hugo Chávez has reached a critical stage when the New York Times starts providing rhetorical cover for Condoleezza Rice's and Donald Rumsfeld's increasingly desperate efforts to isolate the Venezuelan president.

Chile's center-left president Michelle Bachelet -- who Rice name-drops every chance she gets to prove she can have socialist friends -- just last week warned Washington not to "demonize" Chávez. Yet despite this endorsement from Latin America's most lauded reformer, the Times on Saturday ran a 1300-word, front-page hatchet job by Juan Forero titled "Seeking United Latin America, Venezuela's Chávez Is a Divider; Some Neighbors Resent His Style as Meddlesome."

The article quotes seven sources, all openly anti-Chávez save for Brazil's president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, like Bachelet, has repeatedly defended his Venezuelan counterpart against Washington. But Forero ignores this support, instead choosing to cherry-pick through Lula's public statements to find, and take out of context, a rare criticism.

Other supposedly objective comments come from the center-right -- NYU's Jorge Castañeda -- to the Right-Right -- Johns Hopkin's Riordan Roett -- of the political spectrum. Its worth noting that Roett's primary claim to fame was a 1995 memo he wrote while an emerging-market consultant to Chase Manhattan Bank urging the Mexican government to "eliminate the Zapatistas" and to slowdown democratic reforms. Now that's "meddlesome."
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http://www.counterpunch.org/grandin05202006.html