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Cockburn / St. Clair"s Scorching New History of a Decade of War Now Available! Today"s Stories July 3 / 4, 2004 Stan Goff ABC of Opportunism: "Progressive" Latin American Leaders Support the Coup in Haiti   July 2, 2004 Jeffrey St. Clair Suicide Right on the Stage: the Demise of the Green Party Douglas Valentine Fahrenheit 911: Mocking the Moral Crisis of Capitalism Gary Leupp "Just Because I Could": On Obscenities and Opportunities Lee Ballinger Illegal People: Kerry Opposes Immigrant Rights Robert Fisk Saddam in the Dock: Confused? Hardly CounterPunch Wire "What Law Formed This Court?": a Transcript of Saddam"s Arraignment Christopher Brauchli Bush"s Drug Card Lottery: the Price Ain"t Right Saul Landau Buzz Words and Venezuela July 1, 2004 Katherine van Wormer Bush"s Damaged Mind: the Madness in His Method Joe Bageant Is Our President a Whackjob? Does It Matter? William James Martin The Dogma of Richard Perle Dave Lindorff Bush"s Evacuation Moment Robert Fisk Bread and Circus Trials in Iraq Alan Maass Green Party in Reverse Website of the Day Michael Moore and Israel: Blind or a Coward?   June 30, 2004 Kurt Nimmo Nicholson Baker"s Checkpoint: a New Kind of Anger About Bush Tariq Ali Getting Away with Murder in Iraq Jennifer Van Bergen Bush and the Detainees Douglas Valentine Apotheosis of the Psychopaths: Instead of Fahrenheit 9/11, Rescreen The Quiet American David Price Fahrenheit 9/11 Through the McCain-Feingold Looking Glass Roger Normand America"s Criminal Occupation of Iraq Stan Cox Sanitized for Your Protection: Ashcroft"s War on Art Henry David Thoreau On the Futility of Bush v. Kerry: All Voting is a Kind of Gaming Ben Tripp Who Dast Call Him Liar: a Rebuttal to Nicholas Kristof     June 29, 2004 Patrick Cockburn The Cloak-and-Dagger Handover Robert Fisk Alice in an Iraqi Wonderland Troy Selvaratnam New York Times Boosts Pet Developer Harry Browne Bush in Ireland Ray McGovern The CIA According to Anonymous Elaine Cassel Hamdi, Padilla & Rasul: Who Really Won?     June 28, 2004 Patrick Cockburn / Leyla Linton Grisly Rituals in Iraq Amira Hass Confronting Myths and Deadly Power   June 26 / 27, 2004 Alexander Cockburn Venezuela: the Gang"s All Here Patrick Cockburn Iyad Allawi, the CIA"s New Stooge in Iraq Dennis Hans Once They Were Sweethearts: Cheney, the NYTs and the Myth of an Iraq Link to 9/11 Ben Tripp Adventures in Fuel Efficiency Dave Lindorff That State Department Terrorism Report: What They Knew, But Didn"t Tell You Chris Floyd Cold Irons Bound: the Russian Gambit Ali Tonak Contamination at Berkeley: Profit Motives, Academic Freedom and the Case of Ignacio Chapela Keith Rosenthal The Withering of the Anti-War Movement Bryan Sacks The Failure of the 9/11 Commission Wayne Madsen Another Case of Blowback Thomas St. John L. Frank Baum, Racist: Indian-Hating in the Wizard of Oz Niranjan Ramakrishnan American Swadeshi   June 25, 2004 Stephen Gowans US to North Korea: "Trust Us" Saul Landau 2006 Pentagon Budget as Sacrilege: Bush Invests the National Treasure in Death and Destruction Amir Butler Iraq: the Deadly Embrace Jack McCarthy Another Times Plagiarism Scandal? Did Maureen Dowd Lift from the World Weekly News? Greg Bates Chomsky and Zinn Plan to Vote Nader     June 24, 2004 Gary Leupp John Lehman on the Iraq / al-Qaeda Links Patrick Cockburn A Day in the Life of Col. Abu Mohammed: Defusing Bombs, Facing Death Threats Harry Browne On the Rebound: Bush Bounces Back...in Europe Bill Kaufman Another Marxist for Kerry: Joel Kovel"s Sad Smear of Ralph Nader Christopher Brauchli Bush, Cheney and the 9/11 Commission: What Did They Know? What Did They Tell? Rick Gioimbetti Andrea Yates: Victim of Psychiatric Violence? John Chuckman Call Center ID Hypocrisy Diana Johnstone Kerry and Kosovo: the Lie of a "Good War"     June 23, 2004 Laura Carlsen Bush and Castro Face Off Dave Zirin Barry Bonds vs. Boston: "A Flea Market of Racism" Kurt Nimmo From Saddam, With Love Patricia Wolff Foundation Wars Mahboob A. Khawaja "They Had Me Arrested and Shackled My Son" Patrick Cockburn The Pretense of an Independent Iraq Website of the Day The Road to Abu Ghraib June 22, 2004 Dave Lindorff The Meaning of Putin"s Pronouncement: Mutually Assured Pre-emption Ron Jacobs Nuclear Plants in US Protectorate of Iraq? Vanessa Jones Coogee, Peter Garrett and Valium Earrings Mickey Z An Open Letter to the People of Iraq John L. Hess Clinton Exhales Pedro Marset/Ex-Solidarity Committee for Pacho Cortés An Exchange on the Case of Pacho Cortés Bruce Jackson Saying No to