Read John Pilger in the New Statesman and weep. If anyone saw the Channel 4 “news” item mentioned below, I’d be grateful if you’d comment here.
In reclaiming the honour of our craft, not to mention the truth, we journalists at least need to understand the historic task to which we are assigned – that is, to report the rest of humanity in terms of its usefulness, or otherwise, to “us”, and to soften up the public for rapacious attacks on countries that are no threat to us. We soften them up by dehumanising them, by writing about “regime change” in Iran as if that country were an abstraction, not a human society. Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela is currently being softened up on both sides of the Atlantic. A few weeks ago, Channel 4 News carried a major item that might have been broadcast by the US State Department. The reporter, Jonathan Rugman, the programme’s Washington correspondent, presented Chávez as a cartoon character, a sinister buffoon whose folksy Latin ways disguised a man “in danger of joining a rogues’ gallery of dictators and despots – Washington’s latest Latin nightmare”. In contrast, Condoleezza Rice was given gravitas and Donald Rumsfeld was allowed to compare Chávez to Hitler.
