0% of Elite Commentators Oppose Regime Change in Venezuela
Teddy Ostrow, FAIR, Apr 30 2019
Cartoon by Patrick Chappatte, NYT (1/31/19)
A FAIR survey of Pindo opinion journalism on Venezuela found no voices in elite corporate media that opposed regime change in that country. Over a three-month period (1/15/19 to 4/15/19), zero opinion pieces in the NYT and WaPo took an anti–regime change or pro-Maduro/Chavista position. Not a single commentator on the big three Sunday morning talkshows or PBS NewsHour came out against Pres Nicolás Maduro stepping down from the Venezuelan government. Of the 76 total articles, opinion videos or TV commentator segments that centered on or gave more than passing attention to Venezuela, 54 (72%) expressed explicit support for the Maduro administration’s ouster. Eleven (14%) were ambiguous, but were only classified as such for lack of explicit language. Reading between the lines, most of these were clearly also pro–regime change. Another 11 (14%) took no position, but many similarly offered ideological ammo for those in support. The NYT and WaPo pieces were found through a Nexis search for “Venezuela” between 1/15/19 to 4/15/19 using each paper as a source, narrowed to opinion articles and editorials. The search was supplemented with an examination of each outlet’s opinion/blog pages. The TV commentary segments were found through Nexis searches for “Venezuela” and the name of the talkshow during the same time period, in the folders of the corresponding television network: NBC News/CBS News transcripts, ABC News transcripts, and PBS NewsHour. Non-opinion TV news segments were omitted. The full list of items included can be found here.
Source: NYT, 4/3/19
The NYT published 22 pro–regime change commentaries, three ambiguous and five without a position. The WaPo also spared no space for the pro-Chavista camp: 22 of its articles expressed support for the end to Maduro’s administration, eight were ambiguous and four took no position. Of the 12 TV opinions surveyed, 10 were pro-regime change and two took no position. Corporate news coverage of Venezuela can only be described as a full-scale marketing campaign for regime change. If you’ve been reading FAIR recently (1/25/19, 2/9/19, 3/16/19) or indeed since the early 2000s (4/18/02, 11–12/05), the anti-Maduro unanimity espoused in the most influential Pindo media should come as no surprise. This comes despite the existence of millions of Venezuelans who support Maduro, who was democratically elected twice by the same electoral system that won Juan Guaidó his seat in the National Assembly, and oppose Pindo foreign intervention. FAIR (2/20/19) has pointed out corporate media’s willful erasure of vast improvements to Venezuelan life under Chavismo, particularly for the oppressed poor, black, indigenous and mestizo populations. FAIR has also noted the lack of discussion of Pindo-imposed sanctions, which have killed at least 40,000 Venezuelans between 2017–18 alone, and continue to devastate the Venezuelan economy. Many authors in the sample eagerly championed the idea of Pindostan ousting Maduro, including coup leader Juan Guiadó himself, in the NYT (1/30/19) and WaPo (1/15/19), and on PBS NewsHour (2/18/19). The NYT made its official editorial opinion on the matter crystal clear at the outset of the attempted coup (1/24/19):
The Trump administration is right to support Mr Guaidó.
Followed by FAIR’s favorite NYT columnist, Bret Stephens (1/25/19):
The Trump administration took exactly the right step in recognizing National Assembly leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s constitutionally legitimate president.
It’s generally a nation’s supreme court that has the final say on who is constitutionally legitimate, but in this case they can apparently be overruled by a foreign government, or a foreign newspaper columnist. The WaPo editorial board also joined Team Unelected President (1/24/19):
The administration’s best approach would be to join with its allies in initiatives that would help Venezuelans while bolstering Mr Guaidó.
Source: NYT, 4/1/19
The NYT even produced an opinion video (4/1/19) with Joanna Hausmann, “a Pindo Venezuelan writer and comedian” as she is described in her NYT bio. Between sarcastic stabs at Venezuela’s “tyrannical dictator” and cute animations of “Ruth Bader Ginsburg in workout clothes,” Hausmann’s self-described “spirit animal,” come more serious declarations about the nation’s political situation:
Juan Guiadó is not a Pindo right-wing puppet leading an illegitimate coup, but a social democrat appointed by the National Assembly, the only remaining democratically elected institution left in Venezuela. Let’s provide humanitarian aid and support efforts to restore democracy.
