For
almost 20 years, the US government has been trying to overthrow
Venezuela’s government, and establishment media outlets (state,
corporate and some nonprofit) throughout the Americas and Europe have
been bending over backwards to help the US do it.
Rare
exceptions to this over the last two decades would be found in the
state media in some countries that are not hostile to Venezuela, like
the ALBA block. Small independent outlets like VenezuelAnalysis.com
also offered alternatives. In the US and UK establishment media, you
are way more likely to see a defense of Saudi Arabia’s dictatorship
than of Venezuela’s democratically elected government. Any defense
of Venezuela’s government will provoke vilification and ridicule,
so both Alan MacLeod and his publisher (Routledge) deserve very high
praise for producing the book Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years
of Fake News and Misreporting. It took real political courage.
(Disclosure: MacLeod is a contributor to FAIR.org, as am I.)
MacLeod’s
approach was to assess 501 articles (news reports and opinion pieces)
about Venezuela that appeared in the US and UK newspapers during key
periods since Hugo Chávez was first elected Venezuelan president in
1998. Chávez died in March 2013, and his vice president, Nicolas
Maduro, was elected president a month later. Maduro was just
re-elected to a second six-year term on May 20. The periods of peak
interest in Venezuela that MacLeod examined involved the first
election of Chávez in 1998, the US-backed military coup that briefly
ousted Chávez in April of 2002, the death of Chávez in 2013 and the
violent opposition protests in 2014.
MacLeod
notes that US government funding to the Venezuelan opposition spiked
just before the 2002 coup, and then increased again afterwards. What
would happen to a foreign government that conceded (as the US State
Department’s Office of the Inspector General did regarding
Venezuela) that it funded and trained groups involved with violently
ousting the US government?
MacLeod
shows that, in bold defiance of the facts, the US media usually
treated US involvement in the coup as a conspiracy theory, on those
rare occasions when US involvement was discussed at all. Only 10
percent of the articles MacLeod sampled in US media even mentioned
potential US involvement in the coup. Thirty-nine percent did in UK
media, but, according to MacLeod, “only the Guardian presented
US involvement as a strong possibility.”
As
somebody who regularly reads Venezuelan newspapers and watches its
news and political programs, I thought the most powerful evidence
MacLeod provided of Western media dishonesty was a chart showing how
Venezuela’s media system has been depicted from 1998–2014. Of the
166 articles in MacLeod’s sample that described the state of
Venezuela’s media, he classified 100 percent of them as spreading a
“caged” characterization: the outlandish story that the Chávez
and Maduro governments dominate the media, or have otherwise used
coercion to practically silence aggressive criticism.
There is
a bit of subjectivity involved in classifying articles in a sample
like MacLeod’s. From my own very close reading of the US and UK’s
Venezuela coverage over the years, I’m sure one could quibble that
a few articles within MacLeod’s sample contradict the “caged”
story; perhaps reducing the percentage to 95 percent, but that would
hardly assail his conclusion. It is truly stunning that Western
journalists can’t be relied on to accurately report the content of
Venezuelan newspapers and TV. How hard is it to watch TV and read
newspapers, and notice that the government is being constantly
blasted by its opponents? No background in economics or any type of
esoterica is required to do that much—simply a lack of extreme
partisanship and a minimal level of honesty.
MacLeod
acknowledges that the Carter Center has refuted a few big lies about
the Venezuelan government, including the one about government critics
being shut out of Venezuela’s media, but he also reminds us that a
week after the perpetrators of the 2002 coup thanked Venezuela’s
private media for their help installing a dictatorship, Jennifer
McCoy (America director for the Carter Center at the time) wrote an
op-ed for the New York Times (4/18/02) in which she said that the
“Chávez regime” had been “threatening the country’s
democratic system of checks and balances and freedom of expression of
its citizens.” Venezuelan democracy deserved much better
“allies.” The Carter Center may have sparkled at times compared
to the rest of the US establishment, but it’s a very filthy
establishment.
Drawing
from the work of Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky, MacLeod provides a
structural analysis of why coverage of Venezuela has been so
terrible. Corporate journalists, with rare exceptions, reflexively
dismiss common-sense analysis of their industry. Chomsky and Herman
therefore resorted to proving various common-sense propositions,
identifying “filters” that distort news coverage in ways that
serve the rich and powerful. For example, it matters who pays the
bills. (In other news, water is wet.) Corporate-owned, ad-dependent
media will tend to serve the agenda of wealthy owners and corporate
customers who provide the bulk of the ad dollars. Such media will
usually hire and promote people whose worldview is compatible with
the arrangement. That greatly reduces the need for heavy-handed
bullying to enforce an editorial line.
Business
pressures also drive media outlets to cuts costs, and therefore rely
on governments and big corporate outfits as cheap and readily
available sources. Losing “access” by alienating powerful sources
therefore becomes expensive, even before you consider other forms of
flak that powerful people can apply.
Beyond
the general “filters” that Chomsky and Herman identified, MacLeod
described others that are specific to Venezuela. MacLeod pointed to
“massive cuts to newsroom budgets, leading to reliance on local
stringers. Local journalists recruited from highly adversarial
Venezuelan opposition–aligned press, leading to a situation where
Venezuelan opposition ideas and talking points have their amplitude
magnified. Anti-government activists producing supposedly objective
news content for Western media.”
He also
explained that “journalists are overwhelmingly housed in the
wealthy Chacao district of Eastern Caracas…. This, combined with
concerns over crime, creates a situation where journalists
inordinately spend their work and leisure time in an opposition
bastion. Hence, it can appear to a journalist that “everyone” has
a negative opinion about the government.”
I wish
MacLeod had more forcefully stressed another factor explaining why
Venezuela reporting is so bad: impunity. A structural analysis
explains why biased coverage results even if journalists are usually
honest, but being able to say anything you want about an adversary
without having to worry about being refuted (and discredited)
encourages dishonesty. Media bias in Venezuela’s case could more
appropriately be called media corruption.
In 2015,
one of MacLeod’s interviewees, the former Caracas-based journalist
Girish Gupta, wrote (Reuters, 8/5/15) that 1.5 million Venezuelans
had left the country since Hugo Chávez first took office in 1999,
according to “Caracas-based sociologist Tomás Páez, who has
published papers and books on migration.” According to UN
population figures, about 320,000 had left over that period: about
one fifth the number Páez estimated.
Paez is
a fiercely anti-Chavista academic who signed a letter published in a
Venezuelan newspaper (as a quarter-page ad) that welcomed the
dictatorship that briefly replaced Chávez during the 2002 coup.
Gupta’s response to my emails explaining why Páez’s figure was
very far-fetched, and that he should not be presented as a neutral
expert, was that he would no longer read my emails. Páez has since
been cited as a neutral expert on migration by Reuters, the New York
Times and Financial Times.
MacLeod
notes that the Venezuelan government has become practically
inaccessible as a source for corporate journalists, but the same is
often true for independent journalists in Venezuela, and grassroots
supporters of the government. I’ve personally tried to get some of
them to meet a Caracas-based corporate journalist whose integrity I
trusted, but they declined. The assumption was that even if the
journalist didn’t set out to write a dishonest hit piece, the
editors would make it one (or simply kill the piece)—an assumption
that I can’t blame them for making.
While
MacLeod could have been even harsher, his book makes a concise and
well-argued case against media corruption that has succeeded in
hanging the “dictatorship” label on Venezuela—and therefore
allowed the country to be targeted for US-led economic strangulation,
and even military threats by the Trump administration.
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