Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Chevron Ecuador: NY Times Buries Case Bias

Lawyer Steve Donziger and other plaintiff's who filed the so-called environmental damage lawsuit against Chevron appear to have help from some in the print media. According to Julia A. Seymour of the Business and Media Institute, the New York Times joined Crude movie director Joe Berlinger in his effort to be excused from giving over 500 hours of outtakes from the film to Chevron lawyers.

In an article on the Chevron Ecuador issue, the NY Times John Schwartz and Dave Itzkoff wrote "Floyd Abrams, an expert in First Amendment law who wrote a brief fighting the demand for the outtakes by Chevron on behalf of journalism organizations, including The New York Times, said that regardless of how revealing the clips were, the court's broad order was mistaken."

That sentence appears in a paragraph 24 levels down in the article. Buried.

And, as Seymour points out, and has been noted here, the tapes were more than revealing. The tapes were damaging to Steve Donziger's case, and effectively call his motives into question, as well as revealing the case itself to be a fraud.

The main stream American media has not looked into the strength of the evidence Donziger has presented (none), or the efforts Ecuador has made to nationalize its oil production, kicking out American firms from Ecuador in the process.

Stay tuned.

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