"Given that Reporters Without Borders receives 44 percent of its income from the European Commission, you are in no position to criticize any government for using speech"
Mr. Robert Ménard, rsf@rsf.org
Director
Reporters Without Borders
Reporters sans frontières
5, rue Geoffroy-Marie
75009 Paris - France
Tel. 33 1 44 83 84 84
Fax. 33 1 45 23 11 51
CC: Washington office, yareds@erols.com;
New York office, tdowlats@hotmail.com;
Argentina office, jlb_bvl@hotmail.com
CC: Immedia Working Group, salonchingon@hotmail.com
Dear Mr. Ménard,
My name is Al Giordano. I have been a professional journalist since 1988 and today I write you in my capacity as publisher of The Narco News Bulletin - www.narconews.com -- an online newspaper that reports on the drug war and democracy from Latin America.
I write to inform you of specific acts and immediate threats against journalists in Venezuela, and to ask you 12 questions, as a journalist, about your organization's previous statements regarding press freedom issues in that country. I hope that your organization will take immediate action to defend these journalists at risk, and that you will offer full and honest answers to the 12 questions.
Your organization, Reporters Without Borders, prominently displays these good words from Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
"Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice."
This wonderful sentence doesn't say that "only some people shall have the right to freedom of expression." It doesn't say that "only commercial journalists" shall enjoy this right. It says that "everyone" shall enjoy this right. That spirit was embraced recently by the New York Supreme Court, in December 2001, in the landmark ruling in our own favor that, for the first time, extended First Amendment rights in the United States under Sullivan v. NY Times to Internet journalists. A copy of that decision can be read online at the website of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
http://www.eff.org/Cases/BNM_v_Narco_News/20011205_decision.html
I write to you today about your organization's statements regarding press freedom issues in Venezuela, in which you have made very gross errors that, in fact, have endangered many journalists and contributed to a climate of impunity by pro-coup rogue police forces in that country who are now making more frequent and systematic attacks against journalists. In a moment, I will provide you facts to support this concern.
We are not the first journalists to raise this worry about your organization's behavior. The globally respected authentic journalist, Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, stated last month after his own fact-finding mission to Venezuela:
"Closing its eyes to the one of the most odious media campaigns ever launched against a democratic government, the organisation Reporters sans Frontières has allowed itself to be manipulated and has published several reports against the Chavez government, which has never limited freedom of expression, banned media, or arrested a journalist."
Today, Narco News, together with colleagues in authentic journalism and independent media, has launched an international dialogue about the role of "press freedom" organizations. We are focusing on the three such organizations with the largest budgets: the New York-based CPJ, the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders and the Miami-based Inter-American Press Association.
The catalyst for this international dialogue, which we have begun on our own website as well as through the www.indymedia.org networks and others, was our recent fact-finding mission to Venezuela, where we encountered a very different set of circumstances and facts than those described by Reporters Without Borders' statements regarding events in Venezuela.
In fact, we found that an entire class of journalists in Venezuela is under attack and has been left undefended by your organization and the other large-budget "press freedom" organizations: the journalists of the Community Media, particularly those from the 25 non-profit TV and radio stations that were legalized under Venezuela's Bolivarian Constitution of 1999 and the Telecommunications Law of 2001.
The home page of your organization's website states: "Today, 115 journalists are in prison." Today we inform you, sadly, that you can raise that number to 118. Three more have recently been illegally arrested by rogue police forces (the same ones that participated in the April 2002 coup attempt in that country), targeted specifically for their practice of journalism, all of them respected radio journalists: Nicolás Rivera of Radio Perola, and Jorge Quintero and Lenín Méndez of Radio Senderos, both non-profit Community Broadcasters in the greater Caracas area.
You can read more about them - and other threats against press freedom so far ignored by your organization - in Part I of our series, published today, on the media in Venezuela:
http://www.narconews.com/communitymedia1.html
We also bring your attention to serious threats against these journalists and others like them that have come not from governmental institutions, but, rather, from commercial media institutions.
