A hall of shame for Venezuelan elections coverage

If Hugo Chavez emerged triumphant in October's Venezuelan presidential elections, the Western media which carried out a vicious campaign against him only suffered a further loss of credibility.

Keane Bhatt

HUGO Chavez, as a number of us expected, won the Venezuelan presidential election in yet another landslide on 7 October: 55.1% to his opponent Henrique Capriles's 44.2%.

To understand why Chavez's electoral victory would be apparent beforehand, consider that from 1980 to 1998, Venezuela's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) declined by 14%, whereas since 2004, after the Chavez administration gained control over the nation's oil revenues, the country's GDP growth per person has averaged 2.5% each year.

At the same time, income inequality was reduced to the lowest in Latin America, and a combination of widely shared growth and government programmes cut poverty in half and reduced absolute poverty by 70% - and that's before accounting for vastly expanded access to health, education, and housing.

However, the establishment media broadly anticipated that the 7 October election would be a repudiation of the Chavez administration's policies. Consider the Guardian headline, 'Hugo Chavez: A Strongman's Last Stand', for example. To be sure, if Chavez were to win, the press explained, it could be chalked up to a climate of fear and repression or voter suppression. Even with a tight victory, his now-anaemic support would still augur the beginning of the end to a failed, 14-year experiment.

Inconveniently for this narrative, over˙19 million people in a country of 29 million were registered to vote, and any supposed intimidation did not prevent a historic turnout of 81%. With 96% of the votes counted, the country's National Electoral Council showed that Chavez had received 1.5 million more votes than Capriles. And the electoral system's credentials are sterling - Jimmy Carter, who received a Nobel Peace Prize for his democracy-promotion work with the Carter Center after his presidency, commended the record of Venezuela's voting process a month before the elections:

'Although some people have criticised the result - which is Hugo Chavez having won - there's no doubt in our mind, having monitored very closely the election process, that he won fairly and squarely. As a matter of fact, of the 92 elections that we've monitored, I would say that the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world. They have a very wonderful voting system.'

This, apparently, wasn't as newsworthy as the inane question of whether Venezuela is a dictatorship. A LexisNexis search for all English-language news containing the terms 'Jimmy Carter' and 'Venezuela' between 11 September, when Carter made those comments, and 7 October, returned 45 results. In that same time period, 78 news items mentioning both the terms 'Hugo Chavez' and 'dictator' appeared. (To be fair, some of the 78 pieces refuted the notion that Chavez is a dictator, but even these articles are a reflection of the pervasiveness of the nonsensical topic.)

This contrast in the media's priorities is symptomatic of the overwhelmingly disgraceful portrayal of Venezuela's elections. The hall of shame that follows is a sampling of some of the most typical distortions, gratuitous slurs, and incorrect predictions that readers have been exposed to over the past few weeks:

 In a 6 October editorial, the Washington Post falsely attributed the question 'If Hugo Chavez is an autocrat, how could he be in danger of losing the Venezuelan presidency in an election on Sunday?' to economist Mark Weisbrot, 'one of Mr Chavez's dwindling band of American supporters'. In fact, Weisbrot energetically argued, using statistical analysis of polling data, that there was virtually no chance that Chavez was in danger of losing. The editorial went on to compare Chavez to Putin and Ahmadinejad, incorrectly claiming that Chavez controls 'most television channels'. In actuality, the BBC reported that 'some 70% of Venezuela's radio and TV stations are in private hands,' while 'just under 5% are state-owned.'

The Post misleadingly asserted that 'many voters, too, are intimidated by high-tech polling machines that read their fingerprints; polls show that they suspect their votes will not be secret.' But whether these fears are well-founded was left unanswered. The editorial board ignored the Carter Center's report on the technical features of Venezuela's voting system, which concluded that 'this concern has no basis. The software of the voting machines guarantees the secrecy of the vote.'

Finally, the Post ended its editorial by conjuring up a menacing hypothetical scenario: 'Venezuela's neighbours, and the Obama administration, should be ready to react if [Chavez] attempