AP’s One-Sided Venezuela Coverage
On Desk Reporters Who “Phone-in” the Spin
By Dan Feder
Special to the Narco News Bulletin
December 18, 2002
source: http://www.narconews.com/Issue26/article567.html
The statement seemed clear enough. After a total of 25 hours of negotiations that framed this past weekend, the Organization of American States – representing 34 governments - released a much-awaited declaration on the crisis in Venezuela. The OAS rejected any solution that is not consistent with the Venezuelan constitution – which went into law with the support of President Hugo Chávez in 1999 only after the entire nation approved the text in a referendum – and “fully support(s) the democratic and constitutional order of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, whose government is headed by Hugo Chávez Frías.”
But the Associated Press (AP)’s Nestor Ikeda, who until yesterday had not written on Venezuela since the coup last April, doesn’t seem to get it. And looking at the coverage AP has provided on Venezuela for the last two weeks, this is hardly surprising; the reports, especially those of a certain writer we will get to in a moment, have been a steady stream of dishonest spin.
Despite a short, uncomplicated, essentially unambiguous declaration (making it something of an anomaly in diplomatic literature), Ikeda apparently felt the need to bend over backwards trying to prove that the OAS had, in fact, “given no direct support to Chavez.” What could have been more direct than the above statement? A photo of the 34 ambassadors wearing red berets shouting “viva la revolución bolivariana?” An international force sent in to squash the opposition? How long can people like Ikeda deny that the opposition has lost the bulk of the international support that it once had?
Ikeda goes on to quote the US Ambassador to the OAS, Roger Noriega, who says “this resolution supports the secretary general’s efforts, unequivocally and energetically,” giving the impression that Noriega was quite pleased with the resolution. Here may lie the key to Ikeda’s bizarre slanting of this important story. Noriega recently served on the Senate Foreign Affairs committee. While in that post, he became notorious for his skill at manipulating reporters. Once, he was overheard bragging that New York Times’ Larry Rohter never made a move without consulting him. It seems that, rather than seek out independent analysis of the resolution, or do his own (did he even read it? one has to wonder), Ikeda has let a veteran Washington spin-doctor tell the story for him.
In fact, the actual text of the resolution is far less “energetic” about free-expression-suppressing Secretary General Cesar Gaviria, requesting
the OAS Secretary General to continue to report to the Permanent Council on his facilitation efforts concerning the situation in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and bearing in mind the existence of other mechanisms in the inter-American system, such as the Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs.
It appears, to me at least, that the OAS has used this language to distance itself from Gaviria, and to diminish his role in mediating the crisis. If they were so happy with the work, why would they ask him so publicly to bring in two outside parties – the Carter Center and the United Nations - to help?
Ikeda neglects to tell his readers that the same Roger Noriega spent last Friday at the OAS fighting for a very different resolution -- one that would have called for “early elections.” In the two days of marathon and tense debate that followed, Noriega was forced to concede this major point to Venezuelan ambassador Jorge Valero, who had support from many Caribbean nations. The resulting language is much closer to the resolution Valero wanted than to language pursued by Noriega and the White House. Fortunately for Noriega, long a foe of Venezuelan democracy and one of the leading now-embarrassed US politicians who initially backed the April 11 coup, the AP is around to cover up his latest failure. In all likelihood, Noriega told Ikeda much more “off the record” to reshape the story into a victory for his camp. This sort of journalistic spinelessness is hardly limited to Washington; as we’ll see, it is typical of the AP’s correspondents in Latin America.
The problem with the Associated Press
Some of AP’s other reporters have been producing simply awful journalism since long before Ikeda joined this round of the Venezuelan tug-of-war. AP stories are picked up by thousands of newspapers large and small across the country every day, and are often read by newscasters on the radio and television. So the tone they set and messages they break to the public are no small matter; they lie at the heart of the media-created reality through which most United States citizens and many English-speaking people in other countries experience the larger world.
Associated Press is technically a “non-profit” corporation owned by a cooperative of for-profit United States newspapers and media companies, and governed by the AP Managing Editors Association. No radio news show or daily newspaper editor has the resources to send a reporter to every part of the world she or he wants. So editors use the AP to cut costs; why pay twenty-five different journalists to write on an issue when you can pool your resources and just pay one? According to their website,
the AP is the backbone of the world's information system. In the United States alone, AP serves 5,000 radio and television stations and 1,700 newspapers. Add to that the 8,500 newspaper, radio and television subscribers in 121 countries overseas, and you'll have some idea of AP's reach.
This role obviously gives the AP an unbelievable amount of power over the discussion of global events, especially in the English-speaking world. Yet AP correspondents write under much lower standards and with much less supervision than their counterparts at specific media organizations. In other words, they are largely unaccountable to their editors. At the same time, at a corporate level, the AP is unaccountable to its millions of readers. Unlike many newspapers, there is no AP ombudsman who “speaks for the readers.” There is no letters page for the AP, and individual newspapers rarely print letters responding to wire stories.
