{"id":113752,"date":"2018-07-02T12:02:31","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T11:02:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=113752"},"modified":"2018-07-09T11:48:03","modified_gmt":"2018-07-09T10:48:03","slug":"why-venezuela-reporting-is-so-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/07\/why-venezuela-reporting-is-so-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Venezuela Reporting Is So Bad"},"content":{"rendered":"

Review of Alan MacLeod’s <\/em>Bad News from Venezuela<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Alan MacLeod\u2019s Bad News From Venezuela<\/p><\/div>\n

27 Jun 2018 – <\/em>For almost 20 years, the US government has been trying to overthrow Venezuela\u2019s government, and establishment media<\/a> outlets (state, corporate and some nonprofit<\/a>) throughout the Americas and Europe have been bending over backwards to help the US do it.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong><\/a> also offered alternatives. In the US and UK establishment media, you are way more likely<\/a> to see a defense of Saudi Arabia\u2019s dictatorship<\/a> than of Venezuela\u2019s democratically elected government. Any defense of Venezuela\u2019s government will provoke vilification and ridicule<\/a>, so both Alan MacLeod and his publisher (Routledge<\/strong>) deserve very high praise for producing the book \u00a0Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting<\/em><\/a>. It took real political courage. (Disclosure: MacLeod is a contributor to FAIR.org<\/strong>, as am I.)<\/p>\n

MacLeod\u2019s 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 Ch\u00e1vez was first elected Venezuelan president in 1998. Ch\u00e1vez died in March 2013, and his vice president, Nicolas Maduro, was elected president a month later. Maduro was just re-elected<\/a> to a second six-year term on May 20. The periods of peak interest in Venezuela that MacLeod examined involved the first election of Ch\u00e1vez in 1998, the US-backed military coup that briefly ousted Ch\u00e1vez in April of 2002, the death of Ch\u00e1vez in 2013 and the violent opposition protests in 2014.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s Office of the Inspector General did regarding Venezuela<\/a>) that it funded and trained groups involved with violently ousting the US government?<\/p>\n

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, \u201conly the Guardian<\/strong> presented US involvement as a strong possibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Source: Alan MacLeod<\/p><\/div>\n

As somebody who regularly reads Venezuelan newspapers<\/a> and watches its news and political programs<\/a>, I thought the most powerful evidence MacLeod provided of Western media dishonesty was a chart showing how Venezuela\u2019s media system has been depicted from 1998\u20132014. Of the 166 articles in MacLeod\u2019s sample that described the state of Venezuela\u2019s media, he classified 100 percent of them as spreading a \u201ccaged\u201d characterization: the outlandish story that the Ch\u00e1vez and Maduro governments dominate the media, or have otherwise used coercion to practically silence aggressive criticism.<\/p>\n

There is a bit of subjectivity involved in classifying articles in a sample like MacLeod\u2019s. From my own very close reading of the US and UK\u2019s Venezuela coverage over the years<\/a>, I\u2019m sure one could quibble that a few articles within MacLeod\u2019s sample contradict the \u201ccaged\u201d story; perhaps reducing the percentage to 95 percent, but that would hardly assail his conclusion. It is truly stunning that Western journalists can\u2019t 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<\/a>? No background in economics or any type of esoterica is required to do that much\u2014simply a lack of extreme partisanship and a minimal level of honesty.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s media, but he also reminds us that a week after the perpetrators of the 2002 coup thanked Venezuela\u2019s 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<\/strong> (4\/18\/02<\/a>) in which she said that the \u201cCh\u00e1vez regime\u201d had been \u201cthreatening the country\u2019s democratic system of checks and balances and freedom of expression of its citizens.\u201d Venezuelan democracy deserved much better \u201callies.\u201d The Carter Center may have sparkled at times compared to the rest of the US establishment, but it\u2019s a very filthy establishment.<\/p>\n

Drawing from the work of Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky<\/a>, 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 \u201cfilters\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201caccess\u201d by alienating powerful sources therefore becomes expensive, even before you consider other forms of flak that powerful people can apply.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Time (8\/22\/16)<\/p><\/div>\n

Beyond the general \u201cfilters\u201d that Chomsky and Herman identified, MacLeod described others that are specific to Venezuela. \u00a0MacLeod pointed to<\/p>\n

massive cuts to newsroom budgets, leading to reliance on local stringers. Local journalists recruited from highly adversarial Venezuelan opposition\u2013aligned 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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He also explained that<\/p>\n

journalists are overwhelmingly housed in the wealthy Chacao district of Eastern Caracas\u2026. 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 \u201ceveryone\u201d has a negative opinion about the government.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2019s case could more appropriately be called media corruption.<\/p>\n

In 2015, one of MacLeod\u2019s interviewees, the former Caracas-based journalist Girish Gupta, wrote (Reuters<\/strong>, 8\/5\/15<\/a>) that 1.5 million Venezuelans had left the country since Hugo Ch\u00e1vez first took office in 1999, according to \u201cCaracas-based sociologist Tom\u00e1s P\u00e1ez, who has published papers and books on migration.\u201d According to UN population figures<\/a>, about 320,000 had left over that period: about one fifth the number P\u00e1ez estimated.<\/p>\n

Paez is a fiercely anti-Chavista academic who signed a letter published in a Venezuelan newspaper (as a quarter-page ad<\/a>) that welcomed the dictatorship that briefly replaced Ch\u00e1vez during the 2002 coup. Gupta\u2019s response to my emails explaining why P\u00e1ez\u2019s 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<\/a>. P\u00e1ez has since been cited as a neutral expert on migration by Reuters<\/strong><\/a>, the New York Times<\/strong><\/a> and Financial Times<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve 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\u2019t set out to write a dishonest hit piece, the editors would make it one (or simply kill the piece)\u2014an assumption that I can\u2019t blame them for making.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cdictatorship\u201d label on Venezuela\u2014and therefore allowed the country to be targeted for US-led economic strangulation, and even military threats by the Trump administration.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Joe Emerberger is a writer based in Canada whose work has appeared in <\/em>Telesur English, ZNet and<\/em> Counterpunch.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 fair.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

27 Jun 2018 – For almost 20 years, the US government has been trying to overthrow Venezuela\u2019s 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. Review of Alan MacLeod’s Bad News from Venezuela<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":113754,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}