Throughout the promotional campaign for “South of the Border,” director Oliver Stone has been loudly complaining about what he sees as the American media’s unfavorable bias towards the subject of his documentary, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Obviously this is a propaganda trick on Stone’s part – a way to shame the media into covering his film without challenging him on the facts or asking any hard questions. Judging from a recent interview the two-time Oscar winner granted to Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post, the trick appears to have worked.
Once upon a time the Washington Post was a reliable newspaper with ethical investigative reporters. That of course was before Woodward and Bernstein elevated the Fourth Estate denizens to deity wannabes who could bring down a president. Now the once vaunted daily allows amateurish, star-struck reporters to give entertainment celebrities a pass in lieu of professional journalistic coverage.
I’ve written for three newspapers in the past twelve years and endured the critique of numerous editors who’d never let me get away with the one-sided article that Ann Hornaday wrote about Oliver Stone. She allowed Stone to make the following statement without challenging his resources:
“I interviewed Chávez because I thought he’s an underdog and he’s getting the shaft,” Stone says simply. “Because he’s a democratically elected leader and he’s getting a bum rap. The elections in Venezuela have been monitored to death. They have electronic and paper ballots. It’s the cleanest system I’ve ever seen. And we’re condemning them? After how Bush got elected in 2000? It makes me angry, this double standard, this hypocrisy.”
Thus Oliver Stone appears to be a committed member of the Bush Derangement Syndrome Club which still can’t get over the 2000 election which by the way has also has been monitored to death by Democrat counters and a reluctant media. Here’s more:
Stone does address the troubling issue of human rights abuses in Venezuela – but only to remind viewers that Colombia has an even worse record and that because it’s an ally in the war on drugs, it basically gets a free pass.
Incredibly, though she was interviewing Stone, Hornaday never challenges that absurdly illogical rationalization to lionize a notorious human rights’ abuser like Chavez.
Had I the stomach, I mean, the opportunity to interview the director of one of the worst movies ever made — Natural Born Killers –– I would have asked Stone why he thinks that Hugo Chavez is an underdog when he is in fact a brutal man who has squashed any legitimate opposition to his regime. This is a known fact to everyone outside the nouveau Babylon called Hollywood.
Hornady writes a telling line about Stone that should have generated a host of heavy duty questions. She wrote:
“Stone doesn’t interview Venezuelan dissidents, or anyone who disagrees with Chávez’s policies, which have recently included a bid to become president for life and revoking the license of television stations critical of his regime.”
She also describes Stone’s “infatuation with the populist leader. ”
Instead of challenging Stone with any of this – instead of demanding facts and sources for such statements — the WAPO reporter allows Stone to plug his homage documentary, “South of the Border” or as she puts it,”his polemical, personal, deeply passionate love letter to left-leaning movements that have recently taken hold in the region.
I don’t know how old Ms. Hornaday is but Oliver Stone is 64 and if I can remember when Fidel Castro came to power and how liberals fawned over his rebel campaign then he should also recall the deaths and devastation that the 1959 Cuban Revolution brought to that beautiful island. Power to the people of Cuba, my eye.
Chavez and Castro are fellow Marxists bent on eradicating democracy “south of the border” and useful idiot fawners like Oliver Stone and Sean Penn should not be given a platform in the mainstream media to promote their odious ideology.
Whom am I kidding! The mainstream media fair and balanced? Que! un chiste!
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