<div dir="ltr"><p style="box-sizing:border-box;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:"PT Serif",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:17px">A recent video opinion piece published by <em style="box-sizing:border-box">The New York Times</em> intended to drum up support for U.S. involvement in Venezuela failed to disclose the author's ties to the opposition government, leading to criticism from progressives of the paper's coverage. </p><p style="box-sizing:border-box;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:"PT Serif",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:17px">Joanna Hausmann, a comedian who posts highly viewed articles on Venezuela on YouTube, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/opinion/contributors/venezuela-us-hands-off-joanna-hausmann.html" style="box-sizing:border-box;background:transparent;color:rgb(51,102,153);text-decoration-line:none">delivered</a> a five minute, thirteen second opinion piece at the Times Monday in which she claims that the country's leader, President Nicolas Maduro, is a dictator and that the American left are his patsies. </p><p style="box-sizing:border-box;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:"PT Serif",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:17px">"This movement is dangerously glorifying a brutal dictator and promoting inaction," Hausmann says in the video as quirky music plays behind her. "That is the worst combination for ordinary Venezuelans."</p><p style="box-sizing:border-box;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:"PT Serif",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:17px">Hausmann also claims that the country's economic problems are the fault of decades of socialist rule and that the path forward is a future without Maduro—it's implied, though never outright stated, that the answer is for opposition leader Juan Guaidó to take power. </p><p style="box-sizing:border-box;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:"PT Serif",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:17px">What the video and the <em style="box-sizing:border-box">Times</em> did not reveal is that Hausmann's father, Harvard University economics professor Ricardo Hausmann, currently serves as  <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/guaido-names-hausmann-as-venezuela-s-idb-representative/4813590.html" style="box-sizing:border-box;background:transparent;color:rgb(51,102,153);text-decoration-line:none">Guaidó's envoy</a> to the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). It's a position that, if Guaidó became president, would wield immense political and economic power.</p><p style="box-sizing:border-box;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:"PT Serif",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:17px"><a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/02/weak-journalism-nyt-fails-disclose-op-ed-writers-close-family-ties-venezuelan">https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/02/weak-journalism-nyt-fails-disclose-op-ed-writers-close-family-ties-venezuelan</a>  <br></p><p style="box-sizing:border-box;color:rgb(51,51,51);font-family:"PT Serif",Arial,sans-serif;font-size:17px"><br></p></div>