As the Venezuelan Presidential
elections near (October 7th), the obsession of the US mainstream media with bringing
down the administration of President Hugo Chavez resurfaces. The standard story
line is generally the same: Venezuela
is allegedly led by a dictator who is carrying out repression against his
opponents. What is so striking about these allegations is not only their
inaccuracy but how noticeably they contrast with the same mainstream US media’s views of developments in our
neighbor, Mexico.
In our silence we let myths and distortions pass for truth.
In each of
the elections President Chavez has won, since his first victory, there have
been no credible charges of fraud. Wish as the US political elite might, Chavez
has held onto significant popular support, illustrated not only in the
elections but in on-going polls. Despite this, the mainstream US media
insists on painting a picture of Chavez and his administration that can, at
best, be described as caricature. That Chavez and his party - the Venezuelan
United Socialist Party - wish to transform Venezuela is no secret. They
believe in what they call “21st Century Socialism,” which amounts to a shift of
Venezuela (and Latin America) away from the domination of corporate
capital and foreign control, and the creation of a socio-economic system based
on popular power and social cooperation. It is not that Chavez is an autocrat,
in other words, that bothers the US
political elite but that he and his party wish to move the country along a very
different path of development than is approved by the political elite in the USA.
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Contrast
this caricature with the manner in which Mexico is presented. On the one
hand, we witness the near civil war like conditions between elements of the
Mexican government and the narco-terrorist gangs, and
then the wars among the narco-terrorists. At the same
time, the recent Mexican presidential election was filled with allegations of
electoral fraud, resulting in the supposed victory of the candidate of the
former ruling party (the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI). In the
aftermath of this election, thousands of Mexicans demonstrated against what
they perceived as electoral fraud and a silent coup by one of the two parties
of the Mexican political elite. Despite the scale and militancy of these
demonstrations, little coverage was made available in US mainstream
media circles.
Chavez and his party
wish to move the country along a very different path of development
than is approved by the political elite in the USA.
This bias
in coverage is neither accidental nor recent. The demonization of other
opponents of the US, such as
Cuba, has a long history and
is regularly ignored in discussions of US foreign policy. As the
mainstream US
media further consolidates, there are fewer opportunities for alternative views
to be expressed, and fewer opportunities for broader coverage to be made
available. As a result, we have to rely on independent media for a more
accurate portrayal of the situation.
At the same time, it is worth
contesting the portrayal of reality by the mainstream media. Progressive-minded
people need to take a cue from the political Right and ‘bombard’ the media with
our own concerns. When we see bias, such as in the case of the demonization of Venezuela, compared with the hands-off of Mexico, we need
to call them on it. In our silence we let myths and distortions pass for truth.
And when those myths and distortions are accepted as truth by masses of people,
they can translate into support for governmental policies that not only hurt
the lives and sovereignty of other countries, but also take us, in the USA, further
down the road toward authoritarianism.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Bill
Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior
Scholar with the Institute for Policy
Studies, the immediate past
president of TransAfricaForum,
and the author of “They’re
Bankrupting Us” - And Twenty Other Myths about Unions. He is also the co-author of Solidarity
Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path
toward Social Justice, which examines the
crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher.
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