NY Times reporter quits over conflict of interest
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General media: manufacturing consent for war

By David Barsamian

Jan. 11— When the US marches to war, the media march with it. And within the media the generals generally are heavily armed with microphones. The din of collateral language is rising to cacophonous levels. The mobilization and ubiquity of present and past brass on the airwaves is an essential component of manufacturing consent for war. Perhaps we need no-air zones for them. That’s unlikely to happen when ABC/TV and NPR’s Cokie Roberts gushes, “I am, I will just confess to you, a total sucker for the guys who stand up with all the ribbons on and stuff and they say it’s true and I’m ready to believe it.”

Just look at one three-day period in early January. On PBS’s “The NewsHour” on Jan. 2 with Ray Suarez as host, the lead story was Iraq. The guests were Patrick Lang, US Army and John Warden ,US Air Force. They were joined by Geoffrey Kemp, a war hawk and ex-Reagan NSC staffer. The discussion totally focused on strategies and tactics.

How many troops would be needed to “do the job?” What would the bombing campaign look like? And the inevitable, When will the war begin? It’s kind of like placing bets on a bowl game. Suarez, formally of NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,” played the classic role of the unctuous and compliant questioner.

There were no uncomfortable inquiries about the UN weapons inspection process, casualty figures, international law, the UN Charter or the notorious US practice of double standards on Security Council resolutions. Instead, the pundits pontificated on troop deployments, carrier battle groups and heavy infantry forces such as the 3rd Mechanized Division.

Warden wondered aloud if “we need those ground forces in place before we initiate hostilities?” Then he interestingly added that there is “no Iraqi offensive capability outside their borders.” This went right by Suarez, always the smiling and polite host.

The next day, CNN scored a general trifecta. Aaron Brown, anchor of “News Night,” had on General Wesley Clark, a former NATO commander now on the CNN payroll, Army Brig. General David Grange, and Air Force Major General G. Don Shepperd. With the banner of “Showdown Iraq” on the screen, Clark said, “The US is going to do it,” meaning attack Iraq. Then Brown, ever sedate, opined, “It’s going to happen mid-Feburary-ish.”

On Jan. 4, Scott Simon, host of NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” had retired Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor on. Trainor is now Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Displaying his vast linguistic skills, and indeed mimicking network anchors, Trainor twice referred to “Sodom Hussein.” Simon then mentioned the enforcement of no-fly zones. without saying they are unilaterally imposed by the US and have no standing in international law. Then without any sense of irony or history, the two did a back and forth on the possibility of the Iraqi military being charged with war crimes.

Trainor said that the Iraqis “all know about the Nuremberg trials.” Again, this demonstrates the amnesiac quality of the media. A central part of the indictment against the Nazis, and for which they were hung, was the “planning and waging of aggressive war.” In 1991, the US deliberately targeted water purification plants, sewage treatment facilities and power plants knowing that it would produce widespread disease and death. That cannot be a topic for polite discussion.

And it isn’t. War crimes are “their” crimes, not ours. Trainor closed by saying that the US military buildup in the Gulf is “so important” because “all of this is to convince the enemy they’d better think twice about trying to defend a bankrupt regime.” There you’ve got it from liberal NPR. If Iraqis try to defend themselves against attack, they face war crime tribunals. Simon: “General, thank you very much.” Trainor: “All right, Scott. It’s been a pleasure.”

Short of having UN inspectors coming in to the US and monitoring the airwaves and destroying all weapons of mass distraction, what is to be done? That is the crucial question. While applying pressure -- can anyone say boycott? -- on the corporate media and their advertisers, progressives need to vigorously support existing independent media and go about creating and funding new media.

Media projects must be at the center of any progressive movement’s agenda. I am happy to report that as I travel around the country as part of my USA (United States of Amnesia) tour, I see signs everywhere of young people in particular producing media.

David Barsamian is Director of Alternative Radio, the Boulder-based award-winning weekly series. He is the author of The Decline & Fall of Public Broadcasting (South End Press)

Source: ZNet

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NY Times reporter quits over conflict of interest

By Al Giordano

Jan. 14— The New York Times’ Venezuela problem continued to snowball yesterday as its Caracas correspondent Francisco Toro resigned.

Toro acknowledged, in a letter to Times editor Patrick J. Lyons, “conflicts of interest concerns” regarding his participation in protest marches and his “lifestyle bound up with opposition activism.”

Toro’s obsessive anti-Chavez position in Venezuela was publicly known after last April’s coup when he began sending emails to Narco News and other journalists whom he placed on his own mailing list attacking Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. That the Times hired him in the first place was a violation of the Times’ own claims to objective and disinterested reporting. But regarding Venezuela, it was not the first.

Toro’s resignation is the latest in a long series of missteps and misdeeds by the New York Times and its reporters regarding the newspaper’s one-sided and inaccurate Venezuela coverage.

Last April, the Times editorial board had to issue a public apology — sent to journalist Jules Siegel by editorial board member Gail Collins. She said, “Nobody should ever cheer the overthrow of a democratically elected government. You’re right, we dropped the ball on our first Venezuela editorial.”