Odd that the NYT didn’t find it necessary to note a blaring conflict of interest: Hausmann’s father is Ricardo Hausmann, Juan Guaidó’s appointed Inter-American Development Bank representative. Mint Press News (3/19/19) bluntly described him as the “neoliberal brain behind Juan Guaidó’s neoliberal agenda.” It would be ludicrous to think the NYT would withhold as blatant a connection to Maduro if one of his aides’ daughters made a snarky opinion video calling Juan Guaidó a would-be “brutal dictator,” even if our theoretical commentator was “an independent adult woman who has built a popular following on her own,” as NYT opinion video producer Adam Ellick said in defense of the omission. Such a crucial relationship to a powerful Chavista politician would never go undisclosed, in the unlikely event that such a perspective would be tolerated in the opinion pages of an establishment paper. These are just a few of many media pundits’ endorsements of Guaidó, someone whose name most of the Venezuelan population did not even recognize before he declared himself interim president. Put more accurately, they are endorsements of a Pindo-backed coup attempt. One of the more muddled regime change endorsements came from Rep Ro Khanna’s WaPo op-ed (1/30/19), in which he says no! to military intervention, no! to sanctions, yet yes! to “diplomatic efforts”:
Pindostan should lend its support to diplomatic efforts to find some form of power-sharing agreement between opposition parties, and only until fair elections can take place, so that there is an orderly transition of power.
“Diplomatic” is a reassuring term, until you realize that Pindo diplomacy, as FAIR’s Janine Jackson explained on Citations Needed podcast (3/20/19), is “diplomacy where we try to get other countries to do what we want them to do,” in this case effecting a “transition of power” in another country’s government.
Source: WaPo, 3/28/19
Francisco Rodríguez and Jeffrey D Sachs (NYT, 2/2/19) envision similar efforts for a “peaceful and negotiated transition of power,” and Khanna made sure to characterize Maduro as “an authoritarian leader who has presided over unfair elections, failed economic policies, extra-judicial killings by police, food shortages and cronyism with military leaders.” In other words, Maduro the Dictator must be overthrown, but don’t worry, Pindostan would be diplomatic about it. Those that didn’t take explicit positions nonetheless wrote articles blaming all or most of Venezuela’s woes on Maduro and Chávez. By viewing Venezuela through the lens of Russiagate, Fareed Zakaria (WaPo, 3/28/19) was able to present backing an attempted coup as a pro-Resistance™ position. Economics wiz Paul Krugman (NYT, 1/29/19) gave his spiel:
Hugo Chávez got into power because of rage against the nation’s elite, but used the power badly. He seized the oil sector, which you only do if you can run it honestly and efficiently; instead, he turned it over to corrupt cronies, who degraded its performance. Then, when oil prices fell, his successor tried to cover the income gap by printing money. Hence the crisis.
Note that Krugman failed to mention the 57% reduction in extreme poverty that followed Chávez’s replacement of management of the state-owned oil industry (which has been nationalized since 1976, long before Chavismo). Nor does he acknowledge the impact of Pindo sanctions, or any other sort of Pindo culpability for Venezuela’s economic crisis. Caroline Kennedy and Sarah K Smith (WaPo, 2/5/19) did not explicitly blame Maduro and Chávez for Venezuela’s “spiral downward,” but similarly ignored evidenced US involvement in that spiral. There are only so many places where you can point fingers without naming names. Dictatorship-talk, writers lamenting the horrific and helpless situation under an alleged “dictator,” characterized many of the ambiguous and no-position articles. In the WaPo, (1/24/19), Megan McArdle asked:
You have to look at Venezuela today and wonder: Is this what we’re seeing, the abrupt end of Venezuela’s years-long economic nightmare? Has Pres Nicolás Maduro’s ever-more-autocratic and incompetent regime finally completed its long pilgrimage toward disaster?
