{"id":65067,"date":"2002-04-19T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2002-04-19T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2002\/04\/19\/miroirs-deformants\/"},"modified":"2002-04-19T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2002-04-19T00:00:00","slug":"miroirs-deformants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2002\/04\/19\/miroirs-deformants\/","title":{"rendered":"Miroirs d\u00e9formants<\/em><\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Miroirs d\u00e9formants <\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t19 avril 2002 — L’une des diverses causes de l’int\u00e9r\u00eat que nous portons \u00e0 l’\u00e9pisode du coup d’\u00c9tat manqu\u00e9 au Venezuela (coup anti-Chavez suivi du retour au pouvoir de Chavez, entre les 11 et 14 avril) est le comportement de la presse am\u00e9ricaine. Les \u00e9v\u00e9nements ont \u00e9t\u00e9 suffisamment rapides et suffisamment significatifs pour mettre en \u00e9vidence ce comportement, de fa\u00e7on tr\u00e8s frappante et tr\u00e8s significative. Souvent, cela a \u00e9t\u00e9 le m\u00eame comportement que celui des autorit\u00e9s officielles am\u00e9ricaines, ce qui donne beaucoup \u00e0 penser.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tIl y a d\u00e9j\u00e0 eu des analyses de ce comportement de la presse am\u00e9ricaine. Le site WSWS, notamment, s’est attach\u00e9 au cas du New York Times<\/a>, qui fut certainement l’un des plus flagrants, puisque allant jusqu’\u00e0 la situation o\u00f9 le journal new-yorkais, un peu penaud, s’est cru oblig\u00e9 d’expliquer ses premi\u00e8res r\u00e9actions, tr\u00e8s favorables au coup anti-Chavez. Une analyse plus compl\u00e8te, qui reprend bien s\u00fbr le cas du New York Times<\/em>, vient d’\u00eatre diffus\u00e9e par l’organisation FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting), bien connue et respectable pour ses analyses critiques du contenu des m\u00e9dias am\u00e9ricains. Nous proposons ci-dessous cette analyse de FAIR, en date du 18 avril 2002.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

U.S. Papers Hail Venezuelan Coup as Pro-Democracy Move<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n

\tApril 18, 2002<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tWhen elements of the Venezuelan military forced president Hugo Chavez from office last week, the editorial boards of several major U.S. newspapers followed the U.S. government’s lead and greeted the news with enthusiasm. In an April 13 editorial, the New York Times triumphantly declared that Chavez’s \u00a0\u00bbresignation\u00a0\u00bb meant that \u00a0\u00bbVenezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator.\u00a0\u00bb Conspicuously avoiding the word \u00a0\u00bbcoup,\u00a0\u00bb the Times explained that Chavez \u00a0\u00bbstepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tCalling Chavez \u00a0\u00bba ruinous demagogue,\u00a0\u00bb the Times offered numerous criticisms of his policies and urged speedy new elections, saying \u00a0\u00bbVenezuela urgently needs a leader with a strong democratic mandate.\u00a0\u00bb A casual reader might easily have missed the Times’ brief acknowledgement that Chavez did actually have a democratic mandate, having been \u00a0\u00bbelected president in 1998.\u00a0\u00bb The paper’s one nod to the fact that military takeovers are not generally regarded as democratic was to note hopefully that with \u00a0\u00bbcontinued civic participation,\u00a0\u00bbperhaps \u00a0\u00bbfurther military involvement\u00a0\u00bb in Venezuelan politics could be kept \u00a0\u00bbto a minimum.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThree days later, Chavez had returned to power and the Times ran a second<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\teditorial (4\/16\/02) half-apologizing for having gotten carried away: \u00a0\u00bbIn his three years in office, Mr. Chavez has been such a divisive and demagogic leader that his forced departure last week drew applause at home and in Washington. That reaction, which we shared, overlooked the undemocratic manner in which he was removed. Forcibly unseating a democratically elected leader, no matter how badly he has performed, is never something to cheer.\u00a0\u00bb The Times stood its ground, however, on the value of a timely military coup for teaching a president a lesson, saying, \u00a0\u00bbWe hope Mr. Chavez will act as a more responsible and moderate leader now that he seems to realize the anger he stirred.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe Chicago Tribune’s editorial board seemed even more excited by the coup than the New York Times’. An April 14 Tribune editorial called Chavez an \u00a0\u00bbelected strongman\u00a0\u00bb and declared: \u00a0\u00bbIt’s not every day that a democracy benefits from the military’s intervention to force out an elected president.\u00a0\u00bb Hoping that Venezuela could now \u00a0\u00bbmove on to better things,\u00a0\u00bb the Tribune expressed relief that Venezuela’s president was \u00a0\u00bbsafely out of power and under arrest.