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Bad News from Venezuela: Twenty years of fake news and misreporting (Routledge Focus on Communication and Society) by [Alan Macleod]

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Alan Macleod

Bad News from Venezuela: Twenty years of fake news and misreporting (Routledge Focus on Communication and Society) 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

by Alan Macleod (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Since the election of President Hugo Chavez in 1998, Venezuela has become an important news item. Western coverage is shaped by the cultural milieu of its journalists, with news written from New York or London by non-specialists or by those staying inside wealthy guarded enclaves in an intensely segregated Caracas. Journalists mainly work with English-speaking elites and have little contact with the poor majority. Therefore, they reproduce ideas largely attuned to a Western, neoliberal understanding of Venezuela.

Through extensive analysis of media coverage from Chavez’s election to the present day, as well as detailed interviews with journalists and academics covering the country, Bad News from Venezuela highlights the factors contributing to reportage in Venezuela and why those factors exist in the first place. From this examination of a single Latin American country, the book furthers the discussion of contemporary media in the West, and how, with the rise of ‘fake news’, their operations have a significant impact on the wider representation of global affairs.

Bad News from Venezuela is comprehensive and enlightening for undergraduate students and research academics in media and Latin American studies.

ISBN-13

978-1138489233
Edition

1st
Publisher

Routledge
Publication date

17 April 2018
Language

English
File size

3038 KB
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Product description

About the Author

Alan MacLeod is a member of the Glasgow Media Group and completed his thesis in sociology in 2017. He specialized in media theory and analysis.

--This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07CGX5WCG
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Routledge; 1st edition (17 April 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3038 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Up to 4 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 168 pages

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Gold Experience

Read this book if you want to learn how the world works.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 February 2019

Verified Purchase

This quote from the book sums up best why this book is so important and beneficial to this society: "Although this book is ostensibly about Venezuela, it actually tells us more about the structure of Western media and how it functions." That is why you should read this book. Learn about the Venezuelan situation, and apply that knowledge to other geopolitical hotspots.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

William Podmore

Superb study of media bias against independent countries

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 August 2018

In this splendid book, Alan MacLeod, a member of the famous Glasgow University Media Group, studies Western newspaper coverage of Venezuela since the election of President Hugo Chavez in 1998. MacLeod analyses seven of the most influential newspapers in the USA and Britain – The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Times.

He sums up, “All seven newspapers from both countries in this study consistently took editorial positions strongly against the Venezuelan government. None sided with the majority of Venezuelans.” The supposedly ‘left-wing’ papers, The Guardian and The Independent, were no better than the others.

The US Carter Center, the European Parliament and the EU Election Observation Mission all praised Venezuela’s voting system. Yet the seven newspapers that MacLeod studied all published far more articles claiming that its elections were not clean. The Guardian published as many articles claiming this as did The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Times added together.

The Carter Center spent much time scrutinising the Chavez government’s alleged transgressions but did not mention the well-documented US government funding, training and support of opposition groups. Before the 2002 coup that briefly ousted President Chavez, the USA’s National Endowment for Democracy and the United States Agency for International Development quadrupled in 2001 their funding of the groups that carried out the coup, and they quadrupled it again in 2002.

Coup leaders like Leopoldo Lopez often visited Washington to meet top Bush administration officials. The US Ambassador was at the coup headquarters on 11 April, the day of the coup. Yet a US government spokesperson said, “The United States did not participate in, inspire, encourage, foment, wink at, nod at, close its eyes to, or in any way leave the impression that it would support a coup of any kind in Venezuela. The record is crystal clear.” The record was indeed crystal clear. The US government has been posting false news for decades.

The Venezuelan state’s share of the TV market was 5.4 per cent in late 2012. The main privately-owned TV channels - Venevisión, Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), Globovisión and CMT – all backed the opposition. In the April 2013 election, the opposition leader Henrique Capriles got three times more coverage on the four private terrestrial TV channels than the Chavista candidate Nicolas Maduro. Three of them gave Capriles’ campaign adverts more time on every day of the campaign than the law allowed.