Prosecutors: Why Steve Kurtz"s Colleagues Refused to Testify Website of the Day From Boot Camp to Boot Hill   June 21, 2004 Gary Leupp Putin"s Helpful Remarks Lucson Pierre-Charles Haiti After the Press Went Home: Chaos Upon Chaos Cockburn / Khan Saddam May Face Death Penalty Uri Avnery Irreversible Mental Damage     June 19 / 20, 2004 Patrick Cockburn Inside the Green Zone: US is Paranoid and Isolated Bruce Anderson Frozen Gringos Diane Christian Morality and Death: a Meditation on Bush and Blake Walter A. Davis Passion of the Christ in Abu Ghraib Josh Frank How Democrats Helped Bush Rape Mother Nature Col. Dan Smith Respectable Genocide?: the Crisis in Sudan Brian Cloughley A Profound Disruption of the Senses Christopher Brauchli Bush and the Timken Plant, a Year Later Prudence Crowther Mr. Ashcroft, Deport Me! Poets" Basement Iqbal/Alam, Krieger and Albert Kathy Kelly Dying to See Their Kids     June 18, 2004 Chris Floyd Blood Victory Dave Zirin Danielle Green, Basketball Player & Disabled Vet, Speaks Out Against War Justin E.H. Smith The Christian Question in American Politics Gary Leupp The "Long-Established" Link?: Iraq, al-Qaeda, and al-Zarqawi   June 17, 2004 Noel Ignatiev Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People of Palestine Kurt Nimmo The Bush-Kerry Conundrum Ed Cardoni The Persecution of Steve Kurtz Ron Jacobs Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They Do Dave Lindorff Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years" Greg Moses Geneva Ignored Norm Dixon How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons     June 18, 2004 Noel Ignatiev Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People of Palestine Kurt Nimmo The Bush-Kerry Conundrum Ed Cardoni The Persecution of Steve Kurtz Ron Jacobs Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They Do Dave Lindorff Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years" Greg Moses Geneva Ignored Norm Dixon How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons     June 16, 2004 Lenni Brenner A Question for Kerry Supporters Davey D Hip Hop Reflections on Reagan Daniel Wolff Why Did Michael Moore Withhold Video Evidence of US Prisoner Abuse? Bruce Jackson Harry Levin and the Penultimate Manuscript of Finnegans Wake Patrick Cockburn Boom! Boom! Out Go the Lights: Bombings Target Oil and Power Facilities Gary Handschumacher Mourn Ben Linder, Not His Killer: Reagan"s Death Squads JG Turning Haiti into One Big Sweatshop Mario Benedetti Obituary with Cheers Vicente Navarro Meet the New Head of the IMF: Who is Rodrigo Rato? Website of the Day Iraqi Oil Revenue Watch     June 15, 2004 Harry Browne Ireland Adds a Brick to Fortress Europe Neve Gordon The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited David Palmer Richard Armitage, Abu Ghraib and CACI John Blair Lovelock"s Misguided Call: Nukes Are No Solution to Global Warming Dave Lindorff God Wins in TKO Bill Quigley Blood-Pouring Peace Activists: State Charges Dropped; Feds Step In Patrick Cockburn Carbombs and Street Dances: 13 More Killed in Baghdad Blast John Chuckman John Kerry, Political Placebo   Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con! Subcomandante Marcos The Death Train of the WTO Norman Finkelstein Hitchens as Model Apostate Steve Niva Israel"s Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings? Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams CounterPunch Exclusive: 20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians Steve J.B. Prison Bitch Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber True Lies: the Use of Propaganda in the Iraq War Wendell Berry Small Destructions Add Up CounterPunch Wire WMD: Who Said What When Cindy Corrie A Mother"s Day Talk: the Daughter I Can"t Hear From Gore Vidal The Erosion of the American Dream Francis Boyle Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution Click Here for More Stories.     Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition July 3/4, 2004 Venezuela's Media Tycoons The Anti-Chavez Echo Chamber By JUSTIN DELACOUR More than a year ago, I received an angry message from an opponent of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez regarding an article that I wrote for Narco News criticizing the political partiality and methodological problems of Venezuela's two most cited pollsters ("Can You Believe Venezuela's Pollsters?", January 22, 2003). A number of anti-Chavez critiques of my article, including one by Francisco Toro, were pasted below the message. For those who are not familiar with Toro, he is a well-known anti-Chavez activist based in Caracas whom the New York Times once hired as a reporter, in violation of the Times' own claims to objective and disinterested reporting. Toro runs an anti-Chavez weblog called the Caracas Chronicles. At the time that I received this angry message, I was preoccupied with other issues, so, if I recall correctly, I did not read the critique by Toro that followed the message. However, the recent agreement in Venezuela to move ahead with a recall referendum on Chavez's government, as well as the Venezuelan President's recent citations of my article on Radio Nacional de Venezuela, have re-sparked interest in the topic of the pollsters. Thus, I have decided to revisit one of Toro's criticisms in order to show just how vacuous the Venezuelan opposition's defense of their pollsters is. I will address Toro's other "main" criticisms in future entries. Toro writes: The main reply to the writer... is that he's arguing by innuendo. These guys [the pollsters] are personally anti-Chavez (indubitable) therefore they're cheating on their polls (highly questionable). He never argues the link between the two, other than to suggest that anyone who is anti-Chavez is by definition such a nasty rat that he can't possibly be honest in reporting poll results. Actually, I never once put forth an argument that, since Venezuelan pollsters Alfredo Keller and Jose Antonio Gil Yepes were "personally anti-Chavez," they must have therefore been "cheating on their polls." First of all, Keller and Gil Yepes are not just "personally anti-Chavez"; they are publicly anti-Chavez, and virulently so, to the point that one was even quoted by the L.A. Times as calling for Chavez's assassination, while the other sanctified the April 11 coup --on Peruvian radio-- as a "de facto referendum." I made it abundantly clear in my original report that the pollsters had increasingly become identified publicly with the opposition and that they had made little effort to avoid this public perception. If it were only a matter of the pollsters' "personal" beliefs --not one of public declarations-- it would not be an issue. However, once the public comes to associate a pollster with a political side, the pollster's public associations become problematic in and of themselves because they are likely to bias the responses of the population sample being polled. All of this was made perfectly clear in my original report, but, since Toro seems to have overlooked this, allow me to refresh his memory with a passage from my article: ...even if we were to assume that Keller and Gil Yepes are not loading their questions, the poll respondents' simple awareness of the pollsters' political partisanship is likely to skew the polls in favor of the opposition. We asked Matthew Mendelsohn, a Canadian political scientist and specialist on polling methodology, whether or not the pollsters' well-known political partisanship --independent of all other factors-- could bias polling results. Although Mendelsohn told us that he lacked knowledge about polling in Latin America, he responded as follows: "Any perception on the part of the respondent that the questioner is partisan can influence results. You see this with interviewer effects all the time -- male and female, black and white, etc. interviewers get different results. And certainly if the respondent knows that you're a representative from a particular party or group, this biases results." Contrary to the argument put forth by Toro, I never once suggested that "anyone who is anti-Chavez is by definition such a nasty rat that he can't possibly be honest in reporting poll results." Once a pollster becomes publicly associated with a political side --either pro or anti-Chavez, in this case-- the problem is not necessarily that he or she is incapable of honestly reporting poll results but rather that the results themselves are likely to be biased. Given that all of this was made readily clear in the original report, I would like to discuss the issues of why Toro seems so incapable of addressing my actual points and why, instead, he is only able to address his own false caricatures of the arguments put forth in the article. The Anti-Chavez Echo Chamber Imagine a society where almost all private media, in accordance with the interests of the dominant class that owns and controls them, have made a conscious decision to subordinate their advertising, political "reporting" and publication of "polls" to the goal of overthrowing a democratically elected government. Venezuelans have no difficulty imagining