Constructing an Echo Chamber: A Legacy of Media Bias Towards Chávez’s Venezuela

Over the past quarter-century, the United States has spared no effort to overthrow Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. The ceaseless regime-change attacks, besides their near-universal bipartisan backing, have likewise benefitted from uncritical support from the Western media.

In this article, researcher Richard Balzano takes stock of imperialist policies and the “echo chamber” formed by the political and media establishments to sustain anti-Venezuela multi-pronged warfare.

Venezuela’s Bolivarian government has been the target of economic warfare, subversion, failed coup attempts, persistent efforts at regime change, and fifth-generation warfare, championed by the United States as it scrambles to retain hegemony in the hemisphere. Such actions are illegal under various tenets of international law, and yet they go largely unchallenged by Western governments and they receive bipartisan support in Washington, where policymakers have and continue to openly call for and actively pursue regime change in Venezuela. This was and remains possible in part because of a legacy of complicit media hostility towards the Bolivarian government. Hugo Chávez’s direct challenge to neoliberalism and his brand of socialism “represent[ed] perhaps the most important political challenge to the status quo anywhere in the world.”¹ In response, Washington channeled millions of dollars to fuel opposition movements—acts of subversion—through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), USAID, and other NGOs, asphyxiated Venezuela with sanctions, and actively supported coup attempts on both Chávez and Maduro.² The fleeting change of government during the 2002 coup was not recognized by the international community as a legitimate transition of government at that time, but the several attempts to oust Maduro by force and through non-recognition have been ordained by most Western governments. This can be attributed to US economic leverage and the decades-long marketing campaign carried out by Washington and the complicit Western media directed against Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution.³ Diligent journalism on US-Venezuelan relations retains space on the media periphery, but its reach does not extend to the majority of Americans.

Washington engaged the Bolivarian Revolution in fourth-generation asymmetrical warfare in its efforts to shape the perspectives of not only the public at home and abroad, but those of US policymakers as well.⁴ Chávez enhanced participatory democracy in Venezuela, and both he and Nicolás Maduro retained office through the ballot box,⁵ but Washington and mainstream Western media outlets upheld the State Department’s narrative that Venezuela is an undemocratic nation led by human rights-abusing authoritarian caudillos and run aground by socialism.⁶ Persistent media narratives adhere to Washington’s liberal imperialist framework in which US-led destabilization efforts are framed as acts of humanitarianism the West can rally behind, which has fostered a climate in which regime change is publicly palatable.⁷ In this context, the Western media has been a collaborative arm of Washington’s asymmetrical war, sustaining hostility towards two Bolivarian presidents over three US administrations in what has now become a policy of permanent coup.

The W. Bush administration channeled millions of dollars to opposition groups in Venezuela through the NED, USAID, and the Office of Transition Initiatives to undermine the Chavez administration through its “democratic intervention” model.⁸ The budgets of these agencies increased exponentially during W’s tenure, and “funding began flowing into large and small organizations that all shared a common characteristic: aversion to President Chávez.”⁹ Through these subversive efforts, Washington empowered opposition leaders like Leopoldo Lopez and Carlos Fernandez, groomed future opposition leaders like Juan Guaido, courted former president Carlos Andres Perez and then-prospective presidential usurper Pedro Carmona. Anti-Bolivarian networks united “unlikely allies” in Accíon Democrática, COPEI, and Venezuela’s largest labor union Confederación de Trabajadores Venezolanos to assist in the 2002 coup attempt, to mount the 2002-2003 PDVSA oil strike, and to promote subsequent referendum elections under a barrage of Venezuelan anti-Chávez media fervor. Chávez nonetheless prevailed with 59% of the vote.¹⁰ The “ultra right-wing think tank” Center for Security Policy prepared a May 2005 report titled “What to Do About Venezuela” that recommended unilateral regime change alongside an “information warfare bonanza,” under the premise that “Chávez is a dictator who consorts with terrorists and threatens American interests, and therefore must be removed from power as soon as possible.”¹¹ American subversion in Venezuela makes Russiagate seem like child’s play, but no introspective comparison is permitted in the mainstream media due to deeply ingrained and perhaps obligatory adherence to American exceptionalism and innocence within the framework of US liberal imperialism. To the contrary, the slightest protest is hyperbolized in the Western media to represent the Bolivarian government’s alleged illegitimacy while disregarding the de facto evidence of tolerance for civil society.

