Sweeney does Venezuela

Apologies for the absence of posts this week. I hope to be back to normal next week.

I wrote a short piece a while ago on the thuggish bigmouth President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. My friend John Sweeney, an outstanding investigative journalist who previously exposed what he aptly called the Pilger-Baathist line on sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime, reported for the BBC this week on "how good the controversial President [Chávez] is at running his own country". You can see the programme here.

I stress that I have not yet watched it myself. I am pleasantly unfazed, however, by the news that the Chomskyite Media Lens organisation - founded and headed by an ignoramus, as I demonstrated here - is up in arms about "bias". For some reason, other journalists of usually sceptical temperament don't get the point about Chávez. I did a blog post here about a romanticised version of Chávez's contempt for constitutional politics.