Sorry, my lefty friends, but it’s true.
I said it in June of last year, here and here, when I remarked on Amy Goodman’s failure to challenge Arundhati Roy on her professed support for India’s Maoist (Naxalite) insurgents. The Naxalites have a documented policy of harassing community radio activists — i.e., Goodman’s Indian counterparts, the very people you’d expect her to stand up for. Much more important, it seems, to feed the cult of an adored celebrity guest than to stand on principle.
On a community access TV station here in Philly, I just watched Goodman conduct a fawning interview with John Pilger, the far-left propagandist routinely mistaken for a journalist. Pilger is hawking a new documentary called “The War On Democracy,” an entirely accurate title, but for the wrong reasons. It’s about the Venezuela situation, and judging from the trailer, it may as well have been produced by Hugo Chavez himself. (I’m not being facetious in the least.)
I’ve mentioned Pilger on this blog before, here and here. He has referred to Hezbollah as an example of “humanity at its noblest.” He condemns Israel for “driving [Palestinians] to the despair of having to commit their own atrocities….” Yes, having to commit their own atrocities. Though they touched on Israel briefly, Goodman couldn’t be bothered to cite Pilger’s deplorable record on the subject. Nor did this supposed defender of journalists bring up the fact that Pilger is on record supporting the so-called Iraqi “resistance,” despite its relentless kidnapping and slaughter of journalists. “We cannot afford to be choosy,” Pilger said in 2004.
No, Goodman, her co-host Juan Gonzalez and Pilger were gathered to genuflect before Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan revolution, at a time when Chavez is aggressively stifling his country’s media and his riot police are opening fire on student demonstrators with rubber bullets. If those demonstrators were Palestinians, or antiglobalization activists, what a different tune we’d be hearing from Democracy Now, which has the nerve to post a graphic reading “Free Speech TV” at the upper right corner of the screen.
As I’ve noted before, Chavez’s idea of “a model social state” is Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus. But there is Goodman, swallowing the pro-Chavez line without so much as a caveat. She should change her program’s name to Anti-Democracy Now, for she has effectively aligned herself against genuine pro-democracy organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has issued a damning report on Chavez’s recent moves.
[Via Marc Cooper, another progressive critique of Chavez by Eric Biewener, who is based in Caracas.]
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