Chalk Another One Up to Free Speech Hypocrisy
Chalk Another One Up to Free Speech Hypocrisy
By Jim Naureckas
Corporate media coverage of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has enjoyed the supposed irony of his reportedly seeking asylum in Ecuador, a country that U.S. journalists depict as failing to measure up to their standards of freedom.
"Should Snowden eventually land in Ecuador, he'll find that the host government is hardly a champion of free expression," asserted Cristina Lindblad of Bloomberg BusinessWeek (6/24/13).
"Others saw hypocrisy in a possible offer of asylum by a government that has aggressively pursued critics in the press for perceived slights and recently passed a media law that some call an assault on freedom of speech," reported AP (6/24/13)
"Clearly Ecuador isn't the logical, legitimate champion of freedom of expression globally," declared Christopher Sabatini of Fox News Latino (6/28/13), in a piece headlined "Ecuador and Snowden: Really?"
Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (Guardian, 6/27/13) points out there is, actually, a considerable amount of free expression in Ecuador:
Without defending everything that exists in Ecuador, including criminal libel laws and some vague language in a new communications law, anyone who has been to the country knows that the international media has presented a gross caricature of the state of press freedom there. The Ecuadorian private media is more oppositional than that of the U.S., trashing the government every day.
More:
http://www.fair.org/blog/2013/06/30/chalk-another-one-up-to-free-speech-hypocrisy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=chalk-another-one-up-to-free-speech-hypocrisy
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