One wonders if it is indeed a case of self-censorship.
Had they gone ahead with the results I imagine it would had been quite an odd thing to pour graces on a person who is non grata. It would certainly go against the anti-communist mentality that still prevails in spirit if not flesh amongst the politburo elite in the US or the flow of the Potomac though the Cold War vanished years ago.
I am speaking of Time magazine’s recent internet poll on who should be the Person of the Year.
I first became aware of the poll via Sendero del Peje a liberal, leftist blog that espouses Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s ideas in its crusade of going against the Carlos Salinas de Gortari gang. The Sendero gang encouraged its readers to go and vote because Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela, was amongst the persons nominated amongst a plethora of bad guys. The poll seems clearly intended to steer support for George W. Bush.
Oddly enough Time Magazine chose a person that wasn’t even nominated in the first place, You.
The liberal gang over at Sendero interpreted this as a cowardly act on behalf of Time magazine, arguing that to have Hugo Chávez as a winner would have been too much. And I tend to concur because having a Hugo Chávez win would go against the grain of the very fabric of capitalist mentality where things such as this tend to be viewed in a perplexed state of mind. All this comes at the backdrop of Gore Vidal’s visit to Cuba. He once said that if the US really had a free press, things in the US wouldn’t be as muddy as they are now.
I suppose the press has been far the cry they claim to dictators and I would almost guess those very dictators are learning valuable lessons from our ”free press”
I also suppose that the press builds an ideal of itself like we all tend to do with ourselves and yet never match that ideal in anyway.
I reason that our press, because this issue also affects México, becomes part of the establishment when the Press gains more by being on the side of the power brokers than the people they are supposed to be telling the truth to.
Some might argue that freedom of press is to debunk the very flow of lies that encroach upon us and our so-called liberties, and since there are many whose voices are heard anyway, this very freedom is alive and well as we speak.
Truth be, it is all a pack of lies. There isn’t freedom of the press because the truth, however uncomfortable, never leaves the presses without a negotiation or adjustment to suit the buyer. The Media Conglomerates are favored by Powers To Be by making said news kingpins official and sanctioned authorities for the real truth.
The road to debunk said official truth is arduous and long. And in the along all kinds of human phenomena materialize and the people never see the real day of light come to their front doors.
Then again, no one said the truth is a here and now experience.