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    Good luck with that. Archived Message

    Posted by Raskolnikov on May 3, 2019, 8:04 am, in reply to "Re: Venezuela crisis: Defiant Maduro appears with soldiers"

    I admire your optimism in saying "WHEN I get it" with regard to the BBC answering your question.

    I agree the sourcing there is very thin; "one worker", "a foreign ministry professional". The "turn up or else" line smells like bullshit. If they had some serious references for it, they would have used it to try to discredit all the pro-Maduro marches recently.

    Trying to determine who the talking heads are, and how much of a dog they have in the fight, is always difficult in these cases. I try to read a lot of the kind of journalism posted here, but I don't have a clue about most talking heads on Venezuela; I tend to fall back on my crude, cognitive bias laden rule: "If they're favoured by the BBC, they are usually lying" which, to be fair, works pretty well! Seriously though, it seems increasingly difficult to dig behind the attrib line and see who these people really are and that's when they have names not like the mostly anonymous sources in the beeb piece.

    They don't always make it easy like the NYT:

    https://thegrayzone.com/2019/04/09/nytimes-child-of-venezuela-coup-plotter/

    The piece was inspired by Joanna Hausmann’s Youtube harangue, “What’s Happening in Venezuela.” Despite promising “a video dedicated to ‘just the facts,’” Hausmann failed to mention that her father was serving as a top advisor to Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó while she argued in support of his self-declared “presidency.”

    Ricardo Hausmann’s function within the coup government crystalized shortly following the release of Joanna’s Youtube explainer, when Guaidó selected the Harvard professor to represent his shadow regime at the Inter-American Development Bank. The Times took no issue with the fact Hausmann’s family stood to benefit from the same coup she was urging viewers to support, and like Joanna herself, neglected to disclose this ostensibly relevant information.

    The twitter thread of her trying to defend this (with her only reply apparently being "I'm proud of my dad") is brutal:

    https://twitter.com/Joannahausmann/status/1112800714252865536

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