Alan MacLeod’s Bad News From Venezuela
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.”
Source: Alan MacLeod
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.
Time (8/22/16)
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.
Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky’s seminal analysis presented in “Manufacturing Consent” and “Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies” is an ever helpful tool anyone can use to gain a realistic perspective on news coverage of enemies vs allies of the US.
As for Venezuela, in all the stories about its current catastrophic economic situation US outlets always frame it a socialist mismanagement. What they rarely mention is that their dependence on oil exports is at the core of the issue.
Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky’s seminal analysis presented in “Manufacturing Consent” and “Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies” is an ever helpful tool anyone can use to gain a realistic perspective on news coverage of enemies vs allies of the US.
As for Venezuela, in all the stories about its current catastrophic economic situation US outlets always frame it a socialist mismanagement. What they rarely mention is that their dependence on oil exports is at the core of the issue.
All your article says is all the news about Venezuela is fake. I think you need to go there, so at least you know what you are talking about. You have obviously never been there.
And Obviously being Anti US shouldn’t mean you support every dictatorship on the planet like North Korea, Russia, Turkey, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela.
Honduras, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. Or dubious; Colombia, Israel, the Philippines, Turkey(they’re in NATO).. (Yeah, i am not well informed enough to characterize them very precisely or be exhaustive or anything, nor are many people)
All your article says is all the news about Venezuela is fake. I think you need to go there, so at least you know what you are talking about. You have obviously never been there.
And Obviously being Anti US shouldn’t mean you support every dictatorship on the planet like North Korea, Russia, Turkey, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela.
Honduras, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. Or dubious; Colombia, Israel, the Philippines, Turkey(they’re in NATO).. (Yeah, i am not well informed enough to characterize them very precisely or be exhaustive or anything, nor are many people)
The Bolivarian Ascendency salutes the author of this dialectic that espoused the fairness,equality and forthrightedness of the Mucho Maduro movement,Viva the Revulsion,death to the lackeys of the Oligarchiests
The author doesn’t live and work in Venezuela. He’s clueless. This tripe is worse than fake news. It’s ignorance incarnate.
See my essay in Counterpunch, “Venezuela Agonistes” August 14, 2018.
2002 was a long time ago. Things are much worse in Venezuela now. This article lost me right away when it talked about the democratically elected government there. Yet it does remain true that the Honduran government is as bad or worse than Maduro’s, and it has hardly any negative coverage in the US press.
“2002 was a long time ago. Things are much worse in Venezuela now.”
1) US reporting hasn’t improved since then nor has the core US-backed opposition leadership that led the coup (Lopez, Capriles, Machado, Borges, Ramos, Ledezma etc…).
2) It was major test of the US media’s ability to report honestly and as MacLeod showed, it failed miserably.
3) Articles that mention Hugo Chavez usually bring up the coup he attempted in 1992 – much longer ago than 2002.
4) Vnzlan economy is indeed much worse now than in 2002. That doesn’t make Venezuela a dictatorship any more than Greece’s economic meltdown makes it one, or than the Great Depression made the USA one.
“This article lost me right away when it talked about the democratically elected government there.”
Interesting. Would an article that referred to Trump as “democratically elected” also “lose you right away”?
Last time I checked, Trump hasn’t unilaterally called for a constitutional assembly that can rewrite the whole institutional structure of the country, and which essentially dissolves the democratically elected Congress which was elected in free and fair elections in 2015, but which now has zero power to do anything.
Last time I checked, Trump doesn’t unilaterally declare when and how elections will be held, postponing them when he might lose, and then holding rushed elections without the usual guarantees when he thinks he has a chance to win.
Last time I checked, Trump hasn’t banned certain parties and candidates from participating in elections, and hasn’t illegally changed the electoral bases so that with only about 20 percent of the electorate, he can repeatedly win national elections.
Last time I checked, Trump doesn’t to pay his supporters a “bonus” if they and vote for him, and then threaten supporters and government employees that if they don’t register their vote with a special card on election day, they might lose their jobs and government benefits.
So, yes, anyone who compares Maduro to Trump in terms of being democratically elected is obviously a complete ideologue with no capacity for independent thought.
Last time I checked, Trump hasn’t taken over dozens of private firms and placed his military buddies in control of them so they can smuggle goods and get rich while ordinary Venezuelans flood across the border to other countries in search of basic necessities.
Just because Trump is a fascist idiot doesn’t automatically make Maduro someone to be supported or defended. Grow a brain and learn to use it.
Plus, people are afraid to “out” the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for what it is doing to other countries. The CIA has long been the agency which destroys other countries. Think of Chile years ago or Guatemala more recently — the CIA has been busy. What else? Bay of Pigs, Viet Nam. . . .
Joe’s article is just trying to distract attention from the self-inflicted problems in Venezuela.
Joe’s article is just trying to distract attention from the self-inflicted problems in Venezuela.
Hey Rick, last time I checked Trump didn’t even win the popular vote in in the USA in 2016 thanks to system set up by slave owners which is still in place. Last time I checked Trump was not elected emperor of the Western Hemisphere and granted the authority to decide which government is a democracy and which is a dictatorship he must overthrow. Funny that you praise Venezuela’s 2015 National Assembly elections as free and fair, but not the constituent assembly elections which the opposition very stupidly boycotted and refused to run candidates for. You are outraged about Venezuela’s presidential elections called months early and ignore that opposition demand (for YEARS) has been early elections. Your post is mass of self contradiction and hypocrisy. Opposition wins an election “free and fair”. They boycott or lose “dictatorship!”. You also don’t seem to know that the Venezuelan president can call a constituent assembly elections – as Maduro did – according to Venezuela’s constitution. Emperor Trump and his minions didn’t approve but they don’t have to. Moreover, under Venezuela’s conditions – under attack by a foreign power which has declared it an “extraordinary and unusual threat” – most countries would have simply declared martial law, not elected a constituent assembly. The US certainly would have declared martial law under these conditions judging by the freak out over allegedly hacked emails by the Russians.
As for Eddie, he should grow a brain and read up on the USA’s military-industrial complex – and also on the fact that Trump’s economic sanctions have cost the Venezuelan government billions of dollar since last August,
Details matter Joe. And your utter lack of understanding the details shows why you are terribly unqualified to be writing anything on the topic. The 2015 AN elections followed all the usual audits, followed the normal electoral registration and postulation periods, and were widely considered to be free of fraud by independent observers. The 2017 constitutional assembly elections, on the other hand, did not follow any of the usual audits or electoral periods established by Venezuelan law, and Maduro single handedly and illegally changed the electoral bases so that he could control who the candidates would be. The elections was immediately denounced as illegitimate by independent organizations like the Carter Center (which had previously certified Venezuelan elections for years) and was also said to be fraudulent by the very company that ran the electoral systems. Your attempt to compare the two elections as if they were the same shows you are literally clueless about what is going on in the country, and therefore should stop talking.
And, by the way, I find it hilarious that you seem to think that US sanctions costing Venezuela a billion dollars over the last year is somehow significant. Chavez’s own planning minister has estimated that Maduro’s corrupt currency system has the cost the country over 300 BILLION dollars in recent years. In other words, you’d need about 300 years of Trump sanctions to equal the damage Maduro has done to Venezuela. But darnit, Joe wants this to be about Trump, so who cares about reality, right? Let’s keep defending a corrupt group of criminals as they destroy their country…
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-idUSKCN0VB26F
“Rick” (or whoever you are) I really gotta love anonymous people on the internet who make proclamations about “qualifications”.
By your own logic since you have no identity and therefore no way to claim “qualifications” (setting aside many other problems with that objection) you should “stop talking”. Anyway, the likes of OAS head Almagro were declaring the 2015 elections (which you praised) a sham before they even happened and you also missed the tiny detail that Venezuela’s democracy was being smeared by the western media (including Jen McCoy of the Carter Center as I mentioned in my piece) for well over a decade BEFORE 2015. Carter Center is not “independent” of the US establishment. It is part of it. Clue is in the name. Another detail you missed. The Constituent Assembly was boycotted by the opposition and therefore did not and could not have all the usual checks on it. A corporation (whose word you take as gospel) claimed the turnout number was inflated by million but did not offer evidence (that it was 7 million rather than 8 million). Since there was (by the opposition’s moronic choice) essentially only one side to the election, it makes the “fraudulent” claim problematic on that grounds alone even if you believe the corporation about the turnout figure. How would the government lose against itself when, thx to the opposition’s choice, that was the scenario it faced?
“Rick” you sound a like other Trump apologists I’ve encountered on line. if you are a US citizen, that makes it all the more reprehensible. Your use of Jorge Giordani’s claims about the exchange rate system (which he set up and championed!) is ridiculous. In the midst of major crisis (assume for sake of argument 100% government’s false) a foreign power deliberating making it worse by choking off funds (which obviously become more crucial in times of crisis ) is utterly depraved. It is not just an intellectual failure on your part that keeps you from acknowledging that.
Again, hilarious that you now claim the Carter Center is just another arm of imperialism, whereas Chavez and his supporters have long touted the support of the Carter Center of Venezuela’s elections. And, in fact, the center did certify major elections in recent years, despite your idiotic claims to the contrary. I wonder why they would do that even when the US government was so opposed to Chavez and Maduro? Hmmm, I guess things don’t have to make sense when you live in a cloud of conspiracy theories and nonsense.
https://www.cartercenter.org/news/publications/election_reports.html#venezuela
As for the audits, it’s again beyond idiotic to claim they only matter if the opposition candidates participate. Does indelible ink and other mechanism to prevent multiple voting require opposition participation? Does Joe Emersberger possess even the slightest capacity for intelligent thought?
The government never even published the final table by table tally of votes so that they could be checked against the actual electorate in each district, something that they had done in every major election for years. Wonder why? Maybe because they just made up the final count and didn’t want anyone checking their math? And of course there was no proof of fraud you moron because that’s what audits do… they detect fraud! Without them, there IS no physical evidence of fraud.
And I notice you can’t respond to Giordani other than calling him ridiculous. Good one smart guy! Must be hard to get every major detail wrong when you are trying to pretend to know what you are talking about.
And, by the way, utterly depraved is the guy that continually defends those responsible for $300 billion lost, while trying to pin the blame on the guy responsible for $1 billion lost. What a laughably stupid position to be in.
Hey “Rick”. You’ve gone into full blown time wasting mode and inventing things I didn’t say, and you’re not even good at snark. Carter Center ,like any source, has bias. People with common sense take account of it in assessing claims.
As for Giordani, he was the architect of the disastrous exchange rate system and also caused an avoidable recession in 2009/10 by being the key guy arguing against and delaying fiscal stimulus. He also set off the inflation-devaluation spiral just before Chavez died by cutting drastically back on the dollars auctioned to the private sector. So yeah a ridiculous person to moan about problems he played a key role in causing. None of that justifies Trump’s depravity or making light of his attacks on Venezuela’s economy while it is in deep crisis.
Funny how when Giordani was in charge Venezuela never had its current problems isn’t it? The exchange rate was never extremely distorted because he continually adjusted it. But yes, I suppose the estimations from the very architect of the system and who was in charge of it for more than a decade have no validity! Good point! His estimations have been backed up by other sources as well, but it’s obvious you aren’t interested in how much money Maduro has cost Venezuela, because that would go against your whole purpose of propping up a disastrous regime.
And I know it’s fun to claim any source you don’t like is either biased, or ridiculous, etc. But, you see, that’s not an argument. That’s simply a lame excuse from someone who has no argument. Of course, when people like the Carter Center said things idiots like you liked, then you touted it as proof that elections were clean, etc. Now that they say something you don’t like, well they are obviously biased and ridiculous, etc. It’s a fun game played by pathetic hacks with no capacity for honest analysis.
Hey “Rick” I didn’t say Trump’s sanctions have cost Venezuela only $1 billion. It has cost Venezuela BILLIONS this year alone since it has almost been a year since they were introduced. The easier past of the sanctions impact to quantify – the blocking of CITGO profits and dividends being sent back to Venezuela – is about 1 billion per year. You sound an awful lot like someone else I encountered online who engaged in similar apologetics (and bizarre boosting of Giordani). Was that also you “Rick” ?
How much do you think it costs Venezuela when Maduro “sells” the oil dollars to regime insiders for about one percent of its real value? Now calculate that over the last 4 years. Easily hundreds of billions of dollars.
The “billions” that Trump could have cost Venezuela is simply laughable in comparison. Literally a drop in a bucket. Your constant griping about it just shows you have a political agenda that has nothing to do with actually understanding or fixing Venezuela’s problems. Your agenda is to try to blame the US for the problems while, ironically, defending the very regime that has destroyed a country of 30 million people. I realize you’ve never spent more than a couple weeks there, have no family or friends there, and have no need to return there to see the disaster that has been wrought by a completely corrupt regime, so you can just sit in the north and cover for the very source of the problem with no concern for the families that are being separated and destroyed, the poor people who are dying outside of hospitals every day, the children dying of malnutrition as has been documented by places like Caritas. For you to talk about the depravity of others is beyond absurd. It’s disgusting.
Hey “Rick” Giordani kept his position for over a year after Chavez died. Had he left or been fired early in 2013 you’d have a really wobbly leg to stand on. But he wasn’t so you have no leg to stand on at all. The exchange rate system he set up blew up under his watch and was always a problem. Weisbrot suggest it be replaced in 2010! Can see why you keep anonymous when you are so fact resistant and sound an awful lot like another US citizen and Trump apologist I argued with recently
Yes, and when he very publicly resigned in 2014, he laid out the main reasons, which were that Maduro had refused to adopt his policy proposals from late-2012 on. See, this is why not knowing the details leads you to make idiotic are empirically false arguments over and over and over again. Thanks again for proving you have no clue what you are talking about.