The Record of the Newspaper of Record

[mmven...@gmail.com]

by Stephen Lendman

Dictionaries define "yellow journalism" variously as
irresponsible and sensationalist reporting that
distorts, exaggerates or misstates the truth. It's
misinformation or agitprop disinformation masquerading
as fact to boost circulation and readership or serve a
larger purpose like lying for state and corporate
interests. The dominant US media excel in it,
producing a daily diet of fiction portrayed as real
news and information in their role as our national
thought-control police gatekeepers. In the lead among
the print and electronic corporate-controlled media is
the New York Times publishing "All The News That's Fit
To Print" by its standards. Others wanting real
journalism won't find it on their pages allowing only
the fake kind. It's because this paper's primary
mission is to be the lead instrument of state
propaganda making it the closest thing we have in the
country to an official ministry of information and
propaganda.

Singlehandedly, the Times destroys "The Myth of the
Liberal Media" that's also the title of Edward
Herman's 1999 book on "the illiberal media," the
market system, and what passes for democracy in
America Michael Parenti calls "Democracy For the Few,"
in his book with that title out earlier this year in
its 8th edition.

In his book, Herman writes about the "propaganda
model" he and Noam Chomsky introduced and developed 11
years earlier in their landmark book titled
"Manufacturing Consent." They explained how the
dominant media use this technique to program the
public mind to go along with whatever agenda best
serves wealth and power interests. So imperial wars
of aggression are portrayed as liberating ones,
humanitarian intervention, and spreading democracy to
nations without any. Never mind they're really for
new markets, resources like oil, and cheap exploitable
labor paid for with public tax dollars diverted from
essential social needs.

In "The Myth of the Liberal Media," Herman explains
the "propaganda model" focuses on "the inequality of
wealth and power" and how those with most of it can
"filter out the news to print, marginalize dissent
(and assure) government and dominant private
interests" control the message and get it to the
public. It's done through a set of "filters" removing
what's to be suppressed and "leaving only the cleansed
(acceptable) residue fit to print" or broadcast
electronically. Parenti's "Democracy For the Few" is
democracy-US style the rest of us are stuck with.

Books have been written on how, going back decades,
the New York Times betrayed the public trust serving
elitist interests alone. It plays the lead and most
influential media role disseminating state and
corporate propaganda to the nation and world. In
terms of media clout, the Times is unmatched with its
prominent front page being what media critic Norman
Solomon calls "the most valuable square inches of
media real estate in the USA" - more accurately,
anywhere.

Examples of Times duplicity are endless showing up
every day on its pages. The shameless Judith Miller
saga is just the latest episode of how bad they can
get, but she had her predecessors, and the beat goes
on since she left in disgrace. Through the years, the
Times never met a US war of aggression it didn't love
and support. It was never bothered by CIA's
functioning as a global Mafia-style hit squad/training
headquarters ousting democratically elected
governments, assassinating foreign heads of state and
key officials, propping up friendly dictators, funding
and training secret paramilitary armies and death
squads, and now snatching individuals for
"extraordinary rendition" to torture-prison hellholes,
some run by the agency and all taking orders from it.

CIA, as Chalmers Johnson notes, is a state within a
state functioning as the president's unaccountable
private army with unchecked powers and a
near-limitless off-the-books secret budget we now know
tops $44 billion annually. It menaces democratic
rule, threatens the Republic's survival and makes any
notion of a free society impossible as long as this
agency exists. Not a problem at New York Times. It
worked closely with CIA since the 1950s allowing some
of its foreign correspondents to be Agency assets or
agents. It no doubt still does.

The Times is also unbothered by social decay at home,
an unprecedented wealth disparity, an administration
mocking the rule of law, a de facto one party state
with two wings and a president usurping "unitary
executive" powers claiming the law is what he says it
is making him a dictator. It practically reveres the
cesspool of corrupted incestuous ties between
government and business, mocking any notion of
democracy of, for, or by the people. That's the state
of the nation's "liberal media" headquartered in the
Times building in New York.

