Alan Macleod - Bad News from Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting

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 Chavezs 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.

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.

Series Editor: James Curran

Routledge Focus on Communication and Society offers both established and early-career academics the flexibility to publish cutting-edge analysis on topical issues, research on new media or in-depth case studies within the broad field of media, communication and cultural studies. Its main concerns are whether the media empower or fail to empower popular forces in society; media organisations and public policy; and the political and social consequences of the media.

Bad News from Venezuela

Alan MacLeod

For a complete list of titles in this series, please see: www.routledge.com/series/SE0130

First published 2018

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2018 Alan MacLeod

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ISBN: 978-1-138-48923-3 (hbk)

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To my parents

The idea of fake news was popularized by Hillary Clintons campaign and much of the mainstream media, who claimed it was a key factor in the election of Donald Trump as President. However, it immediately rebounded upon them as Trump began to use it against them. It, and its close synonym post truth, have become key terms of our era, with the latter awarded 2016s word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. Fake news has come to be understood as false or deceptive, excessively biased, low-quality journalism. It did not start with Trump, however. Indeed, Herman and Chomsky (1988) have shown that the media has continually pushed false narratives in order to brainwash the population into agreeing with whatever elites wish for decades.

The coverage of Venezuela fits into this perfectly. In 2002, in the midst of a violent coup against him, the media claimed President Hugo Chavez had resigned after ordering a massacre (see ).

Why the media would have a stake in presenting Venezuela in such a way is a seriously interesting question. There are few other places that would elect a former hippie turned bus driver turned politician as President like Venezuela did with Nicolas Maduro in 2013. The worldwide interest in Venezuela is a relatively new phenomenon and can be directly traced back to the 1998 election of Chavez. Suddenly the country had a President who would call President George Bush a donkey and a devil.

Chavez was a highly controversial figure in the West, with the conservative Heritage Foundation claiming Venezuela had become a terrorist state (Walser, 2010) while others on the left presenting him and the country to be a shining inspiration for all those who believe a better world is possible.

Chavezs outbursts are well-known. What is less known is the radical change occurring in Venezuelan society. Millions of ordinary Venezuelans claim to have been empowered by the Chavez government (19982013), who used the profits from the oil industry to drastically reduce poverty, inequality, illiteracy and hunger and fostered a sense of inclusion, changing the constitution and creating a new, truly participatory, popular democratic model. Critics, on the other hand, have seen his and his successor, Nicolas Maduros moves as destroying a once great democratic nation by removing checks and balances on popular will, effectively turning the country into a dictatorship.

Chavez pioneered the ideology of 21st century socialism, which directly challenges both American dominance of Latin America and the ideology of neoliberalism, with its emphasis on the free-market, private ownership, competition, globalization and minimal government regulation or interference in the economy. His example helped inspire a wave of leftist governments to come to power across Latin America, like in Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador, who have challenged the elites in their own countries as well as the United States. It has also inspired a new wave of anti-neoliberal left parties across Europe, from PODEMOS in Spain, Syriza in Greece and the Labour Party in the UK, with its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, proposing his own 21st century socialism model for the country. As such, it represents perhaps the most important political challenge to the status quo anywhere in the world.

Neoliberalism is dying. In recent times we have seen the rise of huge political movements due to the negative impacts of neoliberal policy, both on the right (like those around Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen) and on the left (like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn). However, this wave started in Latin America, and in Venezuela more specifically, as the region was the Empires Workshop, where these theories, and their negative consequences were first seen (Grandin, 2006). Long before the Seattle World Trade Organization protests in 1999 Venezuela was electing a leader promising to end the neoliberal experiment. This gives understanding Venezuela a special importance, as the country is years ahead of us in the neoliberal cycle, so studying it can give us an understanding of where our own societies may go in the future.