Washington recalibrated its policies to challenge Chávez economically and diplomatically, constructing what Condoleeza Rice depicted as “a united international front against Venezuela.”¹² On the economic end, Washington “impos[ed] every possible unilateral sanction on the Venezuelan government that it could conjure up,” while imposing economic blockades and leveraging regional trade partners.¹³ On the diplomatic end, the W. Bush administration set a precedent for future administrations in its efforts to isolate Venezuela’s Bolivarian government from the international community through unsubstantiated accusations of human rights abuses, dictatorial undemocratic authoritarianism, corrupting elections, supporting terrorism, nuclear ambitions, and complicity with drug trafficking.¹⁴ It might be hard to locate a precise moment for a shift towards reciprocal antagonism between the US and Venezuela’s Bolivarian government, but by 2006 the relationships were well defined; Chávez delivered his notorious 2006 speech at the United Nations in which he challenged US interventionism and eluded to George W. Bush as “the devil,” suggesting in dark humor that the podium smelled like sulfur after Bush had presented,¹⁵ while the W. Bush administration formally redefined Venezuela as threat to national security when updating its National Security Strategy that same year, depicting Chávez as “a demagogue awash in oil money… undermining democracy and seeking to destabilize the region.”¹⁶

Western media culture has been historically conditioned to challenge the economics of the Bolivarian Revolution. Sociologist William Domhoff acknowledged that “the media cover events in such a way that America’s diplomatic aims are always honorable, [and] corporate involvement overseas is necessary and legitimate,”¹⁷ adding that within the complicated web of media ownership and consolidation, topics often, but not always, reflect corporate interests.¹⁸ The media generally depicts neoliberalism and elite consensus as “common sense,” with alternatives to the status quo and ideas of radical change presented as dangerous and lacking credibility, if not sophomoric.¹⁹ Chávez’s brand of anti-imperialist 21st Century Socialism certainly confronted the neoliberal model from atop the world’s largest oil reserves, stirring the nonaligned pot, and in this context MacLeod comments that “it is unsurprising to see highly negative coverage” of Chávez.²⁰

The mainstream US media has grown subservient to Washington’s foreign policy objectives. Domhoff argues that the US media is most influential in areas of foreign policy, “where most people have little information or interest, and are predisposed to agree with top leaders out of patriotism and a fear of whatever is strange or foreign.”²¹ At the surface, US media sourcing and foreign policy perspectives often originate from think tanks like the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute, each with its own bias and patronage, and from topical experts, the latter ranging from scholars and authors carefully selected to reinforce an agenda to Rendon-type panelists, from the synchronized rhetoric of Benador-prepped government officials to expatriate economists educated in the US and relieved of their positions by progressive anti-imperialist movements getting in the last word in the Western press.²² In the context of Venezuela, this formula plays out consistently, as the Bolivarian opposition is provided a monopoly on mainstream media exposure outside of Venezuela.²³

Chávez’s left-leaning policies and relationship with Cuba were used to rally Cold War phobias, and challenges to neoliberalism are conflated with challenges to capitalism on the whole.²⁴ Herman and Chomsky posited anticommunism as “a national religion and control mechanism,” and one of the five pillars of their media propaganda model,²⁵ while MacLeod adds that the media contains an anti-socialist filter that “has the effect of tarring journalists arguing against the conservative consensus as untrustworthy, anti-American or traitorous.”²⁶ As politicians fear being “soft” on voter-sensitive issues like crime or foreign policy, so too are journalists confined to similar dynamics of conformity when reporting, especially communism.²⁷ For media consumers, this red scare phobia links socialism to communism to authoritarian dictatorial behavior, with little evidence required to substantiate the accusation and its suggestive connotations in the public forum.²⁸

Washington has little evidence to substantiate its claims about Venezuela, so they rely on such tried and tested phobias. Gregory Shupak’s survey of the use of “regime” demonstrates that the word has been manipulated to imply “that the government to which the label is applied is undemocratic, even tyrannical,” and that “[c]alling a government a ‘regime’ suggests a lack of legitimacy, with the implication that its ousting… would serve humanitarian and democratic ends.”²⁹ Shupak notes that “regime” is reserved for states out of Washington’s favor.³⁰ Gabriel Hetland laments that “[t]he idea that Venezuela is authoritarian has been repeated ad nauseam for nearly the entire eighteen-year period of Chavista rule,”³¹ despite decades of electoral victories in what the Carter Center deemed “the best elections in the world.”³² That the opposition was able to initiate recall referendums, obstruct Chávez’s policies, and regularly engage in slander is evidence of the Bolivarian government’s tolerance for civil society, but there is no place for this angle in mainstream media narratives.