The New York Times v. Hugo Chavez

This article focuses on one example of Times duplicity
among many other prominent ones equally sinister and
disturbing - its venomous agitprop targeting
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez this writer calls the
leading model democratic leader on the planet even
though he's not perfect, nor is anyone else. That's
why after "Islamofascist terrorists" he's practically
"enemy number one" on the Times hit list and
Washington's. Besides Venezuela being oil rich,
Chavez is the greatest of all threats the US faces - a
good example that's spreading. His governance shows
how real social democracy works exposing the fake
American kind.

That's intolerable to the masters of the universe and
their leading media proponent, the New York Times. It
always plays the lead media role keeping the world
safe for wealth and power. So on June 6, it hauled
out former Peruvian president and first ever
indigenous Andean one in the country's history -
Alejandro Toledo (2001 - 2006). His electoral
campaign promised a populist vision for Peruvians, to
create new jobs, address dire social needs of the
country's poor, and end years of corruption and hard
line rule under Alberto Fujimori, now a wanted man on
charges of corruption and human rights abuses.

Toledo was little better, failing on all counts
pushing the same repressive neoliberal policies he was
elected to end. He was in tow with Washington's agenda
of privatizations, deregulation, IMF/World Bank
diktats, debt service, and overall contempt for the
essential social needs of his people. He was also
tainted with corruption, and during his tenure
violence was used against protest demonstrators,
criminal suspects in prisons were beaten and tortured,
and dozens of journalists were threatened or attacked
for criticizing local politicians or him.

No problem for the New York Times that published his
June 6 op ed piece titled "Silence = Despotism." In
it, he said "Political democracy will take root in
Latin America only when it is accompanied by economic
and social democracy (under) political systems....free
and fair for all." As Peru's president, he thwarted
efforts to do what he now says he champions. Toledo
continued saying "our citizens" must be heard, and if
free speech is silenced in one country, "silence could
spread to other nations" pointing his hypocritical
finger squarely at Hugo Chavez.

Venezuelans, he says, "are in the streets (today)
confronting repressions. Courageous students raise
the flags of freedom, refusing to mortgage their
future by remaining silent." He quickly gets to the
point citing Hugo Chavez's refusal to renew RCTV's
Channel 2 VHF license saying "This is about more than
one TV station. President Chavez has become a
destabilizing figure throughout the hemisphere because
he feels he can silence anyone with opposing thoughts
(by) silencing them through repression or government
decrees." He then called on other Latin American
leaders to confront "authoritarianism" and "stand up
for continent-wide solidarity" citing his own
presidency and how "it never occurred to (him) to
silence (critical) media outlets (or) nationalize
them."

Toledo's tainted record as president belies his
shameless pieties on the Times op ed page. He did
more than try silencing critics. He stayed mute when
they were attacked or when two or more of them were
killed. The New York Times knows his record even
though it suppressed the worst of it while he was in
office. Yet it gave him prominent space to denounce
Hugo Chavez's social democracy and legal right not to
renew the operating license of a TV channel for its
repeated illegal seditious acts. RCTV was a serial
abuser of its right to use the public airwaves. It
was then guilty of supporting and being complicit with
efforts to foment insurrection to overthrow
Venezuela's democratically elected government.

Toledo ignored this saying, as Peru's president, he
was "always....respectful of opinions" differing from
his own. He would "never agree with those who prefer
silence instead of dissonant voices. Those....who
embrace liberty and democracy must stand ready to work
in solidarity with the Venezuelan people." He failed
to say which ones he meant, surely not the 70% or more
backing Chavez. And by failing to denounce RCTV's
lawlessness, he showed he condoned it. He also forgot
his successor as president, Alan Garcia, lawlessly
silenced two Peruvian TV stations and three radio
stations, apparently for supporting a lawful strike
Garcia opposes.