Also last April, New York Times reporter Juan Forero reported that President Chávez had “resigned” when, in fact, Chávez had been kidnapped at gunpoint. Forero did not source his knowingly false claim. Forero, on Apr. 13, wrote a puff piece on dictator-for-a-day Pedro Carmona — installed by a military coup — as Carmona disbanded Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution and sent his shock troops house to house in a round-up of political leaders in which sixty supporters of Chávez were assassinated. Later that day, after the Venezuelan masses took back their country block by block, Carmona fled the national palace and Chávez, the elected president, was restored to office.

Forero — who allowed US Embassy officials to monitor his interviews with mercenary pilots in Colombia, without disclosing that fact in his article — was caught again last month in his unethical pro-coup activities in Venezuela. Narco News Associate Publisher Dan Feder revealed that Forero and LA Times reporter T. Christian Miller had written essentially the same story, interviewing the same two shopkeepers in a wealthy suburb of Caracas, and the same academic “expert” in a story meant to convince readers that a “general strike” was occurring in Venezuela. The LA Times Readers Representative later revealed that Forero and Miller interviewed the shopkeepers together. Neither disclosed that fact.

In many ways, it has been the credibility problem posed by Forero that led to Toro’s hiring last November by the Times, and the importation of Times Mexico Bureau Chief Ginger Thompson to Venezuela last month.

But Thompson’s reporting has also been laden with distortions. Last week she reported that there had been a “strike” by “bank workers” when, in fact, it was a lockout by bank owners supported only by the executives’ “union” — which represents only one percent of bank workers in the country. (That the bank lockout of its customers — conducted by 60 percent of bank branches over two days — constituted a theft of people’s access to their own money was not raised by Thompson’s article.)

Thompson, again yesterday, continued to embarrass herself and the Times with a report that “strike” leaders in Venezuela — now completely defeated on every front — are “discussing new strategies to ease the hardship on Venezuelans, including partly lifting the strike to allow businesses and factories to reopen.” This turn of phrase is dishonest on Thompson’s part, transparently an attempt to spin the collapse of the upper-class lock-out as an intentional “evolution” in strategy.

On Dec. 13, Times columnist Nick Kristof quoted Toro as “a Venezuela journalist” without disclosing that he was, at that time, a New York Times reporter; hardly on the scale of the other violations of the Times’ own stated ethical practices by Forero, but still an interesting revelation of how confused the Times’ coverage of Venezuela has been in recent years. When was the last time a Times columnist quoted a Times reporter without identifying him as such?

Sometimes even the New York Times must stand naked, and the tale of the rise and fall of Francisco Toro as “Timesman-for-a-month” reveals a documented intention by Times editors to hire, in Toro, a pro-coup spin-meister.

Francisco Toro: Timesman-for-a-Month

Toro first appeared on the pages of the Times last Sept. 24, when he was quoted by Forero and identified as “an editor at Veneconomia, a financial newsletter,” bolstering Forero’s spin that Chávez had wrecked Venezuela’s economy. Two months later, Toro popped up as a Times reporter.

A LexisNexis search reveals that, in his brief career at the Times, Toro penned just two articles: on Nov. 21 (“Venezuela Ready to License Rights to Offshore Gas”) and Nov. 30 (“White Collar Oil Workers Key in Venezuela Crisis”). Ironically, Toro’s reports were more balanced than those of the rabidly pro-coup Forero or those of relief pitcher Thompson: Toro, at least, acknowledged that it was the “white collar” members of the state oil company’s management behind the lock-out and that “The biggest federation of blue-collar unions in the oil industry, Fedepetrol, is split between pro- and anti-government factions.”

In fact, even last fall, before the “strike” began on Dec. 2, Toro acknowledged on his own Internet weblog that “this strike doesn’t have a chance… the strike will fail.” If only some of that kind of interpretation had made its way onto the Times’ pages over the past month!

On Jan. 7, Toro committed an act of disclosure that probably marked the beginning of the end of his Times career: He spoke “out of class” about his interactions with a NY Times editor, also on his weblog:

“It’s tough being a journalist in this country, especially if, like me, you’re trying to juggle roles as a critic in the local press and a beat reporter for a US newspaper. Trying to play both roles – and trying to mediate between the sides – takes its toll. It’s the reason, in any event, for the new and regrettable need to password-protect this blog: one of my US editors was very uncomfortable with having one of his reporters taking such openly political stances on a public website.”

In other words, at least by Jan. 7, the Grand Poohbahs of 43rd Street were already aware of Toro’s conflicts of interest, and whatever they said to him led him to sweep his blog under the rug with password-only access. This suggests strongly that at the Times, conflicts of interest are tolerated as long as they are not disclosed or made public.

Then, last night, Toro came clean: “my lifestyle is bound up with opposition activism at the moment, from participating in several NGOs, to organizing events and attending protest marches.”

It is admirable that Toro disclosed what the New York Times did not want him to disclose: his clear bias and his conflicts of interest. By resigning from the Times in an open and public manner, he did the right thing.

But the New York Times comes out of this episode with its already broken credibility regarding Venezuela reporting more damaged than ever. The Times’ Venezuela coverage is adrift, caught between its self-proclaimed “objective” mission and its hidden agenda: the distortion of news from that country in order to destabilize a democratically elected government.

If the Times International Desk had a shred of journalistic ethics, it would have either hired Toro as a partisan columnist or disclosed his activity in organizations, protest marches and the rest of what Toro himself calls his “opposition activism” on its pages when it hired him as a news correspondent.

Source: Narco News Bulletin

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