South of the Border

The friendly reviewer cannot speak openly and completely honestly or be seen as anti-American by the vast majority of the population, confirmed gingoists cheering on everything committed under the Sun so long as it's done by Americans.

To describe > important new Latin American leaders who have empowered indigenous populations and rallied suspicion of United States intervention and manipulations < is to pretend the specifics of what these leaders refer to are debatable.

One instance should suffice for how American media slavishly avoids criticizing satanic American acts abroad: Bechtel Corp, i believe based in San Francisco, wrangled a contract out of the previous totally corrupt American-friendly government of Bolivia, to commodify the staple of all staples, water. They were sold the "right" to control the sale of water in Bolivia, raising the cost of drinking and cooking water to the point of bankrupting families whose cost of water rose to almost half of their meager incomes, the people be damned. Bechtel even bribed the formerly corrupt American-brownnosing Bolivian legislature to pass a law outlawing the collection of rainwater, before the population got off its knees and threatened the govt with removal unless Bechtel was thrown out of the country.

Now, this is not a legend, or a nightmare, it is a fact. That is the degree rapacious America goes to nazify the world, if they can get away with it. FORTUNATELY, as Stone tries to reveal, SOUTH Americans at least have had enough of the corporate reign of terror Americans have visited upon them for centuries now. And it is the new crop of leaders which the American govt, stooge of their master corporations, hates, demonizes and threatens with more American wars and coups for these leaders' attempts to take back the most basic of human rights from the Big Pig up north.

Would that this corporate-run media admit to these crimes in print. At least Oliver Stone tries to do so with this film. There is even a right-wing American campaign going on to deny the American-backed coup against the multiply-democratically-elected Hugo Chavez in 2002 ever took place. It's the death of history our supposed journals of contemporary events can't refer to such facts other than couched in terms of "suspicion" of American "manipulations" lest the truth be told. Stone tries to take the scales off our eyes to see the American media's lies about these new leaders are no different than those of the old Soviet media: Totally untrustworthy, for they are in league with pirates like Bechtel in their global shake-downs of decent people abroad, as well as at home.

In Defense of Oliver Stone

The furor over Oliver Stone’s recent remarks in the UK about Jews in the media comes amidst increasing diligence by political pundits concerning the concentration of influence and ownership in media,

Stone's record on other biases in American media warrants more diligence on our part before we cast stones for blatant anti-Semitism. Is the number of Jews reporting or editing the news disproportionate compared to the general population? Would it matter if it were? Is there a professional context within which this question can properly be asked?

Touchy subject.

To borrow from Ashis Nandy, the average voter in Euro-American society has a civic duty to question whether "the idiom of dissent is increasingly being defined at the centers of conformity".

Would any of us deny each other the right to ask similar questions concerning the Cuban trade embargo, the public Health Insurance option, or Banking reform?

Of course not.

In a recent post to the Nunaview blog, even I explored the general phenomenon of diasporic minorities such as the Chinese in Polynesia, Indians in Africa and Jews in Euro-America, and suggested they should justifiably boast about their accomplishments rather than disguising the celebrity and influence they have garnered.

But Oliver Stone’s remarks are different. Very different. So are Michael Moore’s. So are Noam Chomsky’s.

They point to a potentially egregious violation of journalism’s core claim to truth in transparency. They reach to the very foundations of representative democracy, public dialogue, and electoral politics.

Every sophomore journalism student learns that the viewing public must be explicitly cautioned to raise their pre-suppositional antennae, not just for gross bias, but for the more subtle, inadvertent and even innocent bias that reporters might miss in themselves, so ingrained is it in their personal history or basic human preferences.

It is CNN's very own insistence on this principle that opens them up to analysis and accountability. Are allegations that CNN omits information from staff biographies accurate? Did Wolf Blitzer really work for radically pro-Jewish and activist pro-Israel publications and lobbies for much of his career prior to joining CNN? If that is accurate, then CNN has is egregiously derelict in its duty when omitting those facts from their online backgrounders and biographies of Wolf Blitzer. This personal history should be addressed with sufficient frequency and transparency as to discharge that journalistic stricture and obligation to the global audience.

CNN claims not to be Fox. The standard is higher.

If you have any doubt about the legitimacy of this tenet of professional journalism, I dare you to spend a week, just one single week, watching America's mass media as if you were Chinese, Venezuelan, Muslim, Cuban, Pakistani, Arab-Israeli, Palestinian, or just a truly independent American elector.