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Thursday, October 29, 2009

Al Jazeera English covers "nouveau cold war story" in Honduras

"I arrived in Honduras one week after ousted president Manuel Zelaya returned to begin his long spell of internal exile in the Brazilian embassy. With my crew from Fault Lines on Al Jazeera English TV, I went straight from the airport to a funeral. A week later, on our last night of filming, we attended another funeral.

The first was for a 24-year-old woman, the second for a 50-year-old schoolteacher, and both active in the resistance to the coup. ... Unsurprisingly, the US mainstream media is not reporting the story of what is really going on in Honduras. The de facto government and its backers invested $400,000 (that we know of) in bipartisan lobbying, and succeeded in implanting a deeply distorted narrative of events--a nouveau cold war story starring Hugo Chávez as puppet master and Zelaya as marionette.

Meanwhile, the voice of the social movement struggling to reform its country's constitution in the second poorest nation in the hemisphere has been all but ignored." Avi Lewis, The Nation 26 Oct., 2009 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091109/lewis with links to video of AJE's Fault Lines: 100 Days of Resistance. Regardless of what we think about the events in Honduras, the writer's language, at least in this blurb, does not position Al Jazeera English as a dispassionate, objective news source. "About Fault Lines: Looking deeper into the US and its place in the world." AJE website at http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/faultlines/ .
(Kim Elliott)