Pilger the anti-journalist

Anti-US campaigner John Pilger has written yet another feature in the New Statesman on Latin America in which he presents his somewhat simplistic leftwing political opinions as fact. His stance is pretty predictable but being a staunch critic of US foreign policy, I feel like something of a Judas to criticise him too harshly. In essence Pilger is mostly right to criticise his chosen targets, but he doesn't seem to be fond of tackling complicated issues. I wonder what his opinion is of Robert Mugabe, for instance.

But what really gets my goat is not the nature of his opinions, but the fact that despite his shameless one-sidedness and blatant bias, he is still afforded the title of "journalist".

How can this be? He does not present fact, and does not even pretend to. He investigates areas in search of evidence to support his very blinkered opinions. I have not once read a balanced article of his and find his writing tiresome because he is so entrenched in the same dogmatic view, ie US/UK/Colombia/Israel/Bush/Blair/Uribe/white men = Bad, Palestine/Chavez/Morales/Ortega/indigenous/dark people = Good.

Close, but no pinot grigio

My comments about Alice O'Keefe's latest New Statesman article were actually read by someone at the NS (amazing, I thought they had abandoned the forums after they began to fill with the hate and bile that random types feel compelled to leave there, especially whenever Venezuela is mentioned) and published in the print edition. Unfortunately they don't archive letters so you will just have to take my word for it.

They sent me an email asking for permission to use the comments and I agreed. When they found out I was one of their writers they replied that they couldn't use my comments (no reason given apart from it was "the rules") but then ended up using them anyway, without explaining why they had broken said rules. I'm guessing that they had had a disappointing mailbag that week and got desperate for copy. I'm just disappointed I didn't win the £25 wine voucher for Letter of the week.

The Stringer goes online

Finally, the main site for which this blog is simply an adjunct has gone online. www.TheStringer.co.uk is now available to view worldwide. Please enjoy... it took a while!

The lttle-discussed left vs left result of Colombia's intractible civil war

Alice O'Keefe has written an interesting piece in the New Statesman about Colombia. She argues that the FARC are strangling political debate in Colombia by de-legitimising the non-FARC aligned leftwing political movement. It's an easy card for Uribe's rightwing election machine to play, dismissing the opposition as being aligned to the cocaine rebels. The Colombian people don't want to know anything about leftwing politics as long as they have these corrupt hostage-taking drug peddlers running their rural areas by force.

The NS have asked for permission to use my forum comments in the print version of the magazine. It's nice to see them paying attention to the stuff that people write there. I'll put the edited version of my comments up here once they are published.