Specifically, this threat has been executed by Miguel Angel Martínez, the president of the private-sector Chamber of Radio Broadcasters who recently called upon his organization's affiliates to "interfere" with the frequencies of the Community Media outlets during the next coup d'etat attempt in Venezuela (Mr. Martínez was a co-signer, last April 12th, with the military-installed dictator Pedro Carmona, of the decree that abolished the national Congress, the Supreme Court and the Constitution in Venezuela.)
It is very clear to me, based on my first-hand reporting, that the entire "issue" of press freedom in Venezuela turns conventional and outmoded thinking about "freedom of the press" on its head (much as our legal defense against Banamex-Citigroup caused the New York Supreme Court to rethink and expand upon existing First Amendment protections, applying them to Internet journalists).
This international dialogue - and I hope you and others from Reporters Without Borders will participate in a spirit of full disclosure, self-criticism, self-correction and open-mindedness - has many aspects, precisely because it is long overdue.
Today, I challenge the factual accuracy and fairness of many of your organization's statements, based on my own reporting in Venezuela last month.
In Reporters Without Borders' annual report, you wrote:
"Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela and a great admirer of Fidel Castro, raised concern with his inflammatory statements against the media and observers wondered if the former soldier and author of a failed coup in 1992 would turn into a dictator. The verbal threats of previous years grew in 2001 to include new kinds of intimidation such as a threat to withdraw a TV station's broadcasting licence, the threat of a tax inspection and a supreme court ruling that would curb press freedom."
Your worry, expressed here, was stated in the hypothetical future tense: wondering if Venezuela's democratically elected president "would turn into a dictator."
The fact is that the commercial factions you have defended, abusing the cause of "press freedom" on behalf of a partisan political agenda, turned out to be the real dictators when they took, at gunpoint, the chance to govern. They banned Congress, the Supreme Court and the Constitution. They sent their troops house to house illegally detaining and arresting elected political leaders, citizens and journalists who were critical of their coup.
And I remind you that what you have really criticized the Chávez government over is the elected president's use of the very right you claim to defend: speech.
Given that your organization, Reporters Without Borders, receives, according to your website, 44-percent of its income from the European Commission, you are in no position to criticize any government for using speech.
Furthermore, you do the cause of freedom of expression a grave disservice by confusing speech with repression: and you cheapen efforts to combat the very real attacks against journalists, like the recent attacks cited in this letter, with this distracting stance equating speech with "attacks." You should instead be applauding those sectors of Civil Society and its elected leaders who use speech - including strong speech - to air their grievances against the very real and corrupt abuses by many sectors of the commercial media. The people and leaders who use speech are demonstrating the alternative to violence and repression. This ought to a basic principle and understanding of an organization that traffics in the defense of press freedom.
Reporters Without Borders is, in reality (although you might protest the characterization), a quasi-governmental agency. You are funded by governments: How can you suggest that governments should not use speech? You should be encouraging speech as the alternative to state repression against journalists.
Your apparent ideological bias, bizarre hostility to the results of democratic elections in Venezuela, and shoddy use of "guilt by association" tactics is unworthy of serious journalistic practice, and certainly cheapens the respectability of your own "press freedom" organization.
For all your stated concern about the 115 journalists you list as imprisoned today, you have unfairly overlooked the fact that, until the past month, there was not a single journalist imprisoned in Venezuela, and you have so far remained silent over the epidemic of attacks by pro-coup forces against the Community Media: It is no wonder, then, that with the wealthiest "press freedom" groups on earth silent when it came to defending truly independent journalists that the rogue pro-coup police elements felt the impunity to raid and arrest these journalists for their journalistic practice.
Were you at all surprised when a dictatorship emerged not from the Chávez government, but from the very forces your organization has championed, including the commercial media in Venezuela? Don't you feel that your organization's unprofessional behavior during this hemisphere's greatest political crisis in almost 30 years requires you, now, to engage in some public soul-searching and correction of your errors?
In your organization's fictional account of the events during the days of the April coup d'etat, you wrote:
"The Venezuelan stations have since said they did not show such footage because doing so would have been dangerous for their journalists on the job and that scenes of looting in Caracas could have encouraged similar outbreaks in the provinces. Gustavo Cisneros, president of the Diego Cisneros Organisation and owner of Venevisión, added that the TV silence was also to do with practical considerations, such as the absence of pictures to back up the news reports."
