NPR Shreds Ethics Handbook to Normalize Regime Change in Venezuela
AUGUST 5, 2019
The Reagan administration in
1982 coerced National Public Radio (NPR) to cover more favorably the
US terrorist war then being waged against Nicaragua.
As Greg Grandin writes, Otto Reich, head
of the administration’s Orwellian propaganda outfit known as the Office of
Public Diplomacy, informed the public network that his office had contracted “a
special consultant service [to listen] to all NPR programs” on
Central America. Dependent on state funding, NPR promptly buckled
under pressure, reassigning reporters viewed as “too easy on the Sandinistas,”
and hiring conservative pundit Linda Chavez to provide “balance.”
NPR (5/30/19)
says Juan Guaidó is “recognized by dozens of countries as Venezuela’s rightful
head of state”—without mentioning that he was unknown
to most Venezuelans when he proclaimed himself president.
Today, NPR needs no
state coercion to toe Washington’s regime change line on Venezuela.
NPR published an
exclusive interview on
May 30 with Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, in which the
self-proclaimed “interim president” was described as “a fugitive in his own
country” confronting “authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro.”
The article went on to state
that Venezuela “is suffering from hyperinflation, power outages, and chronic
shortages of food, medicine and fuel.” Strangely absent is any reference
to illegal US
sanctions, which have played an indisputable
role in severely exacerbating the country’s crisis to the detriment of
ordinary Venezuelans.
Additionally, the exclusion of
Chavista voices is likewise endemic to NPR’s coverage of Venezuela, in
gross violation of the outlet’s own ethics handbook.
An abused adjective
When it comes to covering
Venezuela’s elected Maduro government, it appears that NPR’s favorite
adjective is “authoritarian.”
The public news network has
referred to President Nicolás Maduro and his administration as “authoritarian”
and/or a “regime” no
less than 26 times since December, with no explanation why the
Venezuelan government merits an editorialized moniker that ideologically justifies US
intervention.
Moreover, when the fact that
Maduro was reelected last
year is mentioned, it is generally
accompanied by a vague reference to “fraud.”
Usually no effort is made to
elaborate on the fraud allegations—which the opposition never presented
substantive public evidence to support—and when additional context is provided,
it generally amounts to a reference to NPR’s mendacious 2018 election
reporting.
At the time, NPR’s
Phillip Reeves (5/20/18)
denied the legitimacy of the vote by claiming, “Nicolás Maduro controls most of
the media, the electoral authorities.” He ignored the fact that most Venezuelan
media is private
and pro-opposition, while the National Electoral Council is headed by the
same officials who oversaw the opposition’s 2015 landslide parliamentary
victory.
NPR‘s headlined claim of
“fraud” (5/21/18)
rests heavily on the unsubstantiated assertions of “many independent
observers.” The 6 million votes received by President Nicolás Maduro are in
line with the support found for the government in independent polling.
Similarly, NPR’s Scott
Neuman (5/21/18)
wrote, “The opposition’s most popular leaders…were barred from running,” in
reference to Leopoldo
López and Henrique Capriles. The claim that these were the most
popular potential opposition candidates is false: Datanalisis, the
international corporate media’s most widely cited pollster, at the time had
opposition presidential candidate Henri Falcon pollingsignificantly
above Capriles and López, at around 38%, in May 2018. By comparison, a Pew
Research study conducted
later in the year amid accelerating hyperinflationfound
that 33% of Venezuelans “trust their government,” roughly equivalent to the 31%
of the electorate that voted for
Maduro on May 20, 2018.
NPR suggests that López
and Capriles were barred for extralegal political reasons, neglecting to
mention that López was convicted of
inciting violence during the 2014 protests aimed at ousting the government,
while Capriles was previously indicted for allowing
opposition supporters to lay siege to the Cuban
Embassy in 2002, and was later barred from office by
the comptroller general over alleged corruption, for
which he is also being investigated by the opposition.
Moreover, NPR and
other mainstream outlets do not regularly refer to Brazil’s 2018 presidential
election as “fraud-marred,”
despite the country’s most popular politician, Lula da Silva, having been
jailed and banned from running in a baseless, politically motivated court case,
as Glenn Greenwald has exposed.
Lula did not participate in violent foreign-backed coup attempts, unlike López
and Capriles, both of whom were active in the
2002 coup against
Chavez.
This myth of electoral fraud
embraced by NPR was “made in USA,” when the Trump administration
threw its weight behind an opposition boycott, preemptively refusing
to recognize the vote and threatening to
sanction the independent opposition candidate. But no amount of US interference
invalidates an election in the view of Western journalists, as the
classic example of
Nicaragua’s 1990 election of Violeta Chamorro illustrates. In 2018—as in
Venezuela’s 2013 presidential election, which was recognized by every
government in the world except
the Obama administration—it would seem that a vote is only “free and fair”
when Washington’s candidate is elected.
This systematic bias
ridicules NPR’s professed commitment to
“stick to facts and to language that is clear, compelling and neutral,” while
the omissions and blatant factual distortions compromise its accuracy and completeness.
Lying by omission: US
sanctions
NPR’s ethics handbook states:
Errors of omission and partial
truths can inflict great damage on our credibility, and stories delivered
without the context to fully understand them are incomplete.
