Human Rights Watch Keeps the Distortions Coming about Venezuela UPDATED

[Judi Lynn]

Human Rights Watch Keeps the Distortions Coming about Venezuela UPDATED

By Joe Emersberger
April 10, 2014

In a blog post for the New York Review of Books, Daniel Wilkenson of Human Rights Watch (HRW) wrote

“Supporters of Chávez and Maduro often seek to downplay concerns about press freedoms in Venezuela by pointing to reporting critical of the government in the country’s newspapers. It is true that the government has not targeted the print media as aggressively as television, perhaps because the number of Venezuelans who read newspapers is a small fraction of the number who watch TV.”

In other words, it is very easy to expose the lies spread by HRW, RSF and most of the international media about the state of press freedom in Venezuela by simply monitoring the content of the country’s largest newspapers. Wilkenson must therefore find some way around that inconvenient fact. Anyone who reads Spanish will be immediately shocked by the quantity and vehemence of anti-government tirades that appear. As I’ve explained elsewhere, it is child’s play to find op-eds every day that openly call Maduro a “dictator” or “assassin” or words to that effect.

What about Wilkinson’s suggestion that the numbers of people who read newspapers is too small to matter much to the government? It doesn’t stand up at all. Relative to the Venezuela’s population, the combined daily circulation of its four largest newspapers is about the same as the combined daily circulation of the four largest newspapers in the USA.

Think about that. If an anti-government group in the USA is very well represented in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today and the LA Times, how credibly could that group claim that it has been unable to effectively get its views out to the public? And how plausible is it that a group with such a strong presence in the print media would be shut out of the TV media? Common sense should lead anyone to say that it probably isn’t true and that is exactly what very recent studies of the Venezuelan TV media have revealed.

More:
http://zcomm.org/zblogs/human-rights-watch-keeps-the-distortions-coming-about-venezuela/

[Peace Patriot]

1. 'Human Rights Watch' is the 'Citizens United' of corporate brainwashing...

...i.e., promotion of the corporate 'right' to monopolize information with monster conglomerates and to lie, lie and lie some more on behalf of the 1%.

Corporations have NO HUMAN RIGHTS. They are not people. They are not human. They live forever, accumulating wealth and power, providing a platform for various oligarchies to build upon, over the eons, to strip the poor of THEIR rights.

Every damn one of them ought to be dismantled, including the 'news' conglomerates.

What HRW never says is that democracy would be greatly enhanced if Blobvision and the other 'news' malefactors in Venezuela, and our own and the world's Associated Pukes, New York Slimes, Wall Street Urinal, Rotters, Dim Channel, Faux pigs, BBCons, et al, would all choke on their corporate 'free speech' bullcrap and never bring us any more Iraq Wars, Afghan wars, 9/11's (Oh, the visuals!), torture chambers (no visuals), Bushes, 'austerity,' Fukushimas and other fiendish horrors from Hell ever again.

We would be better off--much better off--without them. We DON'T NEED THEM. We need a REAL free press. People are, in fact, creating a real free press, as we speak. But the damage that the UNFREE corporate press has done to real democracy and to millions of people, here and abroad--with the wars they've touted and the endless lies they've crammed down peoples' throats, and huge sins of omission, on every vital matter from war to 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines--has been so horrible, that I wonder, sometimes, if it CAN be remedied. It's difficult to have faith in humanity and in the future from inside the USA these days--and ain't that the irony of ironies? Once the hope of the world--the hope of humanity, the creator of the notion of democratic renewal--the USA has become the Roman Empire in its final stage of corruption and DECLINE. And we can certainly blame the New York Slimes and all their brethren, for the loss of our democracy, here. Gawd, the Slimes brought us the Iraq War. They brought us the Iraq War! Right on their front pages, with lie after lie after lie! And the rest of the lying liars of the corporate press followed right in their train.

Elsewhere--particularly in Venezuela, also notably in Argentina and other LatAm countries--people are successfully fighting back, with government policies similar to those we once had here, such as the Fairness Doctrine--which curtail the power of the rich to control the media and foster variety and public access.

Does HRW recognize this? They DO NOT. They are apologists for MORE corporate 'rights.'

[Bacchus4.0]

2. I bet you 100 Bs ($1.50 on the black market) that more Venezuelans watch tv than newspapers

Unbelievable that you picked that country as an example of a free press.