If communist authoritarian dictatorial rule was not enough to stoke public opinion,³³ Washington had other means of discrediting Chávez’s image: terrorism. Decades prior, Reagan’s Central American public relations teams’ pollings concluded that negative connotations associated with “communism” were less than those of “terrorism,”³⁴ and it stands to reason that neoconservatives reemerging under W. Bush may have recalled this lesson in public opinion and were quick to brand Chávez a terrorist. Political Scientist Peter Smith writes that “[a]fter 9/11 the war on terror superseded, and enveloped the war on drugs… [and i]nternational antidrug efforts derived their ultimate rationale from their contribution to the war on terror,” adding that, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, Venezuela was accused by Washington of trafficking drugs without evidence, “a wholly political maneuver, defined within the context of the war on terror.”³⁵ After courting unsubstantiated stories of terrorist training camps and nuclear ambitions, the W. Bush administration’s intelligence officials confronted with evidence simply argued that they could not prove the assertions were untrue.³⁶

Omission is a powerful media tool in crafting the authoritarian image of Venezuela. On the whole, there is a code of conduct for Western journalists and media outlets covering Latin America. Michael Parenti observes four rules governing the Western media’s “demonization of … forces not conducive to American state and corporate interests”:

An absence of any positive comments on democratic or economic reforms; …[s]ympathetic portrayal of the rich suffering oppression; ….silence on the negative effects of US policy and violence in the region; …[and] an image of economic adversity due to mismanagement of the economy that is inherent to socialism.”³⁷

Western media coverage of Venezuela hits the mark on all counts, as democratic mobilization and poverty reduction are ignored or misrepresented while the impacts of US sanctions are also ignored, or credited without explanation to socialism, economic incompetence, corruption, and authoritarianism.³⁸ Justin Delacour identifies an element of omission in which left-wing governments’ economic policies are deemed authoritarian, void of “meaningful discussion of the social and political ramifications of unfettered private power” and unwilling to consider whether “unfettered private economic power is compatible with democracy” at all.³⁹ Delacour’s analysis of media coverage of Venezuela observed about 95 percent of sampled articles were hostile towards Venezuela, concluding that “U.S. commentaries about Venezuela serve as little more than a campaign of indoctrination against a democratic political project that challenges U.S. political and economic domination of South America.”⁴⁰ Critical mainstream media coverage of Washington’s consistent regime change policy and efforts are obsolete.⁴¹

Misinformation is rampant, but redactions, if made at all, come months later, obscured in less frequented back pages.⁴² The NYT quietly redacted its published assertions that the Maduro government set fire to aid trucks at the Colombian border, one month after both the initial publication and evidence to the contrary surfaced. Redactions to articles critical of Chávez are in abundance. Francisco Toro, founding editor of Caracas Chronicles and former writer for the Guardian and Washington Post, produced several pieces of disinformation in February 2014, but Toro’s NYT op-ed was addressed same-day by CUNY professor Ian J. Seda-Irizarry. The Times’ redaction was nominal, and Toro reluctantly conceded his inaccuracies via a personal Twitter (now X) account that is no longer active.⁴³

Another less nefarious institutional media shortcoming lies in the dynamics of foreign correspondence in Venezuela, producing ideological alignment among journalists both right and left. MacLeod’s survey of foreign correspondents in Venezuela demonstrates that many came from socioeconomic backgrounds predisposed to liberal economics, some had limited functional knowledge of the Spanish language, and all resided in “highly polarized” upper-middle class neighborhoods in Caracas and associated within an ideological “bubble” that limited their perspectives.⁴⁴ While MacLeod cites both verbal and physical hostilities towards journalists covering Chavista events positively, Lee Salter comments: “If you ever go there, you cannot mention, in English, that you think the Bolivarian Revolution is anything other than some Nazi Blitzkrieg over Venezuela.”⁴⁵

The US media is not alone in its efforts to demonize the Bolivarian Revolution. Research by Lee Salter and David Weltman demonstrates that reporting by the BBC “falls short of its legal commitment to impartiality, truth and accuracy;” citing similar predispositions and isolative shortcomings as MacLeod’s research, Salter and Weltman observe implications of illegitimacy and demonizations as extreme as comparing Chávez to Hitler, and note less than 1 percent of surveyed articles between 1998 and 2008 mention any positive strides made by the Chávez government.⁴⁶ Ricardo Vaz’s assessment of the Guardian’s coverage takes a highly critical tone, questioning the credibility of polling data and unconditional favoritism towards the opposition.⁴⁷ On uniformity, MacLeod concludes that “virtually all the entire catalog of news and opinions on Venezuela in the international media is sufficiently similar as to seem plausible that it was written by the same person.”⁴⁸

