U.S. press' glaring double standards on Latin American media

By Justin Delacour

Latin America News Review

September 25, 2008

As a number of media analysts have pointed out in recent years, the U.S. press often employs glaring double standards in its evaluations of Latin American media.

As I recently noted, the Venezuelan opposition to President Hugo Chavez controls most of the country's press. The opposition also controls the news channel Globovision, the cable channel RCTV, and most of the country's radio stations. In addition, the opposition can be heard on Venevision and Televen, the two private channels that have sought some semblance of balance in their coverage of Venezuelan politics. It is generally recognized that opposition media were instrumental in the defeat of the proposed constitutional reforms backed by Chavez last fall.

I suspect that one could not find a left opposition in any part of the world that commands as much media resources as Venezuela's center-right opposition.

But never mind all that. As long as Venezuela's opposition media have to compete with pro-government state media, opposition leaders will have us believe that big bad Hugo has stacked the political deck against them. And, of course, the Associated Press will just gobble up the opposition's storyline without thinking twice about it.

"This is a David-against-Goliath fight because the government has the exclusive use of state television, the entire network of state media," opposition politician Juan Carlos Caldera tells the Associated Press.

Now, for purposes of comparison, it might be worthwhile to look around other parts of Latin America to see just how obscenely selective the above quote is.

It is a well-known fact that, in Colombia, there is no such thing as an opposition television station. In sharp contrast with Venezuela, there are not any major Colombian dailies aligned with the country's leading opposition party. There is no doubt that, in terms of how few media resources it has at its disposal, Colombia's left-of-center Democratic Pole is in a vastly inferior position to that of the Venezuelan opposition.

So why is it that AP never offers us a quote to the effect that the Colombian ruling class has stacked the political deck against the Democratic Pole by generally favoring Uribe in its newspapers, television networks and radio stations?

Why doesn't AP ever make such an observation about Mexico, Peru or Costa Rica, three other countries whose elite-controlled media are known to attack and disparage their countries' left-of-center oppositions as well?

To summarize, here we have a situation in which one country's U.S.-backed opposition has vast media resources at its disposal and four other countries' left-of-center oppositions have comparatively few media resources to work with. Only in the neo-Orwellian echo chamber of the mainstream U.S. press does Venezuela's media-rich opposition become the one that's facing a stacked deck.