A key theme in my recently released book, Left Turn, is the failure of the corporate media to even imagine any alternative to vulture capitalism. Just imagine if a country dares to try? The essential Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting takes a look:
When reality fails… to confirm the “truths” held by the international financial establishment, the corporate media can be relied on to concoct more cooperative scenarios.…
In the real world, Argentina’s economy has been one of the most robust in the world for the past decade. But in the world of corporate journalism, Argentina is an economic rogue on the road to ruin. When its economy is discussed in U.S. corporate media, it’s largely to portray it as an example of national leaders making bad economic choices, a model of what not to do. This is what happened when Argentina recently bucked neoliberal nostrums and renationalized its major oil company, YPF, which had been acquired by the Spanish firm Repsol in a 1999 privatization.
In the… New York Times… (4/19/12), Latin American correspondent Simon Romero framed the “expropriation” in negative terms, larding his report with critics like the anonymous Latin American “financial experts” who…
“greeted [Argentine President Cristina Fernández de] Kirchner’s abrupt decision with dismay, saying the nationalization and other economic policies were making Argentina more of a hemispheric outlier than a leader in a bold new economic era.”
Mexican President Felipe Calderón, whose own country’s oil industry is nationalized along similar lines as Argentina’s, was quoted saying the YPF nationalization “did no one any good.” Romero also quoted one Brazilian newspaper columnist who wrote that “Argentina’s capacity to err seems unlimited,” and another who referred to Kirchner as a “Crazy Queen.”