At UN, Reuters Hosts Minutes Used to Indict Inner City Press, Small Media Targeted

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, June 2, updated below -- Ever since Inner City Press began complaining on May 21 that Reuters and its UN bureau chief Louis Charbonneau used without credit Inner City Press' March 28 exclusive that US official Jeffrey Feltman would come to work at the UN, Charbonneau joined by other big media from Bloomberg, Agence France Presse, Al-Arabiya and Voice of America have been trying to expel Inner City Press.

  That Reuters is implicated in this attack on independent investigative media is most recently made clear by the sending out of inaccurate and incomplete minutes of UN Correspondents Association Executive Committee minutes purportedly putting Inner City Press in a bad light.

  An hour before it met to appoint a "Board of Examination" to "investigate" Inner City Press, the UNCA Executive Committee sent Inner City Press what it said were the minutes to four meetings stretching back to September 2011.

  Before the "Board of Examination" was voted on -- with as chairman a subordinate at Xinhua, whose bureau chief has already voted against Inner City Press -- Inner City Press formally objected to the minutes, noting that they were inaccurate and incomplete.

  As simply one example, Inner City Press' complaint at the May 29 meeting that Herve Ladsous, the fourth Frenchman in a row atop UN Peacekeeping, had explicitly refused to answer Inner City Press' questions about Haiti and Sri Lanka, and that no UNCA Executive Committee member had offered any support, was either not in, or deleted from, the minutes.

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