“Press freedom is dying in Venezuela” says the headline to this article by Jan D. Walter in Deutsche Welle (DW) – Germany’s international public broadcaster. Below the headline, the article is summed up for readers as follows, “As Venezuela’s economy collapses, its authoritarian government is clamping down on the media. The latest casualty of President Nicolas Maduro’s censorship is one of the country’s foremost newspapers, ‘El Universal.’”
DW shows part of El Universal’s front page for February 4, 2015, and below the snapshot tells readers “the front page of ‘El Universal’ has become a mouthpiece for government ministers.“ Had DW shown the entire front page, people who could read Spanish would notice that one of the headlines was “Merchants Reject Interventions.” That headline was for an article that conveyed only the views of the Caracas Chamber of Commerce about the government’s crackdown on practices allegedly responsible for shortages. The business group “warns that the crisis will deepen if rights are not respected,” according to El Universal’s report.
El Universal also ran an op-ed that day by Marco Negrón. He equated the “twenty first century socialism” championed by the government of Venezuela to the” twentieth century socialism” practiced in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. He wrote that Caracas residents have been converted into “sad penitents who stand in lines at supermarkets looking for what doesn’t exist.”
Another frequent op-ed contributor to El Universal is Nelson Bocaranda who just wrote that the “government’s reason to exist” is “to lie and break promises.” Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado also contributes regularly. Her op-ed on Jan. 31 predicts the “inevitable collapse of the regime” which has been “unmasked as a military dictatorship and mafia.” Another opposition supporter who is often published, though more moderate than the others I quoted, is Luis Vicente León. He is the president of the widely cited Datanalisis polling firm. In a piece published on Feb. 8, he wrote that the government “tries to implement a primitive socialism that is a proven failure all over the world.”
Did Jan D. Walter even attempt to read El Universal, or did he simply lie about its content? Walter also characterized Ultimas Noticias as being closed to anti-government views – another easily refuted falsehood as I explained here to a CBC journalist.
During the height of violent protests in 2014, Machado and other opposition leaders also appeared on Venezuela’s largest TV networks to accuse the government of “murder,” “torture” and “theft” and were unchallenged by the journalists who interviewed them. See videos here, here and here. Several more examples can be found here. Ignorant of these facts, or deliberately ignoring them, Walter claimed that all television stations have been transformed into “government mouthpieces” as of 2013. [1]
Walter quotes an anti-government source – the only kind he used – saying that in the good old days, prior to an ownership change in July 2014, El Universal journalists were required to “focus on the facts instead of parroting announcements.”
Really? In 2002, when the head of Venezuela’s largest business federation was installed as dictator after a coup briefly ousted former President Hugo Chavez, El Universal’s massive front page headline declared “UN PASO ADELANTE!” (One Step Forward!). El Universal’s pro-coup stance was the dominant one in the private media in 2002. That background is completely missing from the DW article.
Today, anti-government voices can’t dominate as they did in 2002, but they are nowhere close to being shut out of the media. That was shown in data for Venezuelan TV coverage that the Carter Center gathered during the 2013 presidential election campaign. This analysis by Mark Weisbrot considers some important omissions in the Carter Center data which may have led the opposition’s media presence to be underestimated. Nevertheless, the Carter Center’s data – taken completely at face value – totally refutes what has been so frequently alleged about Venezuela’s media for several years.
And speaking of “parroting announcements” the DW article reports as fact opposition claims that Nicolas Maduro was behind El Universal’s ownership change in 2014. If made by Venezuelan government officials, these types of claims are generally referred to as “accusations” or even “conspiracy theory” by corporate journalists, regardless of the evidence.
Like countless inaccurate (or deliberately dishonest) articles about Venezuela that appear in the international media, DW cites Reporters without Borders and Human Rights Watch (HRW) to supports claims that “journalists have taken to censoring themselves out of fear.”
Reporters without Borders applauded two years of very brutal dictatorship in Haiti that followed a U.S.-perpetrated coup in 2004 as a big step forward for press freedom. HRW very recently declared the United States to be “the most powerful proponent of human rights.” HRW can’t see a problem with the revolving door it has with U.S. government officials, and it is happy to have Javier Solana, a man who should be prosecuted for war crimes on its board for many years.
I am sometimes tempted (only tempted and only sometimes I should stress) to cut corporate journalists a tiny bit of slack for distorting Venezuela’s economic situation. Reporters may lack the confidence to challenge what big credit rating agencies and many establishment economists say. But even in that case, the global meltdown of 2008/2009, which exposed most “experts” in economics as incompetent or worse, should have taught reporters to cite them much more skeptically and to diversify their sources. Regarding Venezuela’s media, there is absolutely no excuse for spreading lies. Any reporter who is honest, hardworking and courageous enough to break from the media herd should be able to report accurately. Anybody can read newspapers and watch TV.
Recently, a former editor of a major German newspaper said he planted stories written for him by the CIA. I’m skeptical of the prevalence of that kind of corruption. I’ve discussed in the past why I believe even honest corporate journalists will spread lies. I don’t think Jan D. Walter’s article was written by the CIA, but it might as well have been.
****
[1] Walter singled out Globovision, in particular, as having been the “last to fall” and become a “government mouthpiece.” Opposition legislator Julio Borges, in this lengthy interview on Globovision a few weeks ago, urges the government to “tell the truth” about drug trafficking allegations that have made against the president of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello. Details about those allegations and Cabello’s response are here. Other lengthy Globovision interviews with various opposition people (far from an exhaustive sampling) in recent weeks are here, here,here and here.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate