Behind the New York Times' hatchet job on Oliver Stone's "South of the Border"

Not only are there the numerous errors that Oliver Stone, Tariq Ali, and Mark Weisbrot point out in their letter to the New York Times (having to do with presidential candidate Irene Sáez, flying over the Andes to get to La Paz, Venezuela’s oil exports to the United States – see above article), here are a few more problems that their letter did not go into.

First of all, Rohter chastises Stone for not disclosing that I — who appears for about a minute in the documentary — am married to Carol Delgado, Venezuela’s consul general to New York, nor my affiliation with the mostly pro-Chávez website Venezuelanalysis.com. While these “affiliations” are correct, I question if they are actually the most relevant disclosures, given the testimony I provide in the film.

In the documentary I make brief comments on only two issues, on what I witnessed during the April 2002 coup attempt and on what many “analysts” of Venezuela have said about the role of Venezuela’s private mass media, that it openly supports the opposition and subverts the government. These are both issues I have written about extensively and consistently since April 2002, about six years before my wife was appointed consul in early 2008. My first articles on the coup are available online here and here. I published my fullest account of the coup in April 2007 here, while my wife was still a mid-level PDVSA [Venezuela's state oil company] employee. Also, my book, Changing Venezuela by Taking Power was published in September 2007, also before we moved to New York.

So, if Oliver Stone should have mentioned disclosures in the few seconds that I appear on the screen, then perhaps he should also have mentioned other relevant points. I can just see it, a full disclosure caption that reads: “Gregory Wilpert, adjunct professor of political science at Brooklyn College, co-founder of the mostly pro-Chávez Venezuelanalysis.com, married to Venezuela’s pro-Chávez Consul General, but witnessed and reported on coup-related events six years before his wife’s appointment and one and a half years before the founding of Venezuelanalysis.com.” I think such a caption would probably have been long enough to cover my face.

Second, Rohter’s article suggests that Stone should have known that one of the buildings from which demonstrators were shot at during the coup (known as “La Nacional”) belonged to the pro-Chávez mayor’s office. First, while this is true, this building is not even mentioned in the documentary. Second, if Rohter was really interested in providing more detail, he should also have mentioned that nine opposition-affiliated police officers were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for having participated in the occupation of this building and for having shot at demonstrators or for having given the order to do so (further discussion of metropolitan police involvement in the coup can be found here and here). According to evidence presented at the officers’ trial, opposition-affiliated police shot at demonstrators from this building. I provided Rohter with this information and suggested to him to read about it in my articles about the coup.

Rohter also says that Stone should have mentioned the hard-line opposition versions of the coup, as described in the film X-Ray of a Lie and in the Brian Nelson book, The Silence and the Scorpion. In short, Rohter is arguing that Stone should have taken this opposition version of the coup seriously, which claims (as Nelson and X-Ray of a Lie do) that the coup was not really a coup, even when it is commonly accepted both in Venezuela and around the world that it was indeed a coup. Rohter clearly still believes it was not a coup, also because he never retracted his New York Times, April 12, 2002 statement that, “The armed forces did not actually take power on Thursday. It was the ousted president’s supporters who appear to have been responsible for deaths that numbered barely 12 rather than hundreds or thousands, and political rights and guarantees were restored rather than suspended.”

The bottom line is, even though Rohter brings up three arguments to cast doubt on the Stone documentary’s version of the coup (failure to mention the hard-line opposition account, my potential bias as a witness and government control over a building from which people were shot), he is unable to raise a single point in the Stone documentary’s coup discussion that is misstated or false.

Rohter then goes on to attempt to question several other points made in the film, such as the Kirchners’ role in Argentina’s economic success and the privatisation of Bolivia’s water system. As Stone, Ali, and Weisbrot argue [see above], none of these points hold any water, let alone validity. Perhaps this is to be expected from a journalist who in 2004 wrote an article, with hardly any evidence, alleging that Brazil’s president Lula da Silva is an alcoholic.

I guess the one place where one can say that Rohter is correct, where Stone indeed made a “mistake or misstatement”, is on the pronunciation of Chávez’s name. It is pronounced CHA-vez, not sha-VEZ. Gringos should really get that right.

The gloves are off; New York Times is determined to destroy Oliver Stone

By Nikolas Kozloff

June 29, 2010 – Buzz Flash via Venezuelanalysis.com – On June 26, the New York Times published not one but two critical articles about director Oliver Stone’s latest documentary, South of the Border, about the tectonic political changes occurring in South America. Stone, who is known for such popular hits as Wall Street and Platoon, made his film based on interviews with leaders such as Raul Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

In his movie, Stone takes the New York Times and the mainstream media to task for their shoddy coverage of Latin America and demonisation of Hugo Chávez, someone who Stone openly sympathises with.

Going for a knockout, the Times hit Stone with a one-two punch. First up was film critic Steven Holden, who in a rather sarcastic review called South of the Border “shallow” and “naïvely idealistic”.  Unusually, the Times then continued its hatchet job on Stone by publishing another lengthy article in its movie section, this time penned by veteran Latin America correspondent Larry Rohter.

In his piece, Rohter accuses Stone of numerous mistakes, mistatements and missing details. I don’t think the points which Rohter raises are terribly earth-shattering, though I imagine script writers Tariq Ali and Marc Weisbrot will respond in short order [see above].