Just 5 per cent of Venezuela’s radio stations were in state hands. Four privately-owned newspapers had 86 per cent of the circulation. Nine of the ten major national newspapers, including El Universal, El Nacional, Tal Cual, El Impulso, El Nuevo País, and El Mundo, backed the opposition. Yet the seven British and US newspapers unanimously alleged that the government coerced or cowed Venezuela’s media. The seven newspapers almost always stated or implied that state media dominated the country’s communications.

From 2012 to 2014 the USA increased its funding of anti-government activists by 80 per cent. Nonetheless, when the 2014 street demonstrations (guarimbas) started, MacLeod notes that in the US and UK media, “It was presented as a matter of course that the events were protests being repressed by the government, thus mirroring the line taken by the US and UK governments. When mentioned at all, the idea that this constituted a coup attempt was often stated as an accusation in the mouth of a Venezuelan official …”

MacLeod comments that in a Guardian article of 15 February, “It is presented as a matter of fact that the events constitute protests about crime and economic issues whereas the idea that this was an attempt to overthrow President Maduro is presented merely as an assertion that exists only in the mind of supporters of a government the article itself characterizes as repressive and incompetent.”

MacLeod goes on, “The majority of the articles did not consider the idea that these were anything else except legitimate protests. Therefore, most readers were not even exposed to the idea that there was any debate over the issue, let alone that the balance of evidence pointed to a different conclusion to those given in what they were reading.”

Again, “All major actors in Venezuelan society agreed the Guarimbas’ goal was to get rid of Maduro. Yet the media treated this idea as marginal, at best, and usually as risible or non-existent. This was despite interviewing protestors who told them that that was exactly what they were trying to do, as can be seen in the following quotes. “We are urging the international community to assist us in ridding Venezuela of this government.” And “What we were not able to topple in Cuba, we may be able to topple here.” Guarimba leader Leopoldo Lopez, a leader of the 2002 coup, said the protests would go on “until Maduro goes.”

The Guardian claimed, “Venezuela’s crackdown on anti-government street protests is a threat to democracy across Latin America.” Surely the attempted coup against the elected government was a far greater threat to democracy?

US President Obama added to the pressure on Venezuela by declaring a ‘national emergency’ on 9 March 2015, because of the ‘extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela’.

What was the nature of this threat? The UN reported that the number of Venezuelan children enrolled in secondary school increased from under a half in 1999 to nearly three quarters in 2012. In 2005 UNESCO declared Venezuela illiteracy free.

The UN Development Programme found a steep increase in the number of calories available for the people between the late 1990s and 2010. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization gave the country a special commendation for its exemplary work in reducing malnourishment.

By 2012, poverty had been cut by half and extreme poverty by three quarters. The poor’s income share rose from 14.3 per cent in 1999 to 19.8 per cent in 2013 (all these figures from UN sources). Only the richest 10 per cent were worse off. Poverty fell more sharply in 2012 than in any other Latin American or Caribbean country. By 2012, the country was the second most equal in Latin America.

The World Bank said that GDP per head had risen from $5150 in 1999 to $6434 in 2012. Unemployment had fallen from 15 per cent in 1999 to 8.1 per cent in 2012 (UN figures). Chavez brought inflation under control. The highest level under Chavez was about the same as the lowest under the two previous, neoliberal presidents.

Yet The Times’ leading article ‘The Perils of Populism’ claimed on 7 March 2013, “literacy levels have changed little, income inequality has worsened and the poverty rate remains above 30 per cent.”

MacLeod’s fine study proves Michael Parenti’s claim in his brilliant book, Inverting reality: the politics of news media (St Martin’s Press 1993). Parenti asserted that four rules govern Western media coverage of countries that do not obey capitalism’s dictates: 1. Don’t mention their achievements, 2. Portray the rich as suffering unjust oppression and therefore resisting legitimately and of course peacefully, 3. Don’t mention the inevitable US attempts to overthrow the elected government by all means including violence, and 4. Picture the country as in economic meltdown and political chaos, the inevitable result of their disobedience.

MacLeod concludes that the seven UK and US newspapers “presented minority opinion on highly contentious issues as incontrovertible facts, often not even acknowledging or even denying the majority opinion’s existence, despite empirical data overwhelmingly supporting the majority’s view.”

10 people found this helpful