The New York Times reports: “Footage Contradicts U.S. Claim That Nicolás Maduro Burned Aid Convoy.”

JOE EMERSBERGER, jemersberger at aol.com, @rosendo_joe
Emersberger has written extensively on Venezuela and media coverage of the crisis for the media watch group FAIR including “Facts Don’t Interfere With Propaganda Blitz Against Venezuela’s Elected President” and for the Canary. He said: “NYT was scooped on this by weeks by independent journalists like Max Blumenthal, but good to see. Bigger lie was the whole premise of the aid stunt.” (See FAIR piece “Western Media Fall in Lockstep for Cheap Trump/Rubio Venezuela Aid PR Stunt.”)

Max Blumenthal wrote just after the Feb. 23 incident: “Burning Aid: An Interventionist Deception on Colombia-Venezuela Bridge?” Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted at the time: “Maduro National Police set fire to an aid truck carrying food & medicine while people in #Venezuela starve.” Journalist Dan Cohen tweeted back at him: “You have no evidence of who set the aid truck on fire and these photos indicate your guarimberos had a hand in it.”

Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept highlights the falsifications of administration officials John Bolton and Mike Pompeo as well as CNN and Kasie Hunt of NBC in his latest: “NYT’s Exposé on the Lies About Burning Aid Trucks in Venezuela Shows How U.S. Government and Media Spread Pro-War Propaganda.”

Emersberger’s pieces include “Trump’s Economic Sanctions Have Cost Venezuela About $6bn Since August 2017.”

Economist Mark Weisbrot writes about another Times piece: “This is amazing: buried deep in this NYT article is a sentence indicating the Trump economic sanctions are a major cause of the deadly blackout in Venezuela, contradicting the rest of the article. No one has noticed; this should have been the main story.” The Times acknowledged: “The sanctions have affected Venezuela’s ability to import and produce the fuel required by the thermal power plants that could have backed up the Guri plant once it failed.”