Christian Parenti

I have just finished writing a 1,700 word profile piece on American journalist and author Christian Parenti. The guy is a genius, still young (39) given all he has achieved (three books, hundreds of articles) and bound to produce plenty more intelligent, engaging and independent reportage in the future.

Check him out at www.christianparenti.com.

I sniff news - do you?

I have just discovered Newssniffer.co.uk - it monitors BBC feedback and comments and publishes all the stuff that's censored.

There is one particularly interesting thread about NHS reform in which, if I understand it right, a whopping 340 comments were censored and only ONE comment published! If you read the thread (here) you will see that many of the comments are not particularly extreme or prejudiced, they just oppose New Labour's intentions to reform (i.e. privatise) large chunks of the NHS.

One guy even writes:

"My comments have clearly been removed.

I have read the house rules and cannot see where I have contravened them.

So that I dont repeat my mistake, could a moderator please email me and explain what I am guilty of other, unlike the BBC of not being a new labour fan."

This speaks volumes about the BBC's subservience to the government. You wouldn't get such censorship on any large mainstream private media site... or would you?

Frozen Grand Central Station

Cruising for a bruising

There is no denying that the whole Venezuela/Chavez issue provokes heated debate, but the New Statesman's feedback forums on this topic often end up shamefully unreadable and nauseous. Just cast your eye over the comments following this article.

What do "contributors" achieve by engaging in this sort of mudslinging? And why doesn't the NS vet its forums more effectively? I've never seen it this bad on any other site, even when debating Venezuela.

Lets wait and see what kind of reaction my latest article on Mr. Chavez's hypocritical antagonism towards Colombia receives. I reckon I'm once again cruising for a bruising in the blogosphere.

US bipartisan politics

Have a look at this blog. It sums up almost exactly how I feel about the US primaries - I couldn't have put it better myself. Hillary is a machine, Barack an unknown quantity (who I fear would turn a little hawkish in office), and the election of any of the Republican candidates - except perhaps Ron Paul - would probably hasten the end of humanity by a few hundred years (if you can say we have even that long left!).

Surely there is room in the American political landscape for a third party?

FARCing politics

Today's anti-FARC march has sparked plenty of discussion in the Colombian media. The rally has been organised as a supposedly anti-political demonstration against the narco-terrorist outfit Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, but of course has been hijacked by the Colombian government as a pro-State media blitz.

At first it appears to be a fairly innocuous event which most right-(and left-?)minded people should support. But when you cast your eye over this Colombian site, you realise that by excluding any other forms of violence it becomes somehow complicit in crimes committed by other institutions - especially those of the State-backed renegade mercenary Colombian paramilitaries.

I emailed one of the organisers of the march, asking if the choice of date was significant. The reason I asked was that on February 4th 1992, Venezuela president Hugo Chávez led an unsuccessful coup attempt which ended with the imprisonment of the head-of-state-to-be and his cohorts. Since around 2005 Chávez has celebrated this day as the "Dawn of Hope" when, according to his "Bolivarian" rewriting of history, the Venezuelan people decided to stand up to the corrupt, incompetent and oppressive regime of Carlos Andrés Pérez.
I wondered, with Chávez's recent declaration of shared ideology with the FARC, whether holding an anti-FARC protest on this date was a sly way of undermining his attempts to steal the media limelight with another display of his military prowess.

The organiser responded that it was entirely coincidental and that they only realised a week into January when it was too late to do anything about it.

I'm not convinced. It does seem awfully convenient for Colombian president Uribe to outshine Chávez on a day like today.

It's the f*&^ing economy, stupid

I have a radio alarm clock that pings on to Radio 4's Today program each morning. It's probably the least offensive way of being woken up (listening to Chris Moyles at 7am feels like some kind of blunt instrument invading my inner ear, and Radio 3 is so relaxing it fails to wake me) but the other morning the program editors cut off their Kenya correspondent after barely 90 seconds on air, in time for the hourly pips.

Nothing unusual in that, you might say. But the fact that they had spent the previous twenty minutes exploring the minutiae of implications of the previous day's stock market wobble made it clear where the Today program's editorial priorities lie. The possibility that a few city hedge fund managers may have to take a measly £10m bonus instead of their usual end-of-year £18m wedge is clearly deemed more important to listeners than the supposed "model African nation" descending into machete-wielding barbarity.

Is it because they is black?