Occasionally the American media decides for a moment to interrupt its Paris Hilton coverage and turn south for a look at how Hugo Chavez is destroying democracy. A couple of months ago there was much ado about his denial of a broadcasting license to the coup mongering RCTV.
Meanwhile the presidents of countries like Ecuador and Bolivia are usually portrayed as puppets of the evil Chavez. Funny, though, how little one hears of truly contemptible journalistic behavior such as the shenanigans recently orchestrated by the opposition media in Ecuador. Mark Weisbrot:
...on May 21 the opposition TV media launched an assault on President Correa's finance minister, Ricardo Patiño. In a seven minute grainy video clip from a hidden camera, they showed the minister meeting on February 12 with two representatives of a New York investment firm, as well as a former finance minister. Patiño talks about "scaring the markets," in what looks like a plot to manipulate the country's bond market. The clip, taken out of context, was shown repeatedly for days on the TV news, spliced with gratuitous, unrelated images of faceless people counting large amounts of cash.
It turns out that the video was authorized by Patiño himself, an odd thing to do if one is meeting to plan a crime. Patiño claims that the purpose of the meeting and the taping of it was to investigate corruption. And indeed the rest of the video – not shown on TV but presented in a transcript published in Ecuador's major newspapers – supports his explanation. In the rest of the meeting, Patiño is probing for information on corrupt activities – including past market manipulations. He allows the others to present and explain the possibilities in detail, never agreeing to go along with anything – just as one would expect in an investigation of this sort. In fact he states that it would be wrong to manipulate the market. The meeting ends with one of the investors stating that nothing would be done regarding the current debt payment – which was due three days after the videotaped meeting -- but that they could think about what to do in the future.
But the TV media's repeated, propagandistic images – playing on people's cynicism from decades of corrupt government -- had the most influence. This emboldened the opposition to make more wild allegations of secret deals with foreign banks, and vote to censure Patiño in the Congress – which they control. All of this has been done without anyone presenting evidence that the finance minister was involved in any wrongdoing.
If all this seems Orwellian, it is....
Of course if Ecuadorean government actually tried to hold the purveyors of this kind of garbage responsible to some degree for their misinfomation campaign and libelous assaults then this would be the end of free speech in Ecuador.
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