this; the country's private media are completely devoted to the overthrow of a government that they consider insufficiently subservient to their interests. In fact, in his own infantile sort of way, even Toro comprehends this, although his understanding is naturally devoid of any meaningful class analysis. On January 25, 2003, Toro wrote the following in his weblog: "Venezuela's private media decided that political activism is much more fun than, y'know, actually reporting. Of course, I also decided that too." The absence of politically pluralistic private media should not be very difficult for U.S. citizens to imagine either, since --to the extent that private U.S. media cover Venezuela-- they too are largely united in their hostility toward the Chavez government, for much the same reasons that private Venezuelan media are. The interests of the powerful demand that political debate exist only within narrow bounds. Thus, to move outside those bounds --in other words, to actually challenge powerful economic interests and to question the imperialist behavior upon which those interests depend-- is generally not considered acceptable "journalistic" behavior. Venezuela's private media have essentially become a vast echo chamber, where debate is limited to tactical questions of how best to extinguish the threat to dominant class interests. Unfortunately, the de-pluralization of political discourse within private media tends to have highly degenerative effects on the rational faculties of those sectors of society that either belong to the economic elite or come under the mesmerizing influence of its propaganda apparatus. As one can easily see, the de-pluralization of discourse leads to increasing intolerance of dissenting views, thereby exacerbating authoritarian tendencies among both elites and the technocratic sectors to which they are aligned. This is especially the case during historical junctures when dissenting views come to hold greater sway among the general population and thus directly compromise dominant class interests. Delusions of the Propaganda Apparatus Within this context, the technocratic and educated sectors that fulfill the elite's propaganda function come to develop strange delusions about themselves. They begin to confuse their technocratic capacities with the supposed legitimacy and coherence of their ideas. Forgetting that their influential roles are based entirely on their subservience to dominant class interests, they come to adopt a circular logic, whereby their power to disseminate their message confers legitimacy on the message itself. Thus, subconsciously, the privately-controlled propaganda apparatus comes to equate its subservience to economic power with the legitimacy of its ideas. This logic was readily apparent in Venezuelan pollster Alfredo Keller's comments about my article. At the top of Keller's list of reasons why he chose not to respond to the article, he writes: It occurred to me to look into Narco News to understand the context within which the article appeared. We're talking about a digital newspaper that clearly backs all these leftist movements that are invading Latin America (Lula, Gutierrez, the Sandinistas, the FMLN, Elisa Carrió, Evo Morales, etc.) and that praises Chavez, Fidel, the Andean coca-growers' movements and other such wonderful company. ("Invading" Latin America? Just where are these "leftist" movements "invading" from, Alfredo?). So, in other words, Narco News doesn't bow down before the economically powerful, as this discredited Venezuelan pollster does. In a nutshell, Keller argues that the source of the article is illegitimate on account of its lack of subservience to economic power. Keller does not attempt to refute the arguments put forth in the article because, well, there isn't much that he can refute, a fact that he tacitly and begrudgingly acknowledges in the following quote: The article, besides being written with great ability, comes out in defense of Chavez, so I ask myself, how much could it have cost? I must admit how flattered I am by the suggestion that I may have been contracted by the Venezuelan government to write the article. Perhaps Alfredo will be disappointed to learn that I was never contacted by the Venezuelan government, nor did I receive a penny for writing the report, nor did I ever request payment. In case Alfredo wasn't aware, his virulently anti-Chavez ruminations had been blared all over the internet long before I wrote the report, so my research tasks weren't exactly daunting. In consultation with Narco News