The New York Times has an ugly record bashing Hugo
Chavez since he was elected with a mandate to make
participatory social democracy the cornerstone of his
presidency. That's anathema to Washington and its
chief media ally, the New York Times. Since 1999 when
he took office, it hammered Chavez with accusations of
opposing the US-sponsored Free Trade of the Americas
(FTAA) without explaining it would sell out to big
capital at the expense of his people if adopted.

Following his election in December, 1998, Times Latin
American reporter Larry Roher wrote: (Latin American)
presidents and party leaders are looking over their
shoulders (worried about the) specter....the region's
ruling elite thought they had safely interred: that of
the populist demagogue, the authoritarian man on
horseback known as the caudillo (strongman)."

The Times later denounced him for using petrodollars
for foreign aid to neighbors, equating promoting
solidarity, cooperation and respecting other nations'
sovereignty with subversion and buying influence. It
criticized his raising royalties and taxes on foreign
investors, never explaining it was to end their
longtime preferential treatment making them pay their
fair share as they should. It bashed him for wanting
his own people to benefit most from their own
resources, not predatory oil and other foreign
investors the way it was before Chavez took office.
No longer, and that can't be tolerated in Washington
or on the pages of the New York Times.

When state oil company PDVSA became majority
shareholder with foreign investors May 1 with a
minimum 60% ownership in four Orinoco River basin oil
projects, the Times savaged Chavez. It condemned his
"revolutionary flourish (and his) ambitious (plan to)
wrest control of several major oil projects from
American and European companies (with a) showdown
(ahead for these) coveted energy resources...."
Unmentioned was these resources belong to the
Venezuelan people. The Times also accuses Chavez of
allowing "politics and ideology" to drive
US-Venezuelan confrontation "to limit American
influence around the world, starting in Venezuela's
oil fields."

It calls him "divisive, a ruinous demagogue,
provocative (and) the next Fidel Castro." It savored
the 2002 aborted two day coup ousting him calling it a
"resignation" and that Venezuela "no longer (would be)
threatened by a would-be dictator." It reported he
"stepped down (and was replaced by (a) respected
business leader" (Pedro Carmona - president of
Fedecamaras, the Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of
Commerce).

Unmentioned was that Carmona was hand-picked in
Washington and by Venezuelan oligarchs to do their
bidding at the expense of the people. He proved his
bona fides by suspending the democratically elected
members of the National Assembly and crushing
Bolivarian Revolutionary Constitutional reforms,
quickly restored once Chavez was reinstated in office.
Carmona fled to Colombia seeking political asylum
from where Venezuela's Supreme Court now wants him
extradited on charges of civil rebellion. Unmentioned
also was that the Times had to dismiss one of its
Venezuelan reporters, Francisco Toro, in January, 2003
when Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
revealed he was an anti-Chavista activist masquerading
as an objective journalist.

Back to the present, the Times claims Chavez is moving
to consolidate his dictatorial powers by shuttering
RCTV's Channel 2 and silencing his critics. It
portrays him as a Latin American strongman waging
class warfare with socialist rhetoric. It asks how
long Venezuelans will put up with the destruction of
their democratic freedoms? It points to "evidence Mr.
Chavez's definition of the enemy has been enlarged to
include news media outlets....critical of his
government....extending his control beyond political
institutions (alone)." This marks a "shift from the
early years of his presidency, when he (also) faced
vitriolic criticism" from the media.

The Times speculates how brutal he'll become silencing
critics and quelling protests wondering if he'll use
proxies to do it. It then questions whether Chavez
overstepped enough to marshall large-scale opposition
to him to push him past the tipping point that will
inevitably lead to his loss of credibility and power.
Might this be a thinly disguished Times effort to
create the reality it supports by wishing for it
through the power of suggestion.

