New at Reason

Tim Cavanaugh | May 11, 2005

What happens when "people power" parts ways with America's "national interests"? Jesse Walker heads south of the border.

Comments

|5.11.05 @ 2:02PM|#

What's interesting to me is that, as Noam Chomsky predicted, the puffing up of those popular movements that advance our strategic interests, and the demonization or silence towards those that do not, is not limited to the administration, but is also reflected in the press.

fyodor|5.11.05 @ 2:15PM|#

Jesse, you ANARCHIST!!

At the hazard of speaking about a matter I haven't studied closely, I think the main way nonviolent action succeeds is by convincing the military of the illegitimacy of its masters. Once those masters cannot control the military, they are no longer masters. This is what almost happened in China, while Tianamen Square showed the risks of failure.

joe,

I thought you didn't like Chomsky? I think this example shows the tragedy of Chomsky, because he can be right sometimes (and maybe a little more than a stopped clock). But he discredits himself by severely overplaying his hand. Naturally, business interests are not overjoyed by leftist success, and one should be aware of this and aware that news outlets are business. But he sophomorically portrays this potential for bias as something that universally biases the news media against anything and everything that he believes in to the exclusion of any other potential type of bias. Bias, like shit, happens. Only unlike shit, it doesn't all go in one direction. Ooh, what a smelly metaphor....

|5.11.05 @ 3:01PM|#

nice to see something in reason on foreign policy thats a bit left leaning, not demeaning or sarcastic or/and isn't about lebanon...

|5.11.05 @ 3:03PM|#

Palastinians and South Americans have been engaging in all sorts of coups or resistance since before most of us were born (in the case of South America, since before any of us were born). No new news there.

Nations carved from the former Soviet Union are a different and more interesting matter. And the Lebanese / Syrian thing fueled all sorts of causality debates.

So it is largely a matter of interest. The news will hype good news and bad news alike, if it is newsworthy. Not much about Ecuador is newsworthy (my inlaws, who are Ecuadorian, notwithstanding).

Larry A|5.11.05 @ 6:18PM|#

Gosh. The next thing you know the peons'll want the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.