- Should readers expect imaprtiality from foreign reporters?
The Guardian's Latin America correspondent Rory Carroll has been accused of lacking impartiality in his reporting of current affairs in socialist Venezuela and neighbouring Colombia. Sebastian Kennedy weighs up the evidence, and considers the broader issue: is impartiality desirable, or even possible, when reporting news abroad?
The Guardian appears to have opened a small can of worms by addressing the complaints of one of its readers regarding its coverage of Latin America. The reader complained of a lack of balance, and a tendency to be overly-critical of Venezuela's socialist president Hugo Chávez, whilst systematically overlooking or excluding details of Colombia's right wing government's involvement in human rights abuses, corruption and other misdemeanours.
In a recent posting, its "reader's editor" - that is, the person who deals with readers' complaints - Siobhain Butterworth "reviewed more than 50 articles about Venezuela published by the Guardian over the past 15 months" and concluded that the complaints about Rory Carroll’s writing were not substantiated.
Carroll tends to condense opposing arguments concisely in his articles with passages such as the following, in a piece about Chavez's revoking of an opposition TV channel's broadcast licence:
"Critics say an authoritarian hammer is crushing free speech and what is left of Venezuela's democracy. Supporters say the government is right to replace a channel notorious for lies, manipulation and anti-Chávez propaganda."
There is no doubt that this is a balanced appraisal of the two main arguments. However, Carroll can equally be criticised for his more observational, less fact-based reporting. In one piece, entitled All aboard as Chávez takes off on a four-hour flight of rhetoric, he uses the metaphor of flight throughout, which has two consequences: firstly, it glosses over details in a way that would be inexcusable for a national reporter covering a speech by, say, Gordon Brown; secondly, it makes indirect associations with flights of fantasy, implying that the president's rhetoric has lost touch with reality.
His repeated use of the word "peasants"is also unfortunate and betrays a mild cultural superiority and smugness that closer inspection of other articles, such as this one, will confirm. It is not hard to read between the lines to decipher what this journalist thinks of his principal subject, and revealing it in this way begs the question: is this news or opinion I am reading? Whilst Carroll is sure that "the average reader knows when a piece is observational and can see for himself what is opinion," it may be better for The Guardian's editors to confine such subjective reporting to a dedicated column. After all, "the distinction [between fact and opinion] should always be made as clearly as possible," according to Butterworth herself.
It is important to take into consideration, however, that reporting on the political situation in Venezuela is an extremely tough job, regardless of whether you consider Hugo Chávez to be a hero, a tyrant or just a fool. As Carroll himself rightly points out in Butterworth's post, "It's the most polarised story I've ever covered... The discourse is shrill and high-pitched on both sides. The opposition uses the language of the extreme and the Chavistas are passionate. You have to steer a course between them - it is extraordinarily difficult." (Oddly, Butterworth avoids referring to Carroll by name, and instead calls him "the correspondent" throughout, for no apparent reason, as it is clear that she is talking about Rory Carroll and nobody else.)
But it is the following line that generated a small furore in the blogosphere: "The correspondent doesn't regard himself as a 'champion of impartiality.'" This line was immediately picked up on by eagle-eyed and sharp-tongued leftwing blogging sites such as BoRev, MediaLens and Red Pepper, which claim that this only confirms what they have always known: The Guardian, like almost all other Western newspapers, is part of a huge global conspiracy to undermine Venezuela's socialist revolution by disseminating lies and distorting the facts.
One commenter on Butterworth's post, Daniel Duquenal - himself a prominent Caracas-based blogger -, made the important point that finding accurate sources of information is very difficult in a country like Venezuela. "All the statistics institutions and the Central Bank ... have been 'transformed' over the past half decade into basically propaganda agencies," he writes. "In short obtaining real information in Venezuela has become a challenge. In the spirit of objectivity I also must point out that Chavez's political opposition has not helped since instead of clamouring for real numbers many prefer to use this situation as a license to make up their own numbers for their own political advantage."
It is ironic, but at the same time understandable, that in the fragile democracies of underdeveloped countries where a political crisis or sudden event can easily provoke violent protests and loss of life, the media is denied access to accurate information that could help spread stability through stimulating a more balanced and fair debate on crucial issues. But this is the situation facing reporters such as Rory Carroll.
In such an information vacuum, where does a reporter turn? Contacts in the government, military bigwigs, business leaders, or even the president himself, if you are lucky enough to have access to his inner circle... unless, of course, he appears on television for long periods on a regular basis, as Hugo Chávez does on his weekly live chat show Aló Presidente, in which case you have a guaranteed source of verifiable official quotes.
Of course this only serves as an aid to accurately reporting what has been said. It does nothing to help establish whether what has been said is verifiably true or in itself an accurate version of events. And it is from within the thick of this quagmire of subjective anecdotes, press releases and deeply politicised local news sources that a foreign correspondent is expected to report a fair, accurate and impartial account of current affairs. It should be of no surprise, then, if occasionally their own preconceptions, prejudices or biases slip – subconsciously or otherwise – into their choice of words, quotes or angle in a story. Just like when reading any other part of the newspaper, the reader would be well advised to regard with a healthy amount of cynicism what is being said by whom, and spare a thought for that which might have been left out.
