THE POLITICAL FUNCTION OF PBS, remains a masterful example of satire, damn worth revisiting solely on those terms. —Patrice Greanville, The Greanville Post

DISPATCH FROM FAIR & ACCURACY IN MEDIA (FAIR)
[With select original comments]
Posted on 10/09/2012 by Peter Hart

It’s no secret that U.S. media outlets don’t have much love for left-wing Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.  A PBS NewsHour segment (10/5/12) just ahead of the recent election  showed just how far you could go.

Correspondent Ray Suarez opened by calling the election “a watershed moment for the world’s second-largest oil-producing nation and a critical supplier of crude oil to the U.S”–I guess we know what makes Venezuela important to the United States.

Chavez has been “openly antagonizing the United States as he’s cozied up to the world’s most isolated regimes.” And Suarez has an example:

He’s continued to thwart American efforts on a range of international issues, such as Washington’s attempt to convince Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to halt his country’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

There is no evidence that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. We’ve been over this before with the NewsHour; early this year the show actually chopped a quote from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, removing the part where he said there was no evidence that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapon.

This is arguably the most important fact about the Iran crisis–that the country is facing harsh sanctions and the threat of military strikes over unsubstantiated suspicions about a nuclear weapons program. But it’s apparently important for U.S. media outlets to turn this allegation into a fact…especially in a story about another Official Enemy.

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