While NPR has made
scattered but repeated reference to US economic sanctions—predominately in the
wake of the Trump administration’s January 28 oil embargo—nowhere does NPR bring
up the fact that the unilateral measures are illegal under both US and
international law, while only in a few cases does the public encounter a passing
acknowledgement of the negative humanitarian toll. In the vast
majority of stories, NPR rarely dedicates more than one line to US
economic sanctions, which are routinely presented as “aimed squarely at [the]
Venezuelan government” (8/25/17),
ignoring the repercussions for ordinary Venezuelans. In no case does NPR present
the public with perspectives opposing US sanctions as a matter of principle.
An NPR report (3/8/19)
concludes with Sen. Marco Rubio mocking the idea that the US could be behind
electrical grid failures in Venezuela—though the US openly boasts of conducting
cyber warfare against electrical systems in official enemy nations (New York
Times, 6/15/19).
In a report on the nationwide
March blackouts, NPR’s Sasha Ingber (3/8/19) manages
to avoid naming sanctions as one of the key factors behind the outages,
relegating them to an insignificant tertiary element “likely to increase the
country’s economic plight,” but in no way responsible for Venezuela’s
dramatically worsening crisis since Trump imposed direct economic sanctions in
August 2017. In fact, according to economist Francisco
Rodríguez of Torino Capital, sanctions not only prevented Venezuela
from paying foreign companies for vital maintenance work on its electrical
grid, but also barred it from importing sufficient diesel fuel needed to power
thermoelectric generators.
The pattern is repeated
in NPR’s coverage of Venezuela’s economic crisis through the lens of
out-migration (6/21/19, 6/7/19),
school truancy (6/29/19)
or alleged “intimidation” of private charities (6/11/19).
Here sanctions—which are set to cause Venezuela’s economy to contract by 37%
this year—are either completely ignored, or their devastating social impact is
presented as a dubious “claim” by Caracas officials.
Like virtually every other
mainstream international outlet (FAIR.org, 6/26/19), NPR has
yet to cite—let alone actually report on—a recent study by acclaimed
economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs, which found US sanctions on
Venezuela to constitute a form of “collective punishment” responsible for as
many as 40,000 deaths through 2018. This omission is not surprising, given
that NPR had previously joined major corporate outlets in
systematically censoring the impact of Trump’s August 2017 financial sanctions,
which cost the country at least $6 billion in lost
oil revenue over the subsequent twelve months.
Exhibit A of this erasure is
an article headlined “Venezuela’s Health System Ready to Collapse Amid Economic
Crisis” (NPR, 2/1/19),
in which Samantha Raphelson treats sanctions as a conspiracy theory on which
“Maduro blames the country’s growing crisis,” despite the fact that US financial
blacklisting, as well as plummeting revenue due to sanctions, hampered
Caracas’ ability to import vital medicine and medical equipment. At this
point, NPR can easily cite the US government itself as a source for
the claim that Washington is exacerbating the Venezuelan crisis, with the State
Department publishing (and subsequently hiding) a fact sheet that boasted that
“key outcomes” of US efforts included the freezing of “roughly $3.2 billion of
Venezuela’s overseas” assets, and a 36% reduction in Venezuelan oil production
in February/March 2019 (Venezuelanalysis, 5/6/19).
Silencing Chavista and
critical voices
In answer to the question,
“How can reporting of current news also take account of decades of historical
context surrounding US intervention in Latin America? NPR public
editor Juliette Rocheleau (4/9/19)
concludes: “It depends.”
In an assessment of NPR’s
Venezuela coverage (4/9/19),
the network’s public editor, Juliette Rocheleau, recognizes an “imbalance” in
which “opposition voices have outnumbered those of Maduro supporters in NPR‘s
reporting.” The slant is fairly overwhelming, since Rocheleau can only name
four occasions that NPR interviewed government supporters.
The public editor
justifies NPR’s pro-opposition “imbalance’” on the grounds of journalists’
safety, quoting senior international editor Will Dobson:
“We want to plunge the depths
of the pro-Maduro supporters.” But Dobson said NPR‘s responsibility to
keep its journalists and sources safe is the top priority, and reporting safely
from Venezuela is extremely difficult: Venezuela
ranks 143 out of 180 countries in press freedom, with journalists
risking violence at
the hands of the state and some of its supporters.
This is a self-serving canard.
Various independent outlets such as Venezuelanalysis (where
I’m an editor), the Real News and Grayzone—all with
far fewer resources than NPR—have frequently interviewed Chavistas from
various political walks of life. The notion that Chavista “violence” keeps
Western reporters at bay is rather fantastical, given that it’s opposition
demonstrations, not pro-government ones, that have been the site of mob lynchings and attacks on journalists,
including those from pro-opposition private
outlets. Even if we take at face value NPR’s safety concerns, this
should not stop the network from interviewing experts opposed to US regime
change in Venezuela, such as Noam Chomsky, Mark Weisbrot, Jeffrey Sachs, Alfred
De Zayas and Miguel Tinker Salas, whose voices are conspicuously absent,
despite making regular appearances in independent progressive media.
Perhaps a more realistic
explanation for NPR’s admitted “imbalance” is professional
class bias. It seems that Western journalists bear an instinctual aversion
to poor black and brown people organizing to defy the US Empire. Their natural
sympathies appear to lie with lighter-skinned (preferably English-speaking)
professionals or members of the elite who make them feel more comfortable.
Despite their “progressive” reputation, NPR journalists are little
different than their mainstream corporate counterparts when it comes to
repeating Washington and the opposition’s anti-Chavista propaganda, in flagrant
breach of their own ethics.
You can send a message
to NPR‘s public editor here (or
via Twitter: @NPRpubliceditor).
Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free
to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.
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