The Loudmouth and the Scorpion
The AP’s roundup on the latest batch of VTV Wiretap broadcasts is well worth a read.
The highlight? Mario Silva’s hilarious line of defense. The recordings, it turns out, have nothing to do with the security services. He doesn’t really know where they came from, he just picked them up after he stumbled upon them on YouTube.
In fact, Silva suspects they’re “created by opposition people who are very upset with certain decisions that are being made within the opposition”.
You catch that?
Expect Leopoldo Castillo to get rounded up an thrown in jail for illegal wiretapping any time now…
The stand-out fact about these recordings is just the utter absence of news value in any of them. Because even if – and the supuesto is very much negado – it was true that Mario Silva just happened to find these recordings on YouTube, basic journalistic ethics demands a public interest rationale for echoing what are clearly illegal recordings.
If somebody leaks you evidence of serious wrongdoing, you have a case for publishing it even if it was illegally obtained. But the biggest crime chronicled in the last batch of recordings is injudicious kvetching on the part utterly marginal oppo figures.
If the milquetoast crap Mesa de Alacranes has been putting out is the most incriminating material the government can find on us, then we have either an uncommonly saintly opposition or an even-more-hapless-than-we’d-suspected Security Police.
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