FT says Chávez financed Carlos Mesa's resignation: Do they recruit journalists from CIA job fairs?

The Financial Times really has blown it. Normally I find that they provide more reasonably balanced and accurate reporting than almost any other English-language daily of its size and scale. Why is this? Because it’s where policy-makers go for news – that is to say, policy-makers who actually give a damn about what is going on beyond the White House’s press statements and PR-company-run “messaging.” So the truth-to-propaganda ratio is usually heavily skewed in truth’s favor. But not this week.

On March 13 they ran UK correspondent Andy Webb-Vidal’s flaccid piece of “reporting” titled “Bush Orders Policy to “Contain” Chávez.” With a headline like that, the blatant inaccuracies and vague allegations it contained should have come as no surprise, particularly when viewed along with Webb-Vidal’s new location, oligarch central – that is to say, Miami.... The overall premise of the article is that Chavez is “[driven] to ‘subvert’ Latin America’s least stable states,” and that Condi and Georgie have requested the development of “a strategy aimed at fencing in the government of the world’s fifth largest oil exporters.”

So immediately I wondered – what are the “least stable states” and what does his “drive to subvert” look like, exactly?

Well, Peru is one, where uncited “allegations emerged suggesting that Mr Chávez financed a rogue army officer who tried to incite a rebellion against President Alejandro Toledo in December.”

Allegations don’t just happen to “emerge”; they are made, and those who make them have names and faces. But perhaps those names are more connected to the Oval Office than to the government of Toledo.

Colombia of course counts in the “least stable state” category, where

“Colombian officials close to President Alvaro Uribe say Venezuela is giving sanctuary to Colombian guerrillas, deemed 'terrorists' by the US and Europe.”

Interesting that Uribe himself is not making such claims. At least the officials this time around are Colombian, despite also being nameless.

The most shocking claim is about Bolivia:

“US officials say Mr Chávez financed Evo Morales, the Bolivian indigenous leader whose followers last week unsuccessfully tried to force President Carlos Mesa's resignation.”

This is perhaps the most inaccurate representation of what’s going down in Bolivia this month that I have read. Who are these US officials, and how do I file a complaint against them? Maybe they should have read Mesa’s resignation speech, or read his various threats to resign over recent months. They definitely should have read Luis Gomez’s excellent reporting here in the Narcosphere in which leaders of the social movements state that they never asked that Mesa resign, just that he keep his word.

But the responsibility doesn’t lie with nameless “US officials.” Andy Webb-Vidal, and his editors at the Financial Times are the guilty parties here.

The main source he cites – in fact, the only source with a name – is Mr. Roger Pardo-Maurer, deputy assistant secretary for western hemisphere affairs at the US Department of Defense. What? Webb-Vidal should know better – he has previously filed various reports - real ones, not like this - from Caracas and Bogotá. It isn’t like he used to get his information exclusively from the Pentagon and, perhaps, Florida International University.

Reading the quotes from Pardo-Maurer, I can’t help but wonder if part of the Bush administration policy is based on the assumption that most gringos are afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder and that none of us will notice what they’re doing because we can’t remember what they’ve done.

For example, after reporting Pardo-Maurer’s opinion that Chávez is employing a “hyena strategy,” (can someone tell me what that means?) the “journalist” lays down this choice Pentagon line:

"Chávez is a problem because he is clearly using his oil money and influence to introduce his conflictive style into the politics of other countries,’ Mr. Pardo-Maurer said…”

I wonder what the people of Iraq and Palestine (and Guatemala, Iran, Afghanistan, Chile, Colombia, Granada, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc) would have to say about the US Pentagon criticizing Venezuela – or any nation - for introducing a “conflictive style into the politics of other countries”?

Perhaps being relocated to Miami has taken its toll on Andy Webb-Vidal, and he’s reading too much of The Miami Herald. I hope the FT will realize that by running coverage with such blatant misinformation, they are stooping to that same level.

The article ends on an ominous note, with this gem:
"Mr Pardo-Maurer said Washington has run out of patience: “We have reached the end of the road of the current approach.”

If you feel as I do and have "run out of patience" with both the DOD bullying of Chávez and with such pathetic examples of reporting, please write to the FT and complain. I was only able to find a generic "contact us" form to fill out, so if anyone knows how to directly contact the editors there, please post it here.

And if the FT makes the article disappear, as happened with The Independent when Ron Smith and others of us took correspondent Hannah Baldock to task for her lousy (and illegal) coverage of the Chávez recall referendum, you can always find the article on VHeadline.