For me, the wider point here has to do with political agendas.  At one point, Rohter takes Stone to task for not disclosing the various biases of his sources. In his film, Stone relies on commentary from leftist observers of Venezuela, including Greg Wilpert, a long-time editor of Venezuelanalysis, a web site providing sympathetic coverage of the Chávez government.

The site was set up with donations from the Venezuelan government and Wilpert’s wife is Chávez’s consul-general in New York [as long as we are talking disclosure: before it became, in my view, too identified with the Chávez government I personally wrote many articles for the site].

Rohter does Venezuela

Rohter’s point is fair enough, but he is hypocritical for not disclosing his own particular bias. Far from a removed film critic, Rohter is an establishment reporter with a political axe to grind against the South American left.

In 1998, when Chávez was first elected, the journalist described the political shakeup thus:

All across Latin America, presidents and party leaders are looking over their shoulders. With his landslide victory in Venezuela’s presidential election on December 6, Hugo Chávez has revived an all-too-familiar specter that the region’s ruling elite thought they had safely interred: that of the populist demagogue, the authoritarian man on horseback known as the caudillo.

Four years later in April 2002, Santiago-based Rohter expressed satisfaction over Chávez’s forcible removal by the Venezuelan opposition. “Chávez was a left-wing populist doomed by habitual recklessness”, Rohter wrote, adding that the Venezuelan leader’s fall could not “be classified as a conventional Latin American military coup”.

Later, when Chávez was returned to power and the short-lived coup government discredited, Rohter reversed himself and actually used the word “coup” in a story about recent political developments in Venezuela. If his readers had any doubts about the true intentions of the Bush administration, Rohter assured them that “there were no obvious American fingerprints on the plot that unseated Mr. Chávez”.

Three years later, Rohter was at it again, this time writing that Chávez was “stridently anti-American”.  Chávez on the other hand said it wasn’t true, arguing that reporters were confusing his distaste for the Bush administration with anti-Americanism.

In its magazine Extra! media watchdog group FAIR shrewdly wrote, “If dislike for the current administration is anti-American, doesn’t that make tens of millions of Americans ‘anti-American’? Moreover, by the media logic that calls Chávez ‘anti-American’, shouldn’t the Bush administration, whose distaste for Chávez moved it to support his ouster by an anti-democratic coup, be called ‘anti-Venezuelan?’”

New York Times correspondent: From Colombia to Brazil

In his film, Stone points out that the mainstream media has, more often than not, demonised Chávez while giving a free pass to horrible human rights violations committed in neighbouring Colombia, a key US ally in the region.

In his attack on South of the Border, Rohter doesn’t address that allegation squarely, but continues to hark on human rights violations in Venezuela. What Rohter fails to disclose however is that he has provided sympathetic coverage to right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia. 

Indeed, as FAIR’s Extra! noted in its May/June 2000 edition, “when Carlos Castaño, leader of the Colombian United Self-Defense, the most notorious paramilitary group in Colombia, appeared on Colombian television and revealed the extent to which his own group was involved in the drug business, it hardly merited a passing word in the US media. The New York Times’ Larry Rohter wrote a story about Castaño’s ‘grilling' on Colombian TV (3/12/00) that skirted the drug issue altogether.”

FAIR goes on to note, “Rohter’s report stands in stark contrast to a Reuters story about the same appearance (3/2/00), which led with the admission: ‘The leader of Colombia's right-wing paramilitary death squads has publicly admitted the drug trade finances most of the bloodletting committed by his ruthless militia force.’ Castaño also explained that ‘drug trafficking and drug traffickers probably finance 70 percent’ of his total operations, another fact that the New York Times apparently found less important than the opinions of a waitress and a local magazine columnist, who felt that Castaño had undergone a ‘surprising metamorphosis.’ If Castaño’s intent was to present a ‘human’ face to the world, the New York Times at least seemed happy to help.”

Perhaps Rohter was also irked by Stone’s sympathetic portrait of Brazilian leader and Chávez ally Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. In an explosive 2004 article, Rohter suggested that Lula had a drinking problem, and that the issue had become a “national concern” in Brazil. In a furor, the authorities suspended Rohter’s visa.  When Rohter’s lawyers wrote a letter asserting that the reporter meant no offence, the Brazilian authorities restored the visa. 

Brazilian media stood up for Rohter’s right to write, but was uniformly critical of the New York Times’ article.  Speaking with US Nation Public Radio’s Bob Garfield, Brazilian journalist Antonio Brasil remarked, “One thing is to say anything about a president … and his possible drinking habits. It's another thing when he says that the Brazilians were concerned... Most people say that was not … true. His sources and evaluation in terms of putting together the story would represent … sloppy journalism.” 

Brasil added, “You cannot forget that this is a completely new government. In Brazil this is a Socialist … government for the very first time. Lula is from the Worker's Party, and they are very sensitive of any comment, especially coming from America.”

In response, Garfield asked Brasil how local journalists could conflate the interests of the US government with the New York Times.  “You have to think [about] the whole situation of embedded journalists”, Brasil said. The journalist added that he was concerned about the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times, remarking that “maybe the standards are not … high.” 

Perhaps, the New York Times is simply hitting back at Stone in a tit-for-tat. In South of the Border, the Hollywood director interviews a Times editor who admits to the paper’s lacklustre coverage of Venezuela. I wondered how Stone got the Times man to talk on camera, and whether there was ever an official or explicit line about how to cover the Chávez story. Whatever the case, the paper’s old Latin American hand Rohter certainly got the word: then as now.