Help Narco News Keep Instilling the Work of Journalists with a Sense of Purpose

“Journalists instilled with the moral principles championed by Narco News possess the capability to redefine the faulty scheme”

By Belén Fernández
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

September 24, 2009

Dear Friends,

I began writing for Narco News in August of this year after meeting Narco News and School of Authentic Journalism director Al Giordano in Honduras, where I had come on a whim and on my own to report the military coup against President Mel Zelaya. The whimsical and solitary aspects of the venture were rapidly dispensed with as Narco News instilled my work with a sense of purpose and as Al – with his relentless quest for the truth and attention to his writers – provided me with real-time access to an elite level of journalistic instruction.

Narco News has proved an invaluable respite in Honduras where the majority of the media concerns itself with reporting such fantasies as that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia are behind Honduran commitments to democracy. My appreciation for the publication was reinforced earlier this month when I visited my mother’s family in Florida for the first time in 15 years, with the sporadic nature of visits due in part to the divergence of political beliefs among relevant parties and the resultant lack of harmonious discussion topics aside from the population of bees that my grandfather attends to in his backyard.

On this particular visit I was unsurprised to learn my grandfather’s views on the Honduran coup, which were that Mel Zelaya had wanted to remain president for eternity like “Sha-vazz,” whose identity remained an enigma until I discovered that it belonged to Hugo Chávez. Slightly more surprising were my grandfather’s pronouncements that George W. Bush and The Wall Street Journal were in fact institutions of liberal thought; the extensive ensuing lecture revealed that Fox News was the only institution that had managed to maintain a balanced perspective, which is perhaps why it recently hosted Honduran coup President Roberto Micheletti’s first English-language interview despite the fact that Micheletti is not in command of the English language.

The tendency of far-right media outlets to project themselves as objective – and the willingness of segments of the audience to accept them as such – results in an artificial shift in the spectrum of truth in which truly objective reporting is disregarded as extremist and undeserving of a position on said spectrum. Journalists instilled with the moral principles championed by Narco News, however, possess the capability to redefine the faulty scheme, an endeavor in which the School of Authentic Journalism plays a major role. My personal conviction in the school’s transforming powers stem from the immense impact that Al Giordano has had on my writing and that he is merely one out of 47 of the school’s instructors.

In speaking with the civil resistance in Honduras, the issue of the media battle has consistently surfaced as one that is crucial in the nonviolent restoration of democracy in this country. I would thus appeal to anyone with the available means to support the 2010 School of Authentic Journalism in Mexico in the interest of the continued dissemination of truth not only in Honduras but throughout the Americas.

Please make a donation to The Fund for Authentic Journalism to keep Narco News reporting and make the next session of the School of Authentic Journalism a success. You can donate online at this link:

http://www.authenticjournalism.org

Or you can send a check to:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
PO Box 241
Natick, MA 01760 USA

Thanks to matching support, every dollar you donate will be doubled.

Many thanks,

Belén Fernández

Click here for more Narco News coverage of Mexico

For more Narco News, click here.