Times business columnist Roger Lowenstein is on board
to make it happen. He claims, with no substantiation,
Chavez "militarized the government, emasculated the
country's courts, intimidated the media, eroded
confidence in the economy and hollowed out Venezuela's
once-democratic institutions." Turn this on its head
to know the truth Lowenstein won't report - that
Chavez militarized nothing. He put his underutilized
military to work implementing Venezuela's Plan Bolivar
2000 constructing housing for the poor, building
roads, conducting mass vaccinations, and overall
serving people needs, not invading and occupying other
countries and threatening to flatten other
"uncooperative" ones.

Venezuela's courts function independently of the
democratically elected President and National
Assembly. The media is the freest and most open in
the region and the world with most of it corporate
owned as it is nearly everywhere. Further, business
is booming enough to get the Financial Times to say
bankers were having "a party," and the country never
had a functioning democracy until Hugo Chavez made it
flourish there.

Times Venezuelan reporter Simon Romero is little
better than Lowenstein or others sending back agitprop
disguised as real journalism in his Venezuelan
coverage, including RCTV closure street protests. He
made events on Caracas streets sound almost like a
one-sided uprising of protesters against Chavez with
"images of policemen with guns drawn" intimidating
them. He highlighted Chavez's critics claiming "the
move to allow RCTV's license to expire amounts to a
stifling of dissent in the news media." He quoted
Elisa Parejo, one of RCTV's first soap opera stars,
saying "What we're living in Venezuela is a
monstrosity. It is a dictatorship."

He quoted right wing daily newspaper El Nacional as
well portraying the RCTV decision as "the end of
pluralism" in the country. Gonzalo Marroquin,
president of the corporate media-controlled
Inter-American Press Association (IAPA), was also
cited saying Chavez wants to "standardize the right to
information (indicating) a very bleak outlook for the
whole hemisphere." He invented corporate-cooked
polling numbers showing "most Venezuelans oppose Mr.
Chavez's decision not to renew RCTV's license." In
fact, the opposite is true and street demonstrators
for and against RCTV's shuttering proved it.
Venezuelans supporting Chavez dwarfed the opposition
many times over. But you won't find Romero or any
other Times correspondent reporting that. If any try
doing it, they'll end up doing obits as their future
beat.

Back in February, Romero was at it earlier. Then, he
hyped Venezuela's arms spending making it sound like
Chavez threatened regional stability and was preparing
to bomb or invade Miami. Romero's incendiary headline
read "Venezuela Spending on Arms Soars to World's Top
Ranks." It began saying "Venezuela's arms spending
has climbed to more than $4 billion in the past two
years, transforming the nation into Latin America's
largest weapons buyer" with suggestive comparisons to
Iran. The report revealed this information came from
the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) making that
unreliable source alone reason to question its
accuracy and what's behind it.

The figure quoted refers only to what Venezuela spends
on arms, not its total military spending. Unmentioned
was that the country's total military spending is half
of Agentina's, less than one-third of Colombia's, and
one-twelfth of Brazil's according to Center for Arms
Control and Nonproliferation figures ranking Venezuela
63rd in the world in military spending. The Center
also reported Venezuela's 2004 military budget at $1.1
billion making Romero's $4 billion DIA figure phony
and a spurious attempt to portray Chavez as a regional
threat needing to be counteracted. At that level,
he's also outspent by the Pentagon 500 to one, or lots
more depending on how US military spending and
homeland security readiness are calculated, including
all their unreported or hidden costs.

On June 12, Venezuela Analysis.com reported, in an
article by "Oil Wars," the Stockholm International
Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) indicated Venezuela's
military spending for 2006 was $1.9 billion. The
report's author voiced skepticism so compared this
number to Venezuela's Ministry of Defense expenditures
for that year in its "Memoria y Cuenta." It's figure
was $1,977,179,179 thousand Bolivars that converted to
US dollars comes to $919,618,000. To that must be
added another $1.09 billion the Ministry of Defense
got from Venezuela's FONDEN, or development fund.
Adding both numbers together, of course, shows the
country's 2006 military spending at $2 billion.