The very structure of the AP -- the impersonal bureaucracy through which this huge volume of information is filtered -- encourages “desk reporting” from foreign correspondents. This means gleaning stories from the local commercial newspapers and taking phone calls from Embassy, political, and corporate spin-doctors rather than going outside and talking to the real people their stories concern. According to many familiar with the organization, AP correspondents are typically wined and dined by the English-speaking elites in the Third World outposts where they are assigned.
A perfect example of what this leads to is the case of Peter McFarren, AP’s 18 year bureau chief in Bolivia. McFarren was exposed by this publication as having moonlighted as a lobbyist for an $80 million dollar water pipeline project. After two weeks of stonewalling, AP finally announced McFarren’s resignation after Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz inquired about the conflict. By the time he resigned, McFarren had become a regular figure among elite circles of Bolivian politicians and businessmen, completely alienated from and hostile towards the masses of people he was responsible for reporting on.
In sum, the typical AP report on a major event in a foreign country is first filtered through a friendly English-speaking establishment spin-doctor before reaching the writer, then filtered through a giant bureaucracy of AP editors with no relationship to either the writer or the ultimate reader, and finally chosen, not chosen or tampered with by news editors at the commercial media outlets who buy the story. There are a few exceptions – such as AP’s Mexican and Caribbean correspondent Mark Stevenson. In Venezuela, Niko Price has occasionally reported outside of the box constructed by pro-coup elites that the rest of the reporter’s peers have fallen for hook, line and sinker – but still offers very little insight. Venezuela, a country with such a wide gap between a wealthy elite and a poor majority, seems tailor-made for the trap that most AP Latin American correspondents have fallen into: the administration, rather than the reporting, of the news.
Olson: A Journalist On Strike?
Take AP Venezuela correspondent Alexandra Olson for example: She has proven herself an expert over the past week in the use of AP-style writing to produce an illusion of objectivity in what actually turns out to be a very one-sided, dishonest story. Let’s try a little exercise in deconstruction here with what may have been the most read English-language print articles from Venezuela these last seven days.
In all but one of the eleven stories that Olson has written since Dec. 9th for the AP, the word “strike” appears in the first paragraph. Anyone who has been keeping track of the news from Venezuela via her stories, via whatever medium, has heard reference to a “strike” every single day before any other facts of the story are presented. In more than half of her stories, she also uses the full term “general strike” to describe the opposition, but without quote marks around either.
On Desk Reporters Who “Phone-in” the Spin
By Dan Feder
Special to the Narco News Bulletin
December 18, 2002
source: http://www.narconews.com/Issue26/article567.html
The statement seemed clear enough. After a total of 25 hours of negotiations that framed this past weekend, the Organization of American States – representing 34 governments - released a much-awaited declaration on the crisis in Venezuela. The OAS rejected any solution that is not consistent with the Venezuelan constitution – which went into law with the support of President Hugo Chávez in 1999 only after the entire nation approved the text in a referendum – and “fully support(s) the democratic and constitutional order of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, whose government is headed by Hugo Chávez Frías.”
But the Associated Press (AP)’s Nestor Ikeda, who until yesterday had not written on Venezuela since the coup last April, doesn’t seem to get it. And looking at the coverage AP has provided on Venezuela for the last two weeks, this is hardly surprising; the reports, especially those of a certain writer we will get to in a moment, have been a steady stream of dishonest spin.
Despite a short, uncomplicated, essentially unambiguous declaration (making it something of an anomaly in diplomatic literature), Ikeda apparently felt the need to bend over backwards trying to prove that the OAS had, in fact, “given no direct support to Chavez.” What could have been more direct than the above statement? A photo of the 34 ambassadors wearing red berets shouting “viva la revolución bolivariana?” An international force sent in to squash the opposition? How long can people like Ikeda deny that the opposition has lost the bulk of the international support that it once had?
Ikeda goes on to quote the US Ambassador to the OAS, Roger Noriega, who says “this resolution supports the secretary general’s efforts, unequivocally and energetically,” giving the impression that Noriega was quite pleased with the resolution. Here may lie the key to Ikeda’s bizarre slanting of this important story. Noriega recently served on the Senate Foreign Affairs committee. While in that post, he became notorious for his skill at manipulating reporters. Once, he was overheard bragging that New York Times’ Larry Rohter never made a move without consulting him. It seems that, rather than seek out independent analysis of the resolution, or do his own (did he even read it? one has to wonder), Ikeda has let a veteran Washington spin-doctor tell the story for him.
In fact, the actual text of the resolution is far less “energetic” about free-expression-suppressing Secretary General Cesar Gaviria, requesting
the OAS Secretary General to continue to report to the Permanent Council on his facilitation efforts concerning the situation in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and bearing in mind the existence of other mechanisms in the inter-American system, such as the Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs.