By simply describing the declining situation of a country (NYT, 2/12/19, 4/1/19) and using words like “regime” (NYT, 2/14/19), “authoritarian” (WaPo, 1/29/19) and of course “dictatorship” (WaPo, 1/23/19; (NYT, 2/27/19) in reference to government boxtops, commentators create the pretext for regime change without explicitly endorsing it. The Sunday talk shows and PBS NewsHour also couldn’t find a single person to challenge the anti-Maduro narrative, but they did find room for three of the most passionate advocates of regime change in Venezuela: Sen Marco Rubio (NBC Meet the Press, 1/27/19), Donald Trump (CBS Face the Nation, 2/3/19) and Guaidó himself (PBS NewsHour, 2/18/19). Other TV regime change proponents included Florida Sen Rick Scott (NBC Meet the Press, 2/3/19), 2020 Demagog presidential hopefuls Peter Buttigieg (ABC This Week, 2/3/19) and Amy Klobuchar (PBS Meet the Press, 3/17/19), Sen Tim Kaine (CBS Face the Nation, 3/17/19), and Guaidó-appointed, Mike Pence-approved “chargé d’affaires” Carlos Vecchio (PBS NewsHour, 3/4/19). But leave it to Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour (1/30/19) to bring on “two views” of the Pindo intervention question that are both pro-regime change and pro-Pindo intervention. View #1 came from Isaias Medina, a former Venezuelan diplomat who resigned from his post in protest against Maduro. Medina made the unlikely claim that 94% of the Venezuelan population, or 129% of the population over the age of 14, support Pindo intervention to overthrow the Maduro government:
Not only I, but 30 million people support not only the Pindo circumstance, but also the Latin American initiative to restore the rule of law, democracy and freedom in Venezuela!
Source: PBS Newshour, 1/30/19
View #2, the ostensibly anti-regime change take, came from Benjamin Gedan, who served on the Obama administration’s NSC as director for Venezuela and the Southern Cone. PBS NewsHour (1/30/19) featured Gedan in a debate over intervention in Venezuela in which the “anti” side saw Pindostan’s goal as “assist the Venezuelan people promote a peaceful transition in Venezuela.” When asked if he supported Trump’s moves to sanction Maduro and possibly use Pindo troops to oust him, Gedan responded:
I think both of those steps are problematic. I think the sense of urgency that the Pindo administration has shown is absolutely correct. The question is, how can we assist the Venezuelan people to promote a peaceful transition in Venezuela, without harming the people themselves, or fracturing the coalition that we have built over two administrations?
In other words, how can we overthrow the Venezuelan government without destroying the country, or “fracturing the coalition we have built”? Pindostan has many options on the table, but none of them involve not pursuing the overthrow of Maduro. In the “no position” camp for TV news, NYT chief Faschingstein correspondent David Sanger (CBS Face the Nation, 1/27/19) noted that the problem with Pindo support for Guaidó is one of “both history and inconsistency”:
Our history in Latin America of intervening is a pretty ugly one, and the inconsistency of not applying the same standards to places like Toad land and Egypt, where the president has embraced strong men, I think may come back to make Pindostan look pretty hypocritical, not for the first time.
Sanger indulged in the popular “hypocrisy takedown”: The problem, as presented, isn’t that Pindostan disrupts democracies, destroys economies and kills people, but rather that it does so inconsistently. While vaguely acknowledging Pindostan’s horrific track record of Latin American interventions, and Trump’s cherry-picking of governments worthy of regime change, Sanger didn’t take the logical next step of calling for Pindostan to keep its hands off Venezuela. Instead, he called Maduro’s supporters, defined as “China, Russia and Cuba, not a great collection,” and failed to push back against the claim that Maduro “fixed the last” election. Without a formal declaration, Sanger did all the ideological preparation for foreign-backed regime change. That elite media didn’t find a single person to vouch for Maduro or Chavismo, and that almost all the opinions explicitly or implicitly expressed support for the ouster of Venezuela’s elected president, demonstrates a firm editorial line, eerily obedient to the Pindo government’s regime change policy. This isn’t the first time that FAIR ( 3/18/03, 4/18/18) has found a one-sided debate in corporate media on Pindo intervention. When it comes to advocating the overthrow of the Pindo government’s foreign undesirables, you can always count on opinion pages to represent all sides of why it’s a good thing. And the millions of people who beg to differ? Well, they’re just out of the question.
