Weblog Beats Wires in Reporting Bolivia President’s Resignation

It May Be Twilight for Narco News… but It’s Morning in América

By Al Giordano
Publisher, Narco News

October 17, 2003

At 1:44 p.m. today, the weblog BigLeftOutside.com reported “Bolivian President Will Resign Today.”

Agence France Press confirmed the story eleven minutes later at 1:55 p.m., the rest of the Spanish language media followed suit, but it took the English-language press almost four hours to state the news definitively.

Once again, blogs and bloggers beat, inform, provide context for, and change, the way that the Commercial Media reports the news.

Okay, in full disclosure, it was my blog, and we’re repeating the news here, in part, to get it onto Google News, but it wasn’t just me. It was the “Narco News swarm” in action one more (last?) time: led by Narco News Andean Bureau Chief Luis Gómez chasing the story, under difficult conditions, in La Paz. It was Narco News Authentic Journalism Scholar Andrea Arenas Alípaz also in La Paz. It was Narco News Authentic Journalism Scholar Alex Contreras of Cochabamba, illegally detained by the police when he came back to his native country to cover the story. It was Webmaster Dan Feder, working overtime in the final hours of Narco News.

And it was so many more, sources and collaborators, who believed that getting the facts and the truth out was more important than their personal safety.

But mainly it was the Bolivian people, the workers, the farmers, the indigenous, and the poor, many of who died of U.S.-supplied bullets used in State-sponsored massacres in recent days to bring you this story.

More reports with the details of this Immediate History coming in tonight from our team on the battlefield.

Check back frequently to the BigLeftOutside weblog for updates, as the truth goes marching on.

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