Wall Street Journal's Looking Glass World

- by Stephen Lendman
6/8/07

She's at it again on the Journal's editorial page in her June 4 article called "The Young and the Restless," subtitled "Is this the beginning of the end for Hugo Chavez?" The writer is self-styled Latin American expert Mary Anastasia O'Grady always getting top grades in vilification and disinformation but failing ones on regional knowledge and legitimate journalism.

This time she may have overstepped. Her article wreaks with disinformation, outright lies, and most disturbing of all - incendiary commentary straddling the tipping edge of inciting insurrection. She can get away with it because she represents elitist interests and the Journal's editorial view supporting the Bush administration's fixation on ousting Hugo Chavez by any means, including through violence. It doesn't matter that Chavez was just reelected again in December by a near two to one margin or that he's admired and loved by the great majority of Venezuelans. They're unperturbed and/or supportive of his shuttering RCTV's VHF Channel 2 overshadowing that issue being used as a pretext for suspicious violent street protests, mainly in Caracas. More on that below.

It's clear O'Grady will fit right in if the Journal's controlling Bancroft family succumbs to greed selling out to Rupert Murdock's wooing. That prospect's got Journal employees apoplectic. They're scrambling through their union seeking an alternate buyer willing to grant what Murdock never will - journalistic independence and what's left of the paper's tattered integrity. Those ideas are anathema to how he views journalism, and he's not shy saying it....

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