Larry Rohter Has No Right to his Job

Larry Rohter is quite simply one of the worst "journalists" (in the absolute loosest sense of the word) in history, and how he keeps his job at the New York Times is inexplicable. This is the classy guy who was expelled from Brazil for absolutely baseless accusations of Lula being an alcohlic a few years back (imagine how the American media would respond if a foreign journalist were using smear journalism against Bush because they simply didn't like him).

Well, he's at it again. He filed a report last week detailing the ways in which a street lottery game is involved in an erupting corruption case involving judges here in Brazil. There's just one problem: it doesn't involve the game he says it involves.

This wouldn't be a problem if it weren't the central item in his article. All the charges of corruption involving the jogo do bicho don't involve the jogo do bicho at all, but instead involve the "bingos", slot-machine based casinos throughout Rio, São Paulo, and other parts of the country. Rohter does his hardest to tie the jogo do bicho, and its genrally lower-middle to lower-class vendors and clientele to this wave of corruption in Brazil. But it doesn't even involve these lower-class peoples. Instead, it involves wealthy businessmen who have been using the bingos to launder money, resulting in the closing of all the bingos, which in turn has left thousands of lower-middle class employees of the bingos (totally uninvolved in the high-level corruption) unemployed.

This wouldn't be that hard for Rohter to learn - he could pay attention to the news here, for one, as the story has dominated every headline here for the last 3 weeks. Or, even more simply, he could just look around the major cities and pay attention to what's going on in Brazil. But instead, he absoulely screws up the most simple and central facet of the entire story.

Rohter should have lost his job years ago, and it perplexes me even more to this day that he's still the Brazil correspondent. Of all the unemployed in the world, he probably should be number three on the list.