Honduras' non-coup

It is amazing to me how powerful the media is in the USA. We - her citizens - have forgotten how to think, I think, and now rely on the media to do our thinking for us. And so the media no longer reports the facts, they report what our opinion should be on a particular topic and in order to keep you interested they sensationalize the mundane and the perverse. What a shame. We have ceded our responsibility to think to an institution whose primary goal is to make money and whose secondary goal seems to me to be to remake society in their image.

This can only be our fault. No one has forced this upon us. We've become a nation of "sound bites" seeking to be entertained, not to be informed. We are "too busy" to bothered with the facts. This, in my opinion, is killing our country. For more on this, please see this article.

The primary reason that I am mentioning the power of the media is that I have seen first hand how the media has shaped the perception of the story here in Honduras - a perception that was entirely wrong and one sided. Now, I see portions of the media waking up to the reality of the situation here and reporting (mostly in their opinion pages) on "the truth" of what is happening here in Honduras. The truth is there, if you are willing to look beyond the myriad of "stories" reporting the "coup" here in Honduras and if you know where to look. In that spirit, I post here another link to another excellent rendering of the actual events in Honduras that have incorrectly been characterized as a coup from none other than the LA Times.

The article can be found here: Honduras' non-coup

Here are the first couple of paragraphs:

Honduras, the tiny Central American nation, had a change of leaders on June 28. The country's military arrested President Manuel Zelaya -- in his pajamas, he says -- and put him on a plane bound for Costa Rica. A new president, Roberto Micheletti, was appointed. Led by Cuba and Venezuela (Sudan and North Korea were not immediately available), the international community swiftly condemned this "coup."

Something clearly has gone awry with the rule of law in Honduras -- but it is not necessarily what you think. Begin with Zelaya's arrest. The Supreme Court of Honduras, as it turns out, had ordered the military to arrest Zelaya two days earlier. A second order (issued on the same day) authorized the military to enter Zelaya's home to execute the arrest. These orders were issued at the urgent request of the country's attorney general. All the relevant legal documents can be accessed (in Spanish) on the Supreme Court's website. They make for interesting reading.