The fact is, Mr. Ménard, that the commercial TV owners censored their own reporters from broadcasting news they had already collected, and "pictures" (video) of events was, at very least, available through CNN and other international news agencies for those stations to utilize (although, really, do anchorpersons need "pictures" to convey the most newsworthy stories? Your argument - defending Cisneros and the others - is specious and not credible, and we have a right to expect more from a "press freedom" organization).
What is clear today is that the commercial TV stations belonging to Mr. Cisneros and the other owners - the very forces that encouraged the coup d'etat to begin with and cheered it as it occurred - imposed a news blackout only when it became clear that the Venezuelan public had taken to the streets and was in the process of turning back the violent coup that the commercial media had supported.
Our story, published today, reports:
"The Human Rights group PROVEA (the Venezuelan Education-Action Program on Human Rights), on April 13th, reported that, "A journalist who asked not to be identified, the Production Chief of one of the principal TV channels in the country, denounced that the directors of the company impeded the journalists from transmitting information about the current events."
"In place of news during the most newsworthy events in the nation's history, the big TV chains played "Tom and Jerry" cartoons, movies and re-runs.
"The role of Internet journalists in breaking the information blockade outside of Venezuela was the subject of our April 18th report. But within Venezuela, only the Community Media journalists stood between democracy and dictatorship, and they saved the day."
Today, the Community Media journalists are being systematically persecuted by the pro-coup forces and by the commercial media that you have championed.
Obviously, some of the issues raised here may be difficult, and you may well disagree with the opinions expressed in Part I and future segments of our series on the media in Venezuela, particularly as they pertain to your organization. For that reason, I offer you the opportunity to respond on the pages of Narco News, and will publish your responses in full without censorship on our pages.
I ask for your thorough and honest answers to the following questions:
1. Will Reporters Without Borders, now having been informed of a different set of facts than your organization has so far admitted, investigate and denounce the illegal detentions of radio journalists Nicolás Rivera of Radio Perola, and Jorge Quintero and Lenín Méndez of Radio Senderos?
2. Will Reporters Without Borders address the root cause of these attacks: the existence of rogue police forces and coup-plotters that enjoy a particular kind of impunity precisely because they are supported by the commercial media corporations of Venezuela?
3. Will Reporters Without Borders finally denounce the illegal raids and threats on April 11th, 12th and 13th 2002 by the Carmona dictatorship against Radio Perola, Radio Catia Libre, TV Catia and Radio Fé y Alegría (broadcaster of the Catholic Church)?
4. Will Reporters Without Borders finally denounce the April coup attempt - and any future coup attempts in Venezuela or against any democratically elected government on earth - as a prima facie threat to press freedom?
5. Will Reporters Without Borders consider a public apology to the Community Media journalists of Venezuela, and to the public at large, for having been "asleep at the wheel" in not having denounced the coup d'etat as it was happening last April, and make the internal organizational corrections to ensure that this kind of negligence by a press-freedom organization will never happen again during a time of crisis?
6. Of particular interest to those of us who are Internet journalists (and of obvious personal interest to Narco News and me): Does Reporters Without Borders embrace the case law established by the New York Supreme Court in December 2001 in the case of Banco v. Menéndez et al, which established, A. a higher standard upon Plaintiffs in libel lawsuits for establishing jurisdiction on foreign journalists in U.S. courts, and; B. the landmark ruling that extended First Amendment protections (under Sullivan v. NY Times) in the United States to Internet journalists if we engage in responsible and basic journalistic practices?
These are difficult times for the profession of journalism and for journalists, because, increasingly, the threats to our safety and free speech are coming from within the industry itself: from the corporate owners of TV, radio, print and commercial Internet news organizations.
Again, the attempted coup in Venezuela last April was a watershed moment that revealed this problem, now of epidemic proportions, to the global public.
The landscape of journalism itself has changed radically in recent years, with the wave of mergers and acquisitions and the increased concentration of media ownership in the hands of fewer and fewer companies. Many, if not most, of these companies are no longer exclusively dedicated to news gathering and reporting. The conflicts-of-interest by news organizations with the interests of there own owners thus pile up like traffic at rush hour. Commercial journalism has lost its ethical and societal context and strayed very far from the role envisioned and protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and similar laws in other lands. When it comes to threats to press freedom, the media has met the enemy and, to quote Pogo, "it is us."
