Please Bring Tavis back from vacation.
Tony Cox is off to a terrible start of the week with his story about the Venezuealan recall election.
Today Tony Cox interviewed Mike Caesar in Caracas, and not only was Caesar's story heavily biased, so was Tony Cox.
Cox introduced the story with a claim that there was a second day of voting because of broken machines. This was barely true on two counts. Voting started on Saturday and was extended to 12 midnight. There wasn't a second day of voting. Sunday starts at 12:01 am. The entire tone of the interview seemed to be an attempt to discredit the legitimacy of the election, so I guess it helped to say that Sunday started at 12:00 midnight and that reaching that cusp constituted an entire second day of voting. The second problem with that claim is that nowhere in the media have I seen a fact suggesting that broken machines were the cause of the extended voting hours. Not even Mike Caesar's evidence supported the claim. Caesar said the fingerprinting check caused the delay. But, even though he sounded skeptical, he didn't provide any evidence that it was broken anywhere. Yes, there were lines all over the country. Clearly, there weren't defective machines all over the country. They had about 9 million voters (out of about 12 million registered voters). Perhaps that's why the voting day was extended. Everybody wanted to vote. But a desire to vote doesn't help Cox and Caesar support their attempt to spin the election as defective, so, instead, we hear about these phantom defective machines, or was it the procedure?
Normally, when I hear a person use the sort of loaded language I heard coming from Caesar on a news program, I wait to hear the proponent of other side of the story get a chance to speak. There was no other side of the story in this segment. When I hear that sort of loaded language come from the INTERVIEWER, I tend to reach for the remote and switch the channel from Fox. Sadly, I wasn't listening to Fox.
And Cox hit the ground running with the editorializing. Cox introduced the story by characterizing Chavez's victory as "apparent." As far as I can tell it was "real," notwithstanding Cox and Caesar's evidence-free attempt to present it otherwise.
Caesar's language was loaded from the beginning too, and his claims were unsupported by facts. He claimed that "the governments numbers are unrealistic" because they differed from the opposition's numbers. Granted Caesar said he didn't trust the opposition's numbers either, but his suspicion of the opposition's didn't mitigate his suspicion of the governments numbers, which was logically bizarre. He set himself up by saying the difference suggested fraud, but then could anchor neither of his referants in fact. Gosh, if I were the opposition, and I knew I could count on reporters to think like that, I'd lie about my numbers. And guess what? Perhaps Caesar – the reporter on the ground – didn't know about it, but that's obviously what happened. It sure would have been interesting to hear Caesar address this story:
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1248, or at least do the kind of reporting that constitutes the reporting in this story: actually talking to people and getting their names and putting what they say in quotation marks, rather than just spinning out opinion disguised as news.
OK, so Caesar did then try to embark on a line of argument to make up for his absurd "difference in totals" argument. However, it was no less stupid. He actually said that he didn't believe the recall numbers because the opposition vote was lower than the vote they got during the recall referendum vote. Hello? Is it not possible that the referendum was fraudulent and the election was clean? Perhaps Caesar honestly is not aware of the months long debate about the walk around lists? Or is it not possible that people who wanted a recall election decided to vote for Chavez, which was the trend in the polls for the last few months? Surely Caesar researches his stories, was aware of the trends in the polls, can do math, and can draw a straight line. His spin should not be excused as stupidity.
Caesar's loaded language for describing the election was shameless. He called the government "paranoid" for using a thumbprint "scheme" to make sure people didn't vote twice. He called the system unwieldy, unrealistic, and says "predictably" it broke down. Yet he couldn't provide any evidence that this in fact happened. He's the only person I've heard describe it as broken, and it seems like he's merely relying on "A follows B" logic, rather than actual facts. That the process was slow doesn't mean it broke down, and the polls were kept open until everyone voted. Furthermore, is he claiming that an unwieldy fingerprint system meant the vote wasn't accurate. The fingerprint system was completely unconnected to the voting machine. You confirmed your ID on the fingerprint machine, and then voted on a separate machine. Even if you accept Caesar's claim that the fingerprint stage slowed the process, it doesn't follow that the vote wasn't accurate (especially considering that it looks like everyone who wanted to vote voted – over 75% of registered voters voted, by my estimate).
The facts and the logic simply do not support Caesar's attempt to spin the election as being faulty.
Cox absurdly parroted Caesar's unsupported, illogical musings by employing a tone that this mess needs to be resolved. Caesar followed up on Cox's skepticism by saying the Carter Center might not certify the results and that would undermine Chavez authority. I believe that the Carter Center endorsed the results prior to the first airing of this interview. This isn't the first time I've heard old news on the Tavis Smiley Show, however, after hearing so much bullshit already and then hearing speculation that subsequent events had already proved was based on a false assumption, it only increased my agitation.
Even though events already proved Caesar to be a poor reporter or seer or whatever he was trying to do with this he story, the absurdities weren't over. He then embarked on musings about how a recount could help ("based on what?" I'm wondering, since his only allegation of a problem so far was the fingerprinting system, which had nothing to do with the vote, and apparently didn't stop very many people, if anyone at all from voting). To justify this, he called the electronic voting system "new and untested" which opens the door to "fraud or whatever" (yes, he actually said "whatever"). Dismissively, he says the machines "spit out" paper, and they could recount the paper. But I'm guessing that rereading spat out papers might still not satisfy Mr. Caesar unless it shows that the opposition won.
Cox concluded the interview by saying, suspiciously, "so Chavez is the president _for_now_." Jeez, how many times does Chavez have to win elections before the media accepts him? I believe that this is the 8th election he's survived (not counting the attempted coup) in about the same number of years. This interview today was probably an excellent example of why Chavez keeps going through this. The media is aggressively ignorant and deceptive in representing what is going on.
I hope that when Tavis gets back from vacation he slaps some sense into Tony Cox.
And despite the fact that Caesar bills himself as a 'reporter' it shouldn't mitigate the responsibility of the Tavis Smiley Show to provide an opposing view of what happened in Caracas that is at least as biased in favor of the government as today's interview was against it. And then the next day, maybe Tavis could simply interview someone who isn't full of shit and only has an agenda of telling the truth rather than to evoke unsubstantiated emotions through the use of loaded terminology, dismissive tones, and feigned skepticism (and, perhaps, host a TV show on one of Gustavo Cisneros's stations).
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