A transcript from WNYC's On The Media program...

In which Brazilian journalist Antonio Brasil (currently a fellow at Rutgers University in New Jersey) does an amazing job of setting the record straight, and making an ass out of host Bob Garfield (or, better said, letting Garfield make an ass of himself with his cultural ignorance and bigotry).

Some excerpts:

BOB GARFIELD: Last week, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva dropped his threat to give New York Times Bureau Chief in Brazil, Larry Rohter, the boot. Lula had ordered Rohter's expulsion after the veteran correspondent wrote an article suggesting that there was a national concern in Brazil over Lula's drinking. The Brazilian leader reversed his decision days later, under an avalanche of protest from the Brazilian media and elsewhere on press freedom grounds. Key words: on press freedom grounds. While fighting for Rohter's right to write, the Brazilian media were uniformly critical about the article in question. In fact, according to Brazilian journalist Antonio Brasil, many saw the episode as evidence of the decline and even corruption of American journalism.

ANTONIO BRASIL: One thing is to say anything about a president, you know, and his possible drinking habits. It's another thing when he says that the, the Brazilians were concerned, that -where there was a national concern. Most people say that was not, you know, true. His sources and evaluation in terms of putting together the story would represent some kind of a sloppy journalism or maybe for those who were more into conspiracy somehow that there was something behind. You know, you cannot forget that this is a completely new government. In Brazil this is a Socialist kind of a government for the very, very first time. Lula is from the Worker's Party, and they are very sensitive of any comment, especially coming from America. And you have to think that right now in Latin America -- it's not just in Brazil, but in many parts of the world, the sort of idea of a very strong anti-American feeling.

Analyis:

So far, so good, but look at what Garfield has to say in response...

BOB GARFIELD: I can see how an uninformed public might confuse suspicion with the United States government and its behavior with a newspaper that comes from the United States, but how would journalists in Brazil conflate the United States government's actions with that of the, the New York Times?

Analysis:

Garfield is acting surprised at the mere suggestion to "conflate the United States government's actions with that of the, the New York Times."

"Conflate," according to The American Heritage Dictionary, via Dictionary.com:

con·flate (kn-flt)
con·flat·ed, con·flat·ing, con·flates

To bring together; meld or fuse: “The problems [with the biopic] include... dates moved around, lovers deleted, many characters conflated into one” (Ty Burr).

To combine (two variant texts, for example) into one whole.

Well, Bob, let me count the ways that Latin America very accurately conflates (melds, fuses, combines) the behavior of New York Times correspondents and the U.S. government.

(Hell, even the Times editorial today offers a public apology for such self-conflating-with-U.S.-government-sources in the Times-driven build-up to the Iraq war):

The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one...

But in Latin America it is even worse. Go through the entire body of Rohter's work since the days when he was whoring for U.S. Embassy sources in Guatemala, Mexico, and Nicaragua, among other places, and you will find an absolutely consistent and addictive reliance on "official" U.S. sources, almost always unnamed, to make up his fictions about events South of the Border.

Here is how the game works: If you are a Timesman (or at AP, or CNN, or Washington Post, or LA Times, although the New York Times is a serial offendor) in Latin America, you are required to have open lines of communication with the U.S. Embassies and their press flaks. The State Department knows this: If a Timesman is cut off from Embassy sources, the Timesman will lose his cushy Latin American beat at gringo pay scales. And so the Embassies have the Timesmen by the balls. Either they "play the game," float the untrue rumors that the State Department wants them to float, trash the political and social leaders critical of U.S. policy, and trade information back and forth (thus making Timesmen, also, a kind of unpaid volunteer for U.S. intelligence agencies), or they get cut off from the Embassy sources.

Thus, with this emphasis on "official" sources in almost all their articles, the New York Times editors have guaranteed that their correspondents enter in this corruption.

Some, like Rohter and Juan Forero obviously, beyond the fact that their pubic hairs are in the Embassy vise, like the game this way. It suits their cretinous authoritarian anti-democracy ideologies.

But for Bob Garfield, who purports to understand "the Media," to act surprised at the suggestion makes him either a fool or an intentional liar.

Anyway, Antonio Brasil handled his gasping question very well:

ANTONIO BRASIL: Bob, you have to think that when you start to show things that are wrong with recent American journalism, the whole situation of embedded journalists -- for Brazilians, you know, when they watch and they are sort of very well informed about situations like Fox TV, you know, supporting and being very much engaged in American politics, and some of the problems that happened in the New York Times -- you know, the frauds committed by Jayson Blair, maybe the standards are not as high, so for the people to make this connection of political interest, of a conspiracy behind, you know, it's natural. If you're going to do a profile on the president, and if you're going to accuse him, you have to do a much better journalism. You have to have better sources, different sources, and that was one of the main criticisms of the story, is that he listened to very few sources. Those sources were clear enemies of the government somehow. They are from opposition. And that would represent not the standards of American journalism that we expect.

The conclusion is also interesting in the way that, finally, someone (in this case Antonio Brasil) bats the ball out of the park by raising the omnipresent problem of cultural bias and bigotry by gringo reporters in Latin America, for which Larry Rohter is a poster boy...

BOB GARFIELD: Well, I was going to ask you if a Brazilian journalist had written the article that Rohter wrote, would there have been such an uproar, but I guess the question I want to ask you now is: would a Brazilian journalist at this moment in Brazilian history ever have written the article that Larry Rohter published in the New York Times?

ANTONIO BRASIL: Bob, there were a number of articles. What Larry did was just collect here and there little bits and pieces of stories that were in the Brazilian press, but again, it's one thing for the Brazilian press to comment and for one columnist to make an opinion. That would be very clear in Brazilian minds as being part of a political agenda, you know, because it's difficult to prove. But when the New York Times, which is a reference for Brazilian journalists and for international journalism in terms of standards, if it decides to write a story - if you read the story, it's not something that's just giving, you know, he drank three glasses or four glasses -- it's very opinionated, and reveals, for the Brazilians, you know, some kind of a prejudice against, you know, someone who has a completely different background. You know, Brazilian journalists, they will never say -- and that's a main difference in the New York Times -- that was a national concern -- because Brazilians would take that, you know, like we have a completely different culture, we have to understand carnival, you know -- your culture has a relationship with Prohibition and you know, you cannot drink in the streets -- which is completely alien for us. And that's again the problems of foreign journalism -- you report from your own eyes and from your own culture things that are different that maybe you just don't understand...

And there you have it, in a nutshell... the reason Narco News also exists, had to exist, and must exist... To destroy the monopoly that the bigots like Rohter and his editors have had for too much time already over English-language news reporting from Latin America.