This radical change in the news gathering environment - a change from above and from within the media industry - forces, in my opinion, any organization dedicated to the protection of journalists and press-freedom to reassess and correct its activities bringing them up to date with the times and the actual situation. Obviously, this is a cause for soul-searching by all of us who are journalists or who wish to be authentic journalists, and for the organizations that defend our rights. And yet the change in reality is so sudden and extreme that we must rethink almost all of our past assumptions.
However, it is also obvious that the attempted coup d'etat in Venezuela, which threatened to turn back the clocks of democracy and press-freedom thirty years in the entire hemisphere, is a matter that should take priority over all other threats against press freedom. If that coup d'etat had succeeded, your job would have become a hundred times more difficult not only in Venezuela, but in your role of protecting journalists throughout Latin America (just as the 1973 coup in Chile caused a chain reaction of repression and attacks against the press throughout South America with Operation Condor spreading the terror to Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, Perú, Uruguay, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s).
Specifically, regarding the ongoing present-day situation in Venezuela, there is no reason or justification to wait: Action is needed now, immediately, to address and correct root causes of threats to press freedom and against journalists. And to do this task effectively, Reporters Without Borders and other organizations like it must correct errors already made.
My next set of questions is:
7. Will Reporters Without Borders investigate and denounce the censorship by all of the commercial television stations in Venezuela on April 12th and 13th 2002 against their own journalists, that - nobody today disputes that there was a news blackout - prevented their own journalists from reporting the facts about the counter-coup by Civil Society against the military-installed dictatorship of those days?
8. Will Reporters Without Borders investigate and denounce the threats by Miguel Angel Martínez of the Chamber of Radio Broadcasters to "interfere" with the frequencies of Community radio and TV broadcasters utilizing the technology and equipment of the commercial broadcasters affiliated with his organization?
9. Will Reporters Without Borders investigate and denounce the forced closure of Channel 8 - the public television network in Venezuela - by the Carmona dictatorship in April 2002 and the complete silence by the commercial media about this threat upon a public media outlet?
10. What is Reporters Without Borders' position on the participation by commercial news gathering organizations such as the daily El Nacional and the daily La Hora in Venezuela in censoring their own pages last April 9th in order to join a politically-partisan "national strike" that - it is clear to everyone, in retrospect - had the goal of provoking the April 11th coup d'etat?
I will address some of the issues regarding Question # 10 in a moment, when we discuss, below, whether public speech is, in reality, a threat to public speech, as Reporters Without Borders has repeatedly claimed regarding Venezuela.
But first, I would like to explain why the question of whether Community Media journalists are defended is related to a larger global phenomenon in which your organization and others like it has been asleep at the wheel.
Since 1999, beginning with the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and continuing regularly during similar anti-globalization protests throughout the world - in Davos, Genoa, Cancún and other cities - there has been a systematic series of violent attacks and jailings of journalists, photojournalists and video-journalists who have covered those demonstrations. These attacks have been extensively documented, photographed and filmed and published on the more than 90 Internet sites of www.indymedia.org throughout the world. But the Reporters Without Border, despite the systematic and repeat nature of these attacks on journalists, has been, to my knowledge, silent in the defense of these journalists.
I urge you to address this issue with total seriousness: These attacks against Indymedia journalists are systematic and have enjoyed a savage impunity, in part, because authorities know that the major international press freedom organizations like Reporters Without Borders have not spoken loudly or clearly against them. These attacks will likely continue during every anti-globalization protest to come until the press-freedom organizations end your silence on them.
One of the root causes of these attacks has to do with a conflict within journalism. Typically, during the global meetings of the World Trade Organization and similar groups, a caste system of credentialing journalists has resulted: Journalists for commercial news organizations are accredited and my practice their work with the usual assumption of safety and protection. But independent media journalists are not accredited by these organizations and governments, and thus are left in the streets with the demonstrators, often beaten or jailed precisely because they are present with cameras or tape-recorders or pen-and-paper. They are specifically singled out for violent beatings and imprisonment because they are journalists.
