10 January 2010

Invasion of Venezuela or Caracas Chronicles debacle?

Caracas Chronicles is one of the four longest-running blogs that have been covering the collapse of our country's democracy, for a predominantly English audience. It's author, Francisco Toro, is, without a doubt, perhaps the most eloquent writer we have on our side. Toro has for ages claimed that professional journalism simply does not exist in Venezuela, with which I agree to an extent. Toro is very passionate about defending the importance of sticking to facts, when reporting the stuff that comes out of Chavez's Venezuela, with which I fully agree.

Needless to say that Toro, as good a writer as he is, is far from infallible. His latest, linked to by The Guardian's Rory Carroll (in another example of appalling journalism), does more to harm the stance he so feverishly defends and his own approach to sticking to facts, than prove that the incident of the P3 plane that allegedly ventured into Venezuelan airspace is a botched job of the Chavez propaganda apparatus.

I left the following comment in his blog, for Gene of Harry's Place fame, in the hope he'll retract and set a nice precedent for all of us to follow:

... avion P3 de este tipo... Meaning a P3 airplane of this type, ergo the picture was used for illustration purposes, and was not, as this blog entry claims, that Chavez said that picture of plane is the original.
Link to Chavez's words:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMoYHgD7RVk
A retraction is in order FT, pronto, you are/were, after all, a professional journo, right?

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