Thursday, July 09, 2009

The Obvious Problem

This morning on National Public Radio, I almost got my hopes up when a story about how nearly everyone but the Hondurans think that the removal of Zelaya was a coup.

Alas, instead of a story about how the world's media has largely ignored the fact that the military acted under orders of the Honduran legislative and judiciary branches in response to the exectutive's violation of their constitution, the NPR report argued that the Hondurans were being kept in the dark about the true nature of the so-called coup by the interim government's suppression of contrary news.

Seriously. Don't believe your lying eyes, you stupid and ignorant Hondurans, trust the world press corps to get the story right.

I mean, what else could the explanation be?

UPDATE: This is a bit inconvenient for the assumptions behind the story that the Hondurans are blinded by their media:


A new CID-Gallup poll indicated that Hondurans were split on the coup, with a slight majority appearing to oppose it.

Forty-six percent said they disagreed with Zelaya's ouster and 41 percent said they approved of it, according to the face-to-face survey of 1,204 Hondurans in the days following the ouster. Another 13 percent declined to answer.


On the other hand, I'd have preferred to see a much higher percentage approving the removal of Zelaya.

Of course, I'd like to see how many Hondurans think it was a coup or a lawful removal. One can think Zelaya was trying to stage his own coup under color of law and still disagree with removing him, perhaps believing Zelaya could not succeed in his apparent goal.