The commercial news organizations, by and large, are in favor of this State-enforced "caste system" among journalists for obvious and interested motives: The credentialing of commercial journalists only at such global news events gives commercial news organizations a competitive advantage, indeed, a monopoly, on coverage of the deliberations inside these gatherings where governments and industry meet, often deciding questions of great public importance.
Thus, the very act of refusing to credential non-profit, community, independent or Internet journalists causes danger and harm to many of us, as has been documented time and time again during each of these events.
My questions regarding this matter are:
11. Should Reporters Without Borders address and denounce the exclusion of non-profit, independent, community and Internet journalists from press credentials by governments and trade organizations as threats upon press freedom?
I remind that the single-greatest determinative factor in whether a journalist covering one of these world trade gatherings is beaten, jailed or harmed is whether the journalist has been denied credentials to cover the event on the inside. The question of credentialing of journalists, thus, is a serious matter of the safety of journalists: Those left outside in the streets to cover the event are placed at risk and in harm's way.
A related question:
12. Will Reporters Without Borders, now that this matter has been brought to your attention, assign part of its 20-member staff to monitor and investigate these predictable attacks during future world trade meetings and anti-globalization protests?
This can be easily begun with the simple commitment to monitor reports on www.indymedia.org and similar websites as these events are happening. The archives of these sites, in fact, contain the documentary evidence, including photographs, videotapes, audiotapes and eyewitness testimony, of the systematic attacks that have already occurred.
But back the immediate issues surrounding press freedom in Venezuela:
Much of your organization's concern has been misplaced in that you are apparently confusing criticism of the commercial media - the use of speech to counter speech, which many of us who are journalists believe is a sacred right, even for elected officials - with "attacks" on press freedom.
In your 2002 Annual Report, you wrote:
President Hugo Chávez continued his attacks on the media in 2001. In February, describing himself as close to the poor, he accused "a group of four or five people who have accumulated money and media power over the years" of leading a "conspiracy" not to report on his government's successes. At a ceremony a few days earlier, he had shouted : "Down with journalists and capitalism." In January, he charged that Miguel Henrique Otero, managing editor of the daily El Nacional, was playing into the hands of "perverted interests" after the journalist had accused him of building up personal power. The media, which has become virtually the only voice of regular opposition after the eclipse of the traditional political parties discredited after 40 years in power, responded by joining a general strike on 10 December against Chávez' policies led by employers and trade unions.
That you would call equate the sacred right of the use of free speech with "attacks" on the media is hypocritical on your organization's part.
The commercial media deserves such criticism, and particularly in Venezuela, where the major national dailies and broadcast networks do not abide by even the most basic traditions of ethical and fair journalism.
You speak of the "eclipse of traditional political parties" in a manner that conveniently overlooks the fact that the people voted them out. They no longer represented the majority. They only represented the wealthy. And when, as you note, the commercial media attempts to step into the role of representing the wealthy - even to the extent of promoting and cheering a violent coup d'etat - you have displayed the very same contempt for the people from below and their sovereign rights to choose their own governments. If there is no serious political opposition in Venezuela, it is precisely because its constituency can only be measured in dollars, but not in votes.
What you at Reporters Without Borders are denouncing here is speech itself: and I, for one, don't believe I am at all alone in wondering how a press-freedom organization could engage in such an Orwellian discourse, so harmful to the bedrock principles of free speech and press freedom.
By its active role in the deterioration of the free speech rights of all the people, the commercial media has merely manufactured a boomerang upon its own rights: I should not have lecture experts in "press freedom" about this dynamic - your organization has, in words, said the same thing, but in deeds has not complied with your self-stated mission.
The commercial media, not just in Venezuela but especially in Venezuela, has denied voice to the majority of citizens, particularly the poor majority, and thus frozen them out of the public discourse. Instead, it has reserved access to the airwaves only by the wealthiest sectors - in Latin America, these sectors are accurately known as the oligarchy - but nonetheless the public found a superior medium through which to speak: fair and free elections.