editor Al Giordano, I decided to investigate Venezuela's major pollsters and publish my findings for one simple reason: the story was highly newsworthy. Even in the United States, where the private media are almost invariably subservient to corporate interests, journalists generally do not cite polls by pollsters who have publicly partisan connections. Given these well-known standards, it is simply mind-boggling to witness the amateurism of English-language correspondents in Venezuela, who have routinely cited polls by Keller and Gil Yepes without mentioning that the two pollsters are virulently and publicly anti-Chavez. How, after all, could Keller or Gil Yepes honestly deny the uncontestable fact that their open partisanship compromises the professionalism of their operations? Not surprisingly, Keller avoids the subject altogether, hoping perhaps that, as long as Venezuela's private media remain one vast anti-Chavez echo chamber --and that, at least with regard to Venezuela, private U.S. media remain essentially the same-- the facts will not receive much exposure. As the old riddle goes, "If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, does it still make a sound?" This brings me back to my original point about Toro's inability to address my actual arguments. While the private propaganda apparatus and its ruling class overlords pay ample lip service to the virtues of competition in the marketplace, they are quite unwilling to submit themselves to competition in the realm of ideas. As they vigilantly bar their ideological competitors from their vast echo chamber, their capacity to rationally engage their political foes begins to atrophy. Their growing intolerance of dissenting views --combined with their delusions that their influential roles are somehow based on the merits of their ideas rather than on their subservience to economic power-- leads them to become intellectually lazy. Thus, instead of honestly trying to interpret the arguments of an ideological foe, it suffices for Toro to erect crude caricatures of those arguments --caricatures that have no resemblance to the arguments that I actually made-- and then to respond to the caricatures. In Toro's concluding remarks about my article --directed at someone else in the opposition who was apparently concerned about the article's possible effects-- he states the following: Thankfully, the 20,000 people who read ZMag [note: the article also ran on the progressive U.S. webzine ZNet, at http://www.zmag.org/] are all equally blinded by ideology and unreasonable, and such writing is most unlikely to reach or influence people who matter, who know anything at all, or who have anything like an open mind. So I really wouldn't worry about it. Sound familiar? Yeah, well, there's nothing like an echo chamber to feed an "open mind." Justin Delacour is a freelance writer and recent graduate of the Masters program in Latin American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He has written for Latin America Data Base (http://ladb.unm.edu/), a University of New Mexico-based news service. He receives email at jdelac@unm.edu Weekend Edition Features for June 12 / 13, 2004 Peter Linebaugh Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto and Runnymede Team CounterPunch CP"s Favorite Albums Jeffrey St. Clair Troy, Now and Then Gary Leupp Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq? Brian Cloughley US Military in Crisis Antonio Ponvert, III Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection Ben Tripp The Polls Get Stupider Joe Bageant Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash" Ron Jacobs The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency Forrest Hylton Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés Christopher Brauchli Federal Bureau of Errors Kurt Nimmo Going After Qaddafi, Again Wayne Madsen Israel"s Slap at Reagan Anthony Loewenstein Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World Michael Donnelly A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous Greg Moses Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah? Susan Davis Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban Joseph Ramsey Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground Niranjan Ramakrishnan The 18th Brumaire in the 21st Century Wayne Saunders The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup Poets" Basement Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert Website of the Weekend Insurgent Music WWW http://www.counterpunch.org   Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /