FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
The April 30 coup by presidential poseur Juan Guaidó was a fraud, staged at the instigation of Washington in hopes that the Venezuelan people and rank-and-file troops would fall for the trick and think an actual coup was underway.
An Atlantic report on Trump’s Venezuela policy passed up a rich opportunity to expose the humanitarian pretexts for economic intervention, and instead exhibited the worst tendencies of corporate media coverage of US policy in Latin America.
In their efforts to refrain from using the negative—but accurate—term “coup” to describe events they support, the media have sometimes had to go to bizarre, roundabout and garbled lengths to dance around it.
A FAIR survey of US opinion journalism on Venezuela found no voices in elite corporate media that opposed regime change in that country. Over a three-month period, zero opinion pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post took an anti–regime change or pro-Maduro/Chavista position.
The “dictator” label is also a powerful cue, used by media to prime the reader to see a particular country or leader a certain way.
A New York Times “exposé” of Cuban doctors’ supposed interference in Venezuelan elections was riddled with inaccuracies, omissions and misrepresentations.
It is virtually an iron law of journalism that descriptions of US government-friendly groups will be designed to signal readers that they deserve support.
The outlets that vigorously pushed the false story will not extend any new skepticism toward the official sources that sold it to them. Nor will they offer any new respect—or platform—to the people who questioned the claim…not weeks later, but in real time.
“If you have oil, and you’re not doing what Washington wants, you’re bound to run into some kind of trouble.”
the history of coverage of Venezuela is illustrative of what it looks like when elite media work strenuously to maintain the storyline on an “official enemy.”
“Elliott Abrams supported Latin American democracy pretty much like Jeffrey Dahmer supported all the people that he brought to his apartment.”
The political right is uniting with establishment Democrats in denouncing presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders for his supposedly pro-dictatorship stance on Venezuela. And the media are piling on.
The last thing you’ll get from US media’s assessment of the prospect of peace on the Korean peninsula? What Koreans think.
The US administration and corporate media have resorted to the most extreme lying about Latin America that has been seen since the Reagan administration wars of the 1980s.
Venezuela’s years of social gains have been almost entirely written out of media coverage of the effort to overthrow the Venezuelan government by the US, Canada and their right-wing partners in Venezuela and the region.
Please contact MSNBC to urge the network to balance its pro-coup coverage of Venezuela.
It’s not unusual for Western media to ignore facts they have themselves reported when a major “propaganda blitz” by Washington is underway against a government.
Western media outlets uniformly echoed the Trump administration’s simplistic, pre-packaged claim that the Venezuelan government was heartlessly withholding foreign aid.
Alarmed by the growing threat of progressive policies at home, the establishment has found a one-word weapon to deploy against the rising tide: Venezuela.
The US media chorus supporting a US overthrow of the Venezuelan government has for years pointed to the country’s economic crisis as a justification for regime change, while whitewashing the ways in which the US has strangled the Venezuelan economy.
