Media Distortions about Venezuela Not Just a Problem in the U.S.

I sometimes complain about U.S. media coverage of Venezuela, which is mostly one-sided and sometimes terribly inaccurate. But compared to most of the Latin American media, U.S. reporting is practically “fair and balanced.” Check out this amazing front page banner headline of Peru’s biggest newspaper, El Comercio, on Sunday, March 28 (photo below). Translation: “94 percent of Peruvians reject the Chavista model”; sub-headline: “82 percent of those interviewed consider the government of Venezuela to be a dictatorship.”

Imagine the New York Times running a headline like this. How ridiculous would they look? People would wonder: is this news in the U.S.? What percentage of the U.S. population knows or cares what the “Chavista model” is, or has an informed opinion on whether Venezuela’s democratically-elected government is actually a “dictatorship?” Not to mention that you would be hard-pressed to find a political scientist who specializes in Latin America who would accept the label ‘dictatorship’ for Venezuela.

Now I know what you are thinking. Peru is a bit closer to Venezuela and is part of South America. Peruvians speak the same language as Venezuelans. So, maybe there is some kind of buzz about “the Chavista model” in Peru or some great concern among the masses about the state of constitutional democracy in Venezuela.

Well, no. Peruvians are no more likely than residents of the United States to know anything about “the Chavista model” or about Venezuela in general. This “journalism” looks pretty much as irrelevant and strange in Peru as it would be if the New York Times had run the same headlines. The only qualifier I would add is that, since the media and right-wing politicians scream about Venezuela as in this headline, they are able to create a certain McCarthyist fear among some sectors. Sometimes they use this fear – without necessarily any real connection — against political opponents (e.g. as they did successfully in defeating the current President Ollanta Humala’s first presidential bid in 2006). But that is not much different from what the Florida Cuban-American U.S. Representatives and their neocon allies are doing in the U.S. Congress right now.

The difference is that you wouldn’t see this bizarre headline in the most important newspaper in the U.S. And the comparison to the New York Times is not quite right: as important as the Times may be, it doesn’t quite compare to a newspaper that owns a breathtaking 78 percent of the print newspapers, in a country where only 28 percent of households have internet access. Who knows how much the polling data they are blasting across their front pages accurately reflects public opinion about Venezuela – but to the extent that it does, guess where the public has gotten its (not very deeply-held) opinions from?