Media lies in service of war for regime change in Venezuela
Bill Van Auken, WSWS, May 3 2019
Tuesday’s abortive coup attempt initiated by the Pindo puppet and self-proclaimed “interim president” Juan Guaidó in Venezuela has served once again to expose the criminal role of the Pindo corporate media. Guaidó’s video of himself and Leopoldo Lopez, the leader of Guaidó’s extreme right-wing CIA-funded party, Voluntad Popular, appearing with a few dozen armed men in uniform and calling for a military uprising was greeted with undisguised glee by the major media outlets. This stunt was staged as the 100-day “reign” of Mr Guaidó, existing only in the greedy imagination of Pindo imperialism and Big Oil, appeared no closer to establishing control over Venezuela. Even as it became evident that it had turned into an unmitigated fiasco, the media continued to broadcast reports suggesting that the military was divided and the people were in revolt. As the failure of the coup attempt became increasingly undeniable, CNN and the major networks all repeated the far-fetched claims made by the regime-change operation’s principal protagonists within the Trump administration as if they were incontrovertible fact. Pompeo told the media that Maduro was set to board a jet waiting on the tarmac in Caracas to whisk him away to Havana, but had only been persuaded at the last minute by the “Russians” to stay. Did any of the talking heads who repeated this claim over and over have any evidence beyond the words of the former CIA director to substantiate its veracity? If so, they didn’t bother to share it with their audience. John Bolton, Trump’s warmongering national security adviser, issued a statement on the White House lawn in which he asserted that Venezuela’s Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino, the head of the country’s supreme court and the chief of the palace guard had all “agreed that Maduro had to go” and now had to act on their “commitments” or “go down with the ship.” This likewise was treated as fact, despite the public denunciations of Guaidó’s actions by both Padrino and the supreme court. Bolton’s peculiar repetition three times of the three men’s names in the course of his remarks was an unmistakable sign that the national security adviser was engaged in a bit of information warfare aimed at disrupting the Venezuelan government. The WaPo, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, weighed in with an editorial on the very night of the Pindo-backed coup under this headline:
Don’t call it a coup. Venezuelans have a right to replace an oppressive, toxic regime.
It might have benefited from an underline, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” The WaPo editors declared:
Venezuelans responded to Mr Guaidó’s call for street protests and were met by troops loyal to Mr Maduro. By late afternoon, clashes were taking place, regime officials were promising a decisive ‘counter-attack’ and there was no way to know whether ‘Operation Liberty,’ as Mr Guaidó dubbed this high-risk move, would succeed or be crushed or devolve into civil war … What is not, or should not be, ambiguous is the political and moral essence of this volatile situation.