I need not remind your organization that prior to the 1998 landslide election of Chávez as president of Venezuela, and the five subsequent elections in which, in each vote, the public backed his programs and allies overwhelmingly, that Venezuela, under its old regimes, was a more dangerous country for journalists than it is today by every measure.
According to the 1991-1992 annual report of PROVEA, Venezuela's leading human rights group, in that year there were 125 distinct attacks upon individual journalists in that country: physical beatings, interference, threats, legal persecution, raids, seizures, imprisonment, and firings of journalists specifically related to their work as journalists. In that year, the front pages of the nation's newspapers would regularly have entire sections blocked out and marked "CENSURADO," censored, because governmental authorities ordered that specific stories not be published.
Before the Bolivarian Constitution of 1999, which guarantees press freedom in that country to a degree that never existed prior, there were laws on the books that expressly forbade freedom of the press: the 1940 Telecommunications Act allowing for prior censorship, by the government, of every media; harsh penalties for any reporter who does not reveal his confidential sources to the government; a code of military and government secrecy; later came the 1994 law requiring that any citizen, to legally practice journalism, must have a college degree (which, in a poor country with a terrible education system was akin to a ban on press freedom by the majority of its citizens). There was a law on "state secrets" that stated "national administrative public records are, by their nature, reserved for official use."
Today, as a direct result of the choices, democratically made, by the majority of Venezuela's citizens, there is more press freedom than ever existed in Venezuela. Until last month, when the pro-coup forces unjustly arrested journalist Nicolás Rivera, not a single journalist was in prison in Venezuela under the Chávez government.
I am a journalist who has spoken, face to face, with hundreds of members of the public on all sides of the political disputes in Venezuela - specifically to investigate issues of press freedom, the behavior of the media (commercial and community journalists alike) and public attitudes about the press - and I tell you: Reporters Without Borders is so inaccurate and wrong on this matter that it has undermined its own credibility as a defender of press freedom.
The "undermining" of the "credibility of the press" in Venezuela has one author and one author only: The commercial press has undermined its own credibility. As a class, the commercial media in Venezuela, and particularly in the capital city of Caracas, is the shoddiest, most unprofessional, most inaccurate, most anti-pluralistic, and most un-credible regional media in the entire hemisphere, perhaps save that in Paraguay. To blame that on Chávez, as Reporters Without Borders and others have done, is insulting to the Venezuelan public. It reverses the process of which came first: Undermined press credibility or Chávez? CPJ states that Chávez is the cause of undermined press credibility. Today I inform you that he is not the cause, but, rather, the result of it. And when he criticizes the corrupt behavior of the media in that country, he truly represents the views of a majority of the public that elected him, in part, to be a bulwark against the abuses by the commercial media.
The portrayal of the public as led around by the nose by its elected leader is elitist and hostile to democratic values, and as a journalist and as a citizen I expect more from an organization that claims to protect journalists and press freedom. At very least, I - and others like me - expect a considered exploration of both sides of the Venezuela story, and not the one-sided interested fictional account that Reporters Without Borders has offered.
Impunity is a word that all of us who seek to defend press freedom must report on. I beg of you and your staff at Reporters Without Borders to consider - and correct - the impunity that you have provided to the true usurpers of press freedom in Venezuela by your willful abandonment of the real journalists at risk in the Community Media of that country, and your unquestioning endorsement of the statements of interested and corrupted members of the commercial media who, during those three days in April 2002, demonstrated their hostility to the democratic and free-speech principles that your organization has attributed to them.
Your organization, in its drumbeat of inaccurate statements about Venezuela, and in the way you have shirked your role as defender of the truly threatened, and now imprisoned, journalists there, has done a great disservice to the very cause you claim to champion.
Unfortunately, if the rank-and-file public and its elected leaders of Venezuela or other countries told you this, you would probably accuse them of threatening your freedom of speech, as you have disingenuously and repeatedly claimed when the public has fought bad speech with more speech.
However, I remind you, this critique comes from a journalist, one who has had to defend, more than most, his own press freedom, who has won important legal rights for all journalists as a result, and who reflects the views of a great many authentic journalists and community media workers. We are now going to have this discussion within our profession: Journalists to journalists and speaking, in open public view, to the organizations that claim to protect us. It is not only our right, but our duty, to clean up our own profession, and to do it using the very weapon that we hold sacred: Speech.