Based on The Independent Institute's Senior Fellow
Robert Higgs' calculation of US defense spending for
FY 2006 of $934.9 billion, it still means the Pentagon
outspends Venezuela's military by around 500 to one.
Higgs includes the separate budgets for the Department
of Defense, Energy, State, Veterans Affairs, Homeland
Security, Treasury's Military Retirement Fund, other
smaller defense-related budgets plus net interest paid
attributable to past debt-financed defense outlays.
Even then, he omitted off-the-books budgets and secret
intelligence ones for CIA and NSA.

Back to the Times' Romero and it's clear his reporting
smells the same as Iraq's WMDs and Iran's legal
commercial nuclear program being threat enough to
warrant sanctions and a US military response. Romero
is right in step with Bush administration World Bank
president neocon nominee Robert Zoellick. He took aim
at Hugo Chavez from Mexico City June 16 with warnings
Venezuela is "a country where economic problems are
mounting, and as we're seeing on the political side
it's not moving in a healthy direction."

Romero reports similar agitprop and did it May 17 in
his article titled "Clash of Hope and Fear as
Venezuela Seizes Land." He began saying "The squatters
arrive before dawn with machetes and rifles, surround
the well-ordered rows of sugar cane and threaten to
kill anyone who interferes. Then they light a match
to the crops and declare the land their own." He
continued saying "Mr. Chavez is carrying out what may
become the largest forced land redistribution in
Venezuela's history, building utopian farming villages
for squatters, lavishing money on new cooperatives and
sending army commando units to supervise seized
estates in six states."

Violence has accompanied seizures, says Romero, "with
more than 160 peasants killed by hired gunmen in
Venezuela (and) Eight landowners have also been
killed...." Since Chavez took office, there have been
peasant and other violent deaths, but most of them
have been at the hands of US-Colombian government
financed paramilitary death squads operating in
Venezuela.

Romero stays clear of this while making his rhetoric
sound like an armed insurrection is underway in
Venezuela forcibly and illegally seizing land from its
rightful owners. What's going on, in fact, is quite
different that can only be touched on briefly to
explain. Hugo Chavez first announced his "Return to
the Countryside" plan under the Law on Land and
Agricultural Development in November, 2001. The law
set limits on landholding size; taxed unused property;
aimed to redistribute unused, mainly government-owned
land to peasant families and cooperatives; and
expropriate uncultivated, unused land from large
private owners compensating them at fair market value.
So, in fact, the government seizes nothing. It buys
unused land from large estates and pays for it so
landless peasants can have and use it productively for
the first time ever benefitting everyone equitably.

Nowhere in his article did Romero explain this
although he did acknowledge prior to 2002, "an
estimated 5 per cent of the population owned 80 per
cent of the country's private land." By omitting what
was most important to include, Romero's report
distorted the truth enough to assure his readers never
get it from him. Nor do they from any other Times
correspondent when facts conflict with imperial
interests. That's what we've come to expect from the
"newspaper of record" never letting truth interfere
with serving wealth and power interests that includes
lying for them. Shameless reporting on Venezuela
under Hugo Chavez is one of many dozens of examples of
Times duplicity and disservice to its readers going
back decades.

Former Times journalist John Hess denounced it his
way: I "never saw a foreign intervention that the
Times did not support, never saw a fare....rent....or
utility increase that it did not endorse, never saw it
take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or
advocate a raise for underpaid workers. And don't get
me started on universal health care and Social
Security. So why do people think the Times is
liberal?" And why should anyone think its so-called
news and information is anything more than propaganda
for the imperial interests it serves?

Robert McChesney and Mark Weisbrot explained it well
in their June 1 CommonDreams.org article on "Venezuela
and the Media" saying: "the US media coverage (with
NYT in the lead) of Venezuela's RCTV controversy (and
most everything else) says more about the deficiencies
of our own news media than it does about Venezuela.
It demonstrates again (it's more) willing to carry
water for Washington (and the corporate interests it
serves) than to ascertain and report the truth of the
matter." At the Times, truth is always the first
casualty, but especially when the nation's at war.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendman...@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and
listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour
on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.