Venezuela

On Monday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith discussed President Obama’s brief meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the Summit of the Americas with former Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino and former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers, wondering: "Have the critics of this photo-op made a mountain out of a molehill?" In a prior report on the meeting, correspondent Bill Plante…

Barack Obama is hailed by sycophantic media members as one of the brightest men to ever be President, and was supposed to improve America's standing around the world.Yet, on Sunday, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez called Obama "a poor ignoramus" who "should read and study a little to understand reality." Given how impressed news members are with our new President, and how they regularly disparaged the…

Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez is "attractive to any journalist" because he's "the epitome of the populist leader" with "plain tastes" and "overwhelming charisma," CNN en español senior anchor Patricia Janiot told journalist Cristian Savio in a recent interview conducted in Spanish.Blogger and friend of NewsBusters Fausta Wertz has an English translation up at her blog.Below is an excerpt:

An article in yesterday's Washington Post, Jews in S. America Increasingly Uneasy, seemed to be an admirable attempt to expose a growing problem in South America. Unfortunately, on closer inspection, the article is a major disappointment.

It's almost as if the Associated Press's Ian James and the wire service's headline writers think that Hugo Chavez's latest announcement that he plans to expropriate a huge, city block-sized, nearly complete shopping mall is sort of cute and quirky. James even gave it a "clever" name: drive-by socialism. My post at NewsBusters yesterday noted that James's initial report Sunday evening was short on…

Hugo Chavez has announced that he plans to expropriate a huge and nearly complete shopping mall in Caracas. The Spanish language web page of Constructora Sambil that describes the project (pictured at the right) says that it's 21,600 square meters. Chavez appears to have no idea what he will do with it. The Associated Press's Ian James apparently had no idea what to do with that shocking bit of…

Matt Drudge learned long ago that jumping across the pond in the late evening and perusing the British press is a way to get a head start on the news, and in some cases to get news that the American press is ignoring. The situation with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela is an example of the latter. If it happens, call it The Caracas Crackup -- The UK Telegraph is reporting that the inevitable…

"Softball Chavez Interview From Leader of U.S. Editors" That's not exactly the kind of headline Charlotte Hall would like to see on Cuba Solidarity Day, but it's how Gawker summed up the Orlando Sentinel editor's sit-down with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.Hall, who also serves as president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, pitched a friendly game of softball with Castro regime backer…

Six days after Wall Street Journal's Jose de Cordoba and Jay Solomon published their front-pager, "Chávez Aided Colombia Rebels, Captured Computer Files Show," the Washington Post turned out its coverage of the development by staffer Juan Forero, who pulled a few punches by failing to directly finger Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez: CARACAS, Venezuela, May 14 -- High-ranking officials in…

Leave it to Reuters in this April 29 article, to express surprise that Hugo Chavez' planned economy, complete with “land reform,” price controls and forced production, is failing. Even worse, reporter Frank Jack Daniels relied on a Marxist outlook and socialist jargon to pretend that those tired policies weren't to blam. Chavez wants to increase domestic food production; so, of course, the…