Welcome to the dialogue. I hope you will enter it and answer each of the 12 questions above in a spirit of full disclosure, self-criticism and self-correction.
Your organization, in its behavior regarding Venezuela and its abandonment of persecuted journalists who don't agree with your inaccurate and interested assessment of what has occurred there, has done great harm to the very principles you are organized to defend.
It is time for you, Mr. Ménard, as an individual, and for every member of your staff and board of directors to do some soul-searching about your role.
You could start by protecting Nicolás Rivera and the Community Media journalists of Venezuela, in accordance with your own stated mission and rules, and by answering my 12 questions for you, which I will repeat, as addendum, below, for your convenience.
Sincerely,
Al Giordano
Publisher
The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com/
narconews@hotmail.com
12 Questions for Reporters Without Borders: 1. Will Reporters Without Borders, now having been informed of a different set of facts than your organization has so far admitted, investigate and denounce the illegal detentions of radio journalists Nicolás Rivera of Radio Perola, and Jorge Quintero and Lenín Méndez of Radio Senderos?
2. Will Reporters Without Borders address the root cause of these attacks: the existence of rogue police forces and coup-plotters that enjoy a particular kind of impunity precisely because they are supported by the commercial media corporations of Venezuela?
3. Will Reporters Without Borders finally denounce the illegal raids and threats on April 11th, 12th and 13th 2002 by the Carmona dictatorship against Radio Perola, Radio Catia Libre, TV Catia and Radio Fé y Alegría (broadcaster of the Catholic Church)?
4. Will Reporters Without Borders finally denounce the April coup attempt - and any future coup attempts in Venezuela or against any democratically elected government on earth - as a prima facie threat to press freedom?
5. Will Reporters Without Borders consider a public apology to the Community Media journalists of Venezuela, and to the public at large, for having been "asleep at the wheel" in not having denounced the coup d'etat as it was happening last April, and make the internal organizational corrections to ensure that this kind of negligence by a press-freedom organization will never happen again during a time of crisis?
6. Of particular interest to those of us who are Internet journalists (and of obvious personal interest to Narco News and me): Does Reporters Without Borders embrace the case law established by the New York Supreme Court in December 2001 in the case of Banco v. Menéndez et al, which established, A. a higher standard upon Plaintiffs in libel lawsuits for establishing jurisdiction on foreign journalists in U.S. courts, and; B. the landmark ruling that extended First Amendment protections (under Sullivan v. NY Times) in the United States to Internet journalists if we engage in responsible and basic journalistic practices?
7. Will Reporters Without Borders investigate and denounce the censorship by all of the commercial television stations in Venezuela on April 12th and 13th 2002 against their own journalists, that - nobody today disputes that there was a news blackout - prevented their own journalists from reporting the facts about the counter-coup by Civil Society against the military-installed dictatorship of those days?
8. Will Reporters Without Borders investigate and denounce the threats by Miguel Angel Martínez of the Chamber of Radio Broadcasters to "interfere" with the frequencies of Community radio and TV broadcasters utilizing the technology and equipment of the commercial broadcasters affiliated with his organization?
9. Will Reporters Without Borders investigate and denounce the forced closure of Channel 8 - the public television network in Venezuela - by the Carmona dictatorship in April 2002 and the complete silence by the commercial media about this threat upon a public media outlet?
10. What is Reporters Without Borders' position on the participation by commercial news gathering organizations such as the daily El Nacional and the daily La Hora in Venezuela in censoring their own pages last April 9th in order to join a politically-partisan "national strike" that - it is clear to everyone, in retrospect - had the goal of provoking the April 11th coup d'etat?
11. Should Reporters Without Borders address and denounce the exclusion of non-profit, independent, community and Internet journalists from press credentials by governments and trade organizations as threats upon press freedom?
12. Will Reporters Without Borders, now that this matter has been brought to your attention, assign part of its 20-member staff to monitor and investigate these predictable attacks during future world trade meetings and anti-globalization protests?
Read
Part I of This Series
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Ud. Parte I en Español
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Our Letter to the Committee to Protect Journalists
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Our Letter to the Interamerican Press Association
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