The media’s reach in building consensus not only extends to citizens but policymakers themselves. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) within the Library of Congress provides policymakers with contextual reports of topics of importance, but these reports formed an echo chamber for State Department talking points and mainstream media depictions of the Bolivarian project. The CRS produced seventeen versions “Venezuela: Political Conditions and U.S. Policy” from 2003 to 2009, each growing in content and length over time. Analysis of said reports reveals that the report relied heavily on mainstream and right-wing media outlets over substantive reporting and authentic research, in turn legitimizing and propagating State Department talking points that vilify Chávez and the Bolivarian project to a specific audience of US policymakers.

The analysis surveyed the reports’ citations and identified the number of sources from “commonly accessible media” (CAM), which is defined as major Western media networks and online publications, media that would appear on the first page of search engine results, and syndicated stories from less common journalistic databases. The Economist was included in this category, but stories from The Economist’s Intelligence Unit were not. Think tanks, trade-specific publications like Oil and Gas Journal and Platts Oilgram News, and sources like Oxford Analytica and Latin News were not included. Venezuela Analysis, however, was surprisingly cited to supply contrasting viewpoints to Washington’s opinions, and was thus included in this category. The net was cast wide and was further broken down into conservative, neutral, and progressive media due to the near-uniform hostility throughout the media nexus towards Chávez and the Bolivarian project. A sub-category was added, however, for the Miami Herald, which MacLeod identifies as “extremely conservative”⁴⁹ and which harbors much contempt for Latin America’s left. Not surprisingly, the Herald is featured considerably more than any other sources in the reports.

Of the 1809 total citations throughout these reports, CAM outlets were cited 991 times. Of those 991 citations, the Miami Herald was cited 346 times, which equates to 35 percent of commonly accessible media citations and just over 19 percent of all citations. The Herald appeared in 25 percent of 2003 report’s total citations. In two versions of the 2005 report, CAM was cited 33 and 44 times within 59 and 71 overall citations, respectively. The lone 2009 version of the report and the 2003-2009 summary report, both issued in 2009, cited common media 112 and 122 times within 185 and 202 overall citations, respectively.

The reports are amended and altered but never rewritten in their entirety. The introductory “Background” section, however, does not change throughout the reports, and it draws from two articles in the ultra-conservative National Review: William S. Prillman’s “The Castro in Caracas: Venezuelan Strongman Hugo Chavez, in Fidel’s Image” (April 3, 2003) and Stephen Johnson’s “Venezuela Erupting” (March 5, 2004). This section consistently includes the following passage:

From the outset, critics have raised concerns about Chávez and his government. They fear that he is moving toward authoritarian rule and point to his domination of most government institutions. Some argue that Chávez has replaced the country’s multiparty democracy with a political system that revolves around himself, in essence a cult of personality; others point to Chávez’s open admiration of Fidel Castro and close relations with Cuba as a disturbing sign.⁵⁰

The critics, of course, are Prillman and Johnson of the National Review.

The CRS reports consistently defend the “democratization efforts” of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Information from NED’s website is referenced to counter Mark Weisbrot’s 2004 testimony before congress in which he argued that the US was undermining democracy in Venezuela.

Western media outlets are combatants in Washington’s fourth-generation asymmetrical war on the Bolivarian project. Despite four election victories and unwavering popular support among sectors of Venezuelan society, the media asserted that the Chávez government was an illegitimate authoritarian dictatorship and threat to global security. The “evidence” to support its claims lay in the web of disinformation spun by themselves. The amount of secondary reporting cited by the CRS exposes the circular nature of the echo chamber surrounding US policy towards Venezuela, and raises several alarming questions. Does CRS “research” aim to provide policymakers with information so as to generate informed policy, or do CRS reports provide policymakers with an official narrative, preferred talking points, and insights into the (dis)information being consumed by their constituents?

Congressional Research Service

“Venezuela: Political Conditions and U.S. Policy” Reports, 2003-2009

Congressional Research Service Reports (Chronological)

Notes

Richard Balzano is an Assistant Professor of History at Simmons University. He specializes in the US and Latin American History. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelan editorial staff.