More on Venezuela Reporting

Here, to go along with my post yesterday, is the lede from a Reuters article by one Patricia Rondon:

President Hugo Chavez commanded a wide lead before Venezuela's election on Sunday, setting the stage for the self-styled revolutionary to intensify his anti-U.S., leftist crusade in Latin America.

This is a newswire piece, not an opinion piece. Now, of course there's something we could call "fact" here: Chávez is far ahead in the polls, he uses revolutionary rhetoric. Chávez is explicitly not anti-US; he's anti-imperialist (and thus to the extent that the US is imperialist, he is anti-US - maybe Patricia is simply inferring from what we already know). Chávez is generally leftist, but as I've noted in another post below, the numbers suggest that he's not your old-timey leftist. Venezuela is the fastest growing economy in South America, with a recent growth rate much higher than the United States' (roughly 9% vs. roughly a paltry 2%).

How about "crusade"? Well, Chávez is a religious man in a religious nation and part of the Chavista program is making sure that Catholic values play a role in government.

OK, enough fakey disingenuousness. The point here is that this is the standard lede for a newswire piece and the lede suggests that Chávez and Venezuela are all about crusading against the US ignopring the fact that Venezuela does have its own domestic policy issues and international interests, as does any country. I'll gladly listen to criticism on those grounds (and, once again, I'm not a Chávez pollywog), but this kind of news piece is simply crap.