Christian Science Monitor has some hagiography on Hugo Chavez’s own house organ, Telesur, insisting that it’s — no, really — full of professional journalists. It cites as proof the Telesur chief, the creepy, rat-like former Chavez shill and spokesman, Andres Izarra, a man who was suddenly forced to leave CNN a few years ago, and on very murky grounds. The one who, when he was Chavez’s shill, used to read off journalists’ names at Caracas press conferences to say just how much he didn’t like their reporting. That one.

Extolling Telesur’s questionable leadership is something Telesur tried to do when it first announced its launch. It was bad propaganda then, and it’s bad propaganda now.

Telesur’s a hardcore leftwing state-financed news organization managed by a Uruguayan Marxist named Aron Aharonian who once worked for the excreble Prensa Latina, the Cuban state news organ. Don’t tell me there was any independence in that! The Monitor misleadingly cites ONLY the guy’s ‘professional’ past at UPI, conveniently forgetting to mention that this guy just came off a gig shilling for Fidel Castro. This guy is one of the operational leaders of Telesur!

Here’s something the Monitor needs to get straight: Just because someone works at a professional news organization doesn’t make him a professional journalist. Just ask Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair. The news industry is loaded with fabricators and shills, people on the take, and people who expound a point of view. Point of view is fine but not when it pretends to be objective. The one thing the recent media scandals teach us is that individuals cannot be judged by their organizations.

So did the Monitor convince anyone that Telesur was loaded with professional journalists? I don’t know. But they sure didn’t convince me. I already know some of the Telesur staff, and, as ‘professionals’: Sorry, Christian Science Monitor: No, They’re Not.

Maybe the Monitor was slaggy on the question of professionalism because it is unable to distinguish professionalism itself. This is evident in the Monitor’s sourcing. It’s annoying that that bona fide lie about ‘professionalism’ was declared as fact in the article by an anonymous single staffer there who was identified as a U.S. citizen. Who is this person and why weren’t they identified? What was to be afraid of?

I suspect the U.S. staffer is a Sandalista of longtime leftwing ties, long enough to pass the Cuban-style vetting process all Telesur staff undergo.

There was no need to let the U.S. citizen remain anonymous in an article like this. No need at all! The story, and especially the parts from him, were unchecked propaganda extolling the ‘professionalism’ of the Chavez-owned network. Something like that has to have a name on it. Otherwise it’s just more government propaganda derived from an agenda. I am stunned that an unnamed source of this caliber was allowed to remain ‘anonymous.’

If anyone knows the name of this unnamed U.S. source, let me know and I will publish it. Meanwhile, I have unusual resources of my own and trust me, I will find out!

UPDATE: Media bias favoring Chavistadom is getting to be a problem. Alek Boyd has much more on a separate incident involving the anti-American BBC here.