Bolivia Update: Evo Morales, Jews, Cocoa, and Media Bias
Opposition leader Evo Morales, who narrowly lost Bolivia’s last presidential election, received a $50,000 peace prize from Muammar Gadhafi last year.
Morales might be anti-Semitic; he’s certainly anti-”foreigners.” “Bolivia’s Jews,” meanwhile, uncertain whether new president Carlos Mesa will survive for long, “are keeping a low profile.”
Turning to the drug issue, Al Giordano reports on Morales’s recent comments regarding the US’s coca eradication program in Bolivia:
“The so-called war against drug trafficking is just an excuse for the United States to increase its power and to control other countries,” said Morales, who represents traditional coca growers in Bolivia…
The Bush Administration drug policy folks in Washington must be sweating bullets right about now; Morales wields extraordinary power in Bolivia.
And in the world of Weblogs, Colorado Luis (via Body and Soul) asks an interesting question: if Goni had been ousted on Bill Clinton’s watch, would the media have made more of the story? He thinks the media don’t question Dubya enough, but I disagree.
The media largely ignores third world crises that don’t involve US interests. Period. (Sure, the coca angle is important, but it can’t compete with the specter of terrorits in Iran or Syria or Afghanistan plotting an attack on US soil.)
Taking a step back, I think people exaggerate the issue of media bias (though I agree with Brian Montopoli that liberals tend to enter the field of journalism because they want to “speak truth to power”).
3.3 million people have died in the Congo in the last five years. How come you see little US mainstream media coverage of what some are calling the “African Holocaust”? Because media outlets are businesses, and they produce products that are intended to sell.
International news–unless it threatens America–just isn’t a hot commodity. And regardless of who’s in the White House, consumers in the United States don’t really care to spend their hard-earned dollars on news stories that don’t resound with them. Bolivia, just like The Congo, is simply an abstraction to most Americans.