\u00a0\u00bb No longer would he be free to pursue his habits of \u00a0\u00bbtoasting Fidel Castro, flying to Baghdad to visit Saddam Hussein, or praising Osama bin Laden.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t(FAIR called the Tribune to ask when Chavez had \u00a0\u00bbpraised\u00a0\u00bb bin Laden. Columnist and editorial board member Steve Chapman, who wrote the editorial, said that in attempting to locate the reference for FAIR, he discovered that he had \u00a0\u00bbmisread\u00a0\u00bb his source, a Freedom House report. Chapman said that if the Tribune could find no record of Chavez praising bin Laden, the paper would run a correction.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe Tribune stuck unapologetically to its pro-coup line even after Chavez had been restored to power. Chavez’s return may have come as \u00a0\u00bbgood news to Latin American governments that had condemned his removal as just another military coup,\u00a0\u00bb wrote the Tribune in an April 16 editorial, \u00a0\u00bbbut that doesn’t mean it’s good news for democracy.\u00a0\u00bb The paper seemed to suggest that the coup would have been no bad thing if not for \u00a0\u00bbthe heavy-handed bungling of [Chavez’s] successors.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tLong Island’s Newsday, another top-circulation paper, greeted the coup with an April 13 editorial headlined \u00a0\u00bbChavez’s Ouster Is No Great Loss.\u00a0\u00bb Newsday offered a number of reasons why the coup wasn’t so bad, including Chavez’s \u00a0\u00bbconfrontational leadership style and left-wing populist rhetoric\u00a0\u00bb and the fact that he \u00a0\u00bbopenly flaunted his ideological differences with Washington.\u00a0\u00bb The most important reason, however, was Chavez’s \u00a0\u00bbincompetence as an executive,\u00a0\u00bb specifically, that he was \u00a0\u00bbmismanaging the nation’s vast oil wealth.\u00a0\u00bb After the coup failed, Newsday ran a follow-up editorial (4\/16\/02) which came to the remarkable conclusion that \u00a0\u00bbif there is a winner in all this, it’s Latin American democracy, in principle and practice.\u00a0\u00bb The incident, according to Newsday, was \u00a0\u00bban affirmation of the democratic process\u00a0\u00bb because the coup gave \u00a0\u00bba sobering wake-up call\u00a0\u00bb to Chavez, \u00a0\u00bbwho was on a path to subverting the democratic mandate that had put him in power three years ago.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe Los Angeles Times waited until the dust had settled (4\/17\/02) to run its editorial on \u00a0\u00bbVenezuela’s Strange Days.\u00a0\u00bb The paper was dismissive of Chavez’s status as an elected leader– saying \u00a0\u00bbit goes against the grain to put the name Hugo Chavez and the word ‘democracy’ in the same sentence\u00a0\u00bb– but pointed out that \u00a0\u00bbit’s one thing to oppose policies and another to back a coup.\u00a0\u00bb The paper stated that by not adequately opposing the coup, \u00a0\u00bbthe White House failed to stay on the side of democracy,\u00a0\u00bb yet still suggested that in the long run, \u00a0\u00bbVenezuela will benefit\u00a0\u00bb if the coup teaches Chavez to reach out to the opposition \u00a0\u00bbrather than continuing to divide the nation along class lines.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe Washington Post was one of the few major U.S. papers whose initial reaction was to condemn the coup outright. Though heavily critical of Chavez, the paper’s April 14 editorial led with an affirmation that \u00a0\u00bbany interruption of democracy in Latin America is wrong, the more so when it involves the military.\u00a0\u00bb Curiously, however, the Washington Post took pains to insist that \u00a0\u00bbthere’s been no suggestion that the United States had anything to do with this Latin American coup,\u00a0\u00bb even though details from Venezuela were still sketchy at that time. The New York Times, too, made a point of saying in its April 13 editorial that Washington’s hands were clean, affirming that \u00a0\u00bbrightly, his removal was a purely Venezuelan affair.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tIronically, news articles in both the Washington Post and the New York Times have since raised serious questions about whether the U.S. may in fact have been involved. Neither paper, however, has returned to the question<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Miroirs d\u00e9formants 19 avril 2002 — L’une des diverses causes de l’int\u00e9r\u00eat que nous portons \u00e0 l’\u00e9pisode du coup d’\u00c9tat manqu\u00e9 au Venezuela (coup anti-Chavez suivi du retour au pouvoir de Chavez, entre les 11 et 14 avril) est le comportement de la presse am\u00e9ricaine. Les \u00e9v\u00e9nements ont \u00e9t\u00e9 suffisamment rapides et suffisamment significatifs pour… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[3304,625,3305],"class_list":["post-65067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faits-et-commentaires","tag-chavez","tag-fair","tag-venezuela"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65067\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}