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Venezuelan “Campaign from Opposition Media” Taken Up by U.S. Press

A Reuters article today on Venezuela’s upcoming legislative elections describes “a campaign from opposition media to highlight the [Venezuelan] government’s failure to tackle violent crime.” But it is not only Venezuelan media that have joined the campaign. In the past few days a flurry of news reports in the international press have laid out the same theme: that violent crime in Venezuela is out of control, that there were more murders last year in Venezuela than civilians killed in Iraq, and that the Venezuelan government either cannot or will not do anything to staunch the bloodshed.

But Robert Naiman, of Just Foreign Policy, reveals some holes in this story. Writing about Venezuela correspondent Simon Romero’s front page article in the New York Times, Naiman notes

It’s bad enough that the editors of the New York Times have refused so far to tell the truth about what we know about the magnitude of the death toll in Iraq as a result of the US invasion and occupation of the country since 2003, according to the standards that are used to describe human tragedies for which the U.S. government does not bear primary responsibility. If the New York Times used the same standards of evidence to describe human tragedies regardless of the degree of responsibility of the U.S. government, it would report that “hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died” as a result of the US war, a fact that we know with the level of confidence that we know similar facts that the New York Times publishes as a matter of routine (such as a recent report that “hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died” — in the Iraq-Iran war.) The New York Times is reluctant to publish this fact about the U.S. war, perhaps, because this fact is awkward to acknowledge for those in Washington who support the status quo policy of permanent war.

But now the New York Times has exacerbated the harm of its denial about the Iraqi death toll, by using its own failure to accurately report the death toll in Iraq as a benchmark for comparison to other human tragedies: in particular, to claim that murder in Venezuela claimed more lives in 2009 than did violence in Iraq. The New York Times editors are like the boy who killed his parents and demanded mercy on the grounds he was an orphan.

In a front page article this week headlined “Venezuela, More Deadly Than Iraq, Wonders Why,” NYT reporter Simon Romero claims:

Some here [in Caracas] joke that they might be safer if they lived in Baghdad. The numbers bear them out.

In Iraq, a country with about the same population as Venezuela, there were 4,644 civilian deaths from violence in 2009, according to Iraq Body Count; in Venezuela that year, the number of murders climbed above 16,000.

Note that the headline and the first two paragraphs of this piece depend crucially on the assumption that the partial tally of Iraqi deaths constructed by the NGO Iraq Body Count by monitoring press reports gives an accurate picture of the magnitude of the Iraqi death toll. If the Iraq Body Count partial tally is not an accurate picture of the magnitude of the Iraqi death toll, if it is too small by several orders of magnitude, then the comparison of the lede and the headline in the New York Times article is baseless.

Romero’s article also makes no attempt to explain why so many killings have taken place, unlike, for example, a recent report in the French publication Le Monde Diplomatique.

Read Naiman’s entire post here.