It appears, to me at least, that the OAS has used this language to distance itself from Gaviria, and to diminish his role in mediating the crisis. If they were so happy with the work, why would they ask him so publicly to bring in two outside parties – the Carter Center and the United Nations - to help?
Ikeda neglects to tell his readers that the same Roger Noriega spent last Friday at the OAS fighting for a very different resolution -- one that would have called for “early elections.” In the two days of marathon and tense debate that followed, Noriega was forced to concede this major point to Venezuelan ambassador Jorge Valero, who had support from many Caribbean nations. The resulting language is much closer to the resolution Valero wanted than to language pursued by Noriega and the White House. Fortunately for Noriega, long a foe of Venezuelan democracy and one of the leading now-embarrassed US politicians who initially backed the April 11 coup, the AP is around to cover up his latest failure. In all likelihood, Noriega told Ikeda much more “off the record” to reshape the story into a victory for his camp. This sort of journalistic spinelessness is hardly limited to Washington; as we’ll see, it is typical of the AP’s correspondents in Latin America.
The problem with the Associated Press
Some of AP’s other reporters have been producing simply awful journalism since long before Ikeda joined this round of the Venezuelan tug-of-war. AP stories are picked up by thousands of newspapers large and small across the country every day, and are often read by newscasters on the radio and television. So the tone they set and messages they break to the public are no small matter; they lie at the heart of the media-created reality through which most United States citizens and many English-speaking people in other countries experience the larger world.
Associated Press is technically a “non-profit” corporation owned by a cooperative of for-profit United States newspapers and media companies, and governed by the AP Managing Editors Association. No radio news show or daily newspaper editor has the resources to send a reporter to every part of the world she or he wants. So editors use the AP to cut costs; why pay twenty-five different journalists to write on an issue when you can pool your resources and just pay one? According to their website,
the AP is the backbone of the world's information system. In the United States alone, AP serves 5,000 radio and television stations and 1,700 newspapers. Add to that the 8,500 newspaper, radio and television subscribers in 121 countries overseas, and you'll have some idea of AP's reach.
This role obviously gives the AP an unbelievable amount of power over the discussion of global events, especially in the English-speaking world. Yet AP correspondents write under much lower standards and with much less supervision than their counterparts at specific media organizations. In other words, they are largely unaccountable to their editors. At the same time, at a corporate level, the AP is unaccountable to its millions of readers. Unlike many newspapers, there is no AP ombudsman who “speaks for the readers.” There is no letters page for the AP, and individual newspapers rarely print letters responding to wire stories.
The very structure of the AP -- the impersonal bureaucracy through which this huge volume of information is filtered -- encourages “desk reporting” from foreign correspondents. This means gleaning stories from the local commercial newspapers and taking phone calls from Embassy, political, and corporate spin-doctors rather than going outside and talking to the real people their stories concern. According to many familiar with the organization, AP correspondents are typically wined and dined by the English-speaking elites in the Third World outposts where they are assigned.
A perfect example of what this leads to is the case of Peter McFarren, AP’s 18 year bureau chief in Bolivia. McFarren was exposed by this publication as having moonlighted as a lobbyist for an $80 million dollar water pipeline project. After two weeks of stonewalling, AP finally announced McFarren’s resignation after Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz inquired about the conflict. By the time he resigned, McFarren had become a regular figure among elite circles of Bolivian politicians and businessmen, completely alienated from and hostile towards the masses of people he was responsible for reporting on.
In sum, the typical AP report on a major event in a foreign country is first filtered through a friendly English-speaking establishment spin-doctor before reaching the writer, then filtered through a giant bureaucracy of AP editors with no relationship to either the writer or the ultimate reader, and finally chosen, not chosen or tampered with by news editors at the commercial media outlets who buy the story. There are a few exceptions – such as AP’s Mexican and Caribbean correspondent Mark Stevenson. In Venezuela, Niko Price has occasionally reported outside of the box constructed by pro-coup elites that the rest of the reporter’s peers have fallen for hook, line and sinker – but still offers very little insight. Venezuela, a country with such a wide gap between a wealthy elite and a poor majority, seems tailor-made for the trap that most AP Latin American correspondents have fallen into: the administration, rather than the reporting, of the news.
Olson: A Journalist On Strike?
Take AP Venezuela correspondent Alexandra Olson for example: She has proven herself an expert over the past week in the use of AP-style writing to produce an illusion of objectivity in what actually turns out to be a very one-sided, dishonest story. Let’s try a little exercise in deconstruction here with what may have been the most read English-language print articles from Venezuela these last seven days.
In all but one of the eleven stories that Olson has written since Dec. 9th for the AP, the word “strike” appears in the first paragraph. Anyone who has been keeping track of the news from Venezuela via her stories, via whatever medium, has heard reference to a “strike” every single day before any other facts of the story are presented. In more than half of her stories, she also uses the full term “general strike” to describe the opposition, but without quote marks around either.