[Peace-discuss] FAIR: NYT Corrects Venezuela TV Falsehood

[Robert Naiman]

http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/02/27/nyt-corrects-venezuela-tv-falsehood/

FAIR BLOG <http://fair.org/blog/>
Feb
27
2014
NYT Corrects Venezuela TV Falsehood
By Peter Hart <http://www.fair.org/blog/author/peter-hart/> Leave a
Comment<http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/02/27/nyt-corrects-venezuela-tv-falsehood/#respond>

[image: Venevision]<http://www.fair.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Venevision.png>
On February 21<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/world/americas/protests-swell-in-venezuela-as-places-to-rally-disappear.html>,
a report in the *New York Times* by William
Neuman<http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/03/08/nyt-debates-hugo-chavez-minus-the-debate/>about
a supposed clampdown on dissent in Venezuela started out with this bold
claim:

The only television station that regularly broadcast voices critical of the
government was sold last year and the new owners have softened its news
coverage.

This struck some observers, like Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic &
Policy Research
(2/24/14<http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/does-venezuelan-television-provide-coverage-that-opposes-the-government>),
as totally overblown, since opposition figures do in fact appear routinely
on Venezuelan television. As he pointed out, the Carter Center studied
media coverage during the country's presidential election last year, and
found that opposition candidate Henrique Capriles received much more
coverage than President Nicolás Maduro, whose campaign enjoyed an
overwhelming advantage in state-owned media.

[image: globovision]<http://www.fair.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/globovision.png>As
for protest coverage, Weisbrot shows that opposition leaders appeared on
television as the protests were underway, in particular on*Venevision*, a
widely watched outlet.

So it's not clear why the *Times* would suggest that there was only one
channel that featured opposition voices, and that it seemed less likely to
do so now.

 Writer and activist Robert Naiman wondered too, so he wrote to the
*Times*(2/25/14)
to ask whether they would print a correction.

They would not.  Louis Lucero II, the paper's assistant to the senior
editor for standards, who wrote this:

We remain confident in the factual accuracy of the central assertion of our
sentence (that the only television station that regularly broadcast voices
critical of the government was sold last year), but you seems to take issue
with the less clearly disprovable claim that the new owners have adopted a
less critical tack when covering the government. Accordingly, I'm afraid a
contrary assessment from the CEPR doesn't quite rise to the level of the
empirical counter-evidence we require to correct a claim made in our
articles.

This is an odd response,  seeming to misunderstand the complaint. The paper
was suggesting that there was only one TV station regularly featuring
anti-government views in Venezuela last year, and that it would be less
likely to do so now. That is, at best, totally misleading.

Naiman's group started a
petition<http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/nyt-fix-your-false-reporting>
to
get the *Times* to correct the story. Lo and behold, the *Times* corrected
the story:

*Correction: February 26, 2014 *

*An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to Globovision.
Before its sale last year, it broadcast more voices critical of the
Venezuelan government than any other TV station, but it was not the only
one to regularly feature government critics.*

As is often the case, the correction obscures the central problem with the
piece: that it reported erroneously that Venezuelan TV is a place where
voices critical of the government do not appear.

Interestingly, Neuman wrote another piece
(2/25/14<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/world/americas/in-venezuela-middle-class-joins-protests.html?ref=todayspaper>)
about protests in San Cristobal, an opposition stronghold in the western
part of the country. It included this observation:

Nearby, a neighbor, Teresa Contreras, 53, flipped through the channels on
her television, showing that there was no coverage of the violence, a sign,
she said, of the government control over the news media.

Is the idea that any protest anywhere that isn't being covered in real time
by television is evidence of state control of the media? That would be an
interesting standard to apply to the US press.

Meanwhile, the *Times* ran an op-ed by Francisco Toro
(2/24/14<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/opinion/rash-repression-in-venezuela.html>),
a Venezuelan expatriate whose blog
post<http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/02/22/news-from-venezuela-but-where-is-it-coming-from/>
accusing
international media of ignoring a "tropical pogrom" against demonstrators
in Venezuela was hugely popular on social media-despite the fact that he
later described it as an "overstatement in the heat of the moment" (
*Twitter*, 2/24/14 <https://twitter.com/BoringDev/status/437974589931397120>
).
[image: Screenshot from
Venevision.]<http://www.fair.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Venevisi%C3%B3n.jpg>

Venevisión covers the speech that wasn't covered.

Toro's op-ed declared that "to the Venezuelan government, all dissent is
treason"-citing as an example a speech by opposition leader Henrique
Capriles: "Few outside the rally heard him, however, because government
pressure ensured that no broadcast media carried coverage of the event."

According to NACLA (*Manufacturing
Contempt*,2/26/14<http://nacla.org/blog/2014/2/26/letter-new-york-times-correct-francisco-toros-error-venezuela>),
though, Capriles' speech was covered by both*Globovisión
<http://globovision.com/articulo/capriles-los-venezolanos-que-piensan-distinto-no-son-fascistas>*
 and *Venevisión <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXiCZVVy5K8>*.

Asked about the discrepancy, Toro (*Twitter*,
2/26/14<https://twitter.com/BoringDev/status/438777420800598016>)
responded: "There was no live coverage." Can you imagine living in a state
so repressive that  speeches by government opponents aren't covered live?



-- 
Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
(202) 448-2898, extension 1.
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