[NYTr] El Pais Slings Mud at Che, HugoC havez, then Demands Royalties for Fair-Use Quote

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[The translation here is not great, but readers will get the
gist.-NYTr]


Granma Daily - Nov 28, 2007
http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/english/news/art82.html

Pay or Be Censored

El País Newspaper and its Latest Disguise

By ROLANDO PEREZ BETANCOURT

With a facade of a progressive newspaper, sometimes on the left side
(provided the left is not in power), an advocate of "balanced opinions"
and of "international projection" in its public image, the Spanish
newspaper "El País" has been categorical with journalist Pascual
Serrano: either you pay or I censor you.

Serrano wrote an article published on the Spanish language website
Rebelión at http://www.rebelion.org that shows, once again, that the
journalistic practices of El País are far from the image it projects.
"From Teheran, Caracas, Managua, Madrid, London; in its editorial,
front page, press magazine and in its Sunday supplement, all the
artillery of El País in its November 18 edition opened coordinated
fire on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, following the same
military order," Serrano said.

Serrano’s report revealed another eruption of a long and not in the
least "balanced" neoconservative campaign, mounted by El País against
the governments of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua. It was the
same kind of media crusade that detonated in October. After the
publication of an editorial entitled "Caudillo Guevara," the workers of
the El Pais editorial staff demanded that a disclaimer be published
expressing their dissatisfaction with it.

It was an editorial full of insults on the occasion of the 40th
anniversary of the assassination of Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Bolivia,
and, as one of that newspaper's readers wrote, "there’s no need to have
been a Guevara follower in the past or be one today to consider your
editorial note of yesterday ('Caudillo Guevara,' El País, 10-10-2007) an
insult to the intelligence and sensitivity, another example of the
‘authorized by the police and banned by logic’ kind of discourse Karl
Marx used to talk about."

Another offended reader wrote to the newspaper, "I’m Spanish, and a
long-time reader of 'El País.' It’s sad, but the editorial does not
surprise me. It’s the result of the newspaper’s evident swing to the
right, aimed not only at conservative readers but also citizens with a
purchasing power that is simply unimaginable in Spain."

And what does the editorial say to provoke its readers’ immediate
reaction? Reading one paragraph is enough to see its intentions:

"Actually, behind the willingness to give one’s life for one’s ideals
lies a sinister purpose: the readiness to take the lives of people who
don’t share them. Ernesto Guevara, Che, who died 40 years ago in the
Bolivian town of La Higuera, belongs to that sinister saga of tragic
heroes, still alive in new-style terrorist movements, from nationalists
to jihadists, who try to hide his being an assassin under that of a
martyr, extending the old prejudice inherited from romanticism."


Yet, Pascual Serrano’s article in Rebelión was not referring to that
editorial but to the bugle sound of slaughter coming from the pages
of El País against President Chavez. "It’s not that the Venezuelan
president was front-page news; he was the focus of three news items:
one on the Spanish King after the incident at the Santiago de Chile
Summit; the Sunday special that includes a picture with the title 'Why
doesn’t he shut up?' and the subtitle 'Hugo Chavez uses incident with
the King as a means to consolidate his power,' an the article by
Vargas Llosa entitled 'The Commander and the King,' which, of course,
tackles the same issue.

About Vargas Llosa we already know that, while remaining a popular
novelist, he has become a manipulator of ideological interests and,
every now and then, a not-so-elegant journalist. But he has readers.
Some, happy to find in his analytical pieces the sort of conservative
ancestry matured throughout the years that insists on turning old
hatreds into veracities by using inflammatory adjectives. He says in the
hastily written article published by "El País," "The most evident and
immediate lesson of this psychodrama is that today there’s still an
anachronistic, demagogic, uncultured, and barbarian Latin America. To
try to incorporate it into the civilized, democratic and modernizing
entity Ibero-American Summits seeks to be is just a waste of time
and money. This will be an impossible aspiration as long as there are
Latin American countries that have people like Chavez, Ortega or Evo
Morales as rulers, not to mention Fidel Castro. The fact that they are
or have been popular and won elections does not make them democrats."

In his article, Pascual Serrano makes reference to Vargas Llosa:
"[Against Chavez] they had an international and national report, an
analyst of international politics, an editorial and a magazine article.
Now the shots came from a prestigious writer, nonw other than Vargas
LLosa."

And to highlight the antipathy that moves the Peruvian-Spanish writer
to join El País against President Chavez, Serrano quoted a few lines
-- prose worth analyzing as more proof of the fact that political phobia
can turn an excellent writer into the author of intemperance and
personal attacks.

In view of Pascual Serrano’s criticism, comes a reaction that exudes
the newspaper management’s arrogance, informing Serrano by email that
they have "the INTERNATIONAL rights to MARIO VARGAS LLOSA’s column."
And they rebuke: "You have two options: either you immediately remove
it from your page or you pay [a royalty."]

The threat is puerile and lacks legal support, since it is not a
complete reproduction, but rather quotes, a practice used by media
around the world every day.

But the arrogance continued despite the evidence and El País insisted:
"either you remove it or you pay for it."

Pascual Serrano has been categorical in his response, "Neither
Rebelión.org nor I are the least bit interested in spreading the texts
of Mario Vargas LLosa, neither paying nor without paying for them. His
essays are only useful as El País ammunition to criticize progressive
governments in Latin America."

"The newspaper article and its subsequent insistence, stresses Serrano,
is absolutely paranoid, without legal foundation and can only be
explained as an attempt to intimidate and pressure Rebelión.org and its
articles from legally and respectfully criticizing :El País’" editorial
and its misleading information policy. "Neither I nor Rebelión.org are
going to remove that article, much less pay the newspaper for the
right to criticize it."

This, let’s make it clear, will hardly represent economic bankruptcy
for "El País" or for Mario Vargas Llosa, because, after all, new cunning
ways of investing in the field of journalism, inside or outside the
paper’s façade of being "global and progressive" are bound to come.