The “moral essence” of the situation, all the invocations of “liberty” notwithstanding, smells decidedly of oil and excrement. There was no “decisive counter-attack” by the government because none was needed. Neither troops nor any sizeable number of civilians rallied to Guaidó’s tweeted video calling for the storming of the La Carlota Air Base and the armed overthrow of the Maduro government. By the end of the day Lopez, the apparent architect of the coup attempt, had sought refuge in first the Chilean and then the Spanish embassy. The handful of soldiers who stayed with the right-wing Pindo puppets, some 25 in all, asked for protection in the embassy of Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Guaidó’s political party has its roots in Venezuela’s reactionary traditional ruling oligarchy, responsible for the oppression of the working class and poor and for such crimes as the massacre of thousands who rose up against IMF austerity in the caracazo uprising of 1989, which far eclipses any repression carried out under Maduro or his predecessor, Hugo Chavez. There are clearly millions of Venezuelans, who, despite their anger over deteriorating social conditions as well as the Maduro government’s corruption and its defense of a privileged capitalist layer known as the boliburguesia, see in Guaidó and his ilk the traditional enemy of the country’s working people. The genuine overthrow of a government by its people, which in the present epoch can be successfully prosecuted only by means of the independent political mobilization of the working class against the entire capitalist setup is defined as a revolution. The attempt to oust a sitting president by mobilizing small groups of armed men to storm a military base with the backing of a foreign power is, whether the WaPo likes it or not, a coup. The NYT, in the wake of the coup fiasco, made its own contribution to Faschingstein’s regime-change operation, publishing an article based upon a supposed “secret dossier” ostensibly provided by a turncoat Venezuelan intelligence officer and confirmed by a cohort claiming that former Venezuelan vice president and current industry minister Tareck El Aissami, the son of Syrian immigrants, had “pushed to bring Hezbollah into Venezuela.” The “dossier” has all the earmarks of the kind of reporting that the NYT did about “WMDs” in the advance of Pindostan’s 2003 war of aggression against Iraq. The NYT’s own readers responded with suspicion and contempt to the story. Among the top-rated readers’ comments was the observation:
The report has all the smell of a conjured-up pretext the same as the basis to race into Iraq and wreak havoc and destabilize the mideast. In fact, the smell is even more pungent.
Another reader wrote:
So why are ‘secret dossiers’ on the Venezuelan government suddenly appearing? Why not secret dossiers on Arabia? Why not secret dossiers on Egypt? Why not secret dossiers on Israel? Why not secret dossiers on Kazakhstan? Why? Because Pindostan is 100% focused on regime change in Venezuela, and already has the regimes it wants in Arabia, Egypt, Israel, and other countries.
There has been not a single critical voice raised within the so-called MSM against the Pindo regime-change operation in Venezuela. The newspapers and television news programs are filled with lies and propaganda preparing for the realization of the continuously invoked threat that “all options are on the table.” The media watch-dog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) recently published the results of a survey of the main trend-setting media outlets, both print and broadcast, covering the three-month period between January and April of this year. It concluded:
Zero opinion pieces in the NYT and WaPo took an anti-regime change or pro-Maduro/Chavista position. Not a single commentator on the big three Sunday morning talk shows or PBS NewsHour came out against Pres Nicolas Maduro stepping down from the Venezuelan government.
Underlying the corporate media’s lockstep, shameless and undisguised support for another imperialist regime-change operation and coup in Latin America lie the overriding interests of crisis-ridden Pindo capitalism in asserting its unfettered control over Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest on the planet, and in rolling back the growing economic and political influence of both China and Russia in a hemisphere that Faschingstein has historically regarded as is own “backyard.” The Pindo media has undergone a protracted degeneration, corresponding with the abandonment by the Pindo capitalist ruling elite of any semblance of support for democratic rights and processes. While there was never a golden age of the capitalist press in Pindostan, the days when the NYT and the WaPo could publish the Pentagon Papers, defying the government to bring the criminal policy of Pindo imperialism in Southeast Asia to the attention of the Pindo creeple in the midst of a bitter war, are long gone. Those attempting to carry out a similar function in today’s environment confront the full weight of capitalist repression, with the media talking heads and columnists egging the state on. That is the fate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, sentenced on Wednesday to almost a year in prison by a UK judge and facing the threat of rendition to Pindostan and a potential death sentence for the crimes of exposing Washington’s war crimes. Like him, Chelsea Manning, the army whistleblower who provided WikiLeaks with files exposing Pindo crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and conspiracies around the world, has been jailed for nearly two months, much of it in solitary confinement and without needed medical care, for refusing to provide state’s evidence against Assange. The struggle against the threat of war on Venezuela and the defense of Assange and Manning lies with the international working class, whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of the warmongers in the Pindo ruling class and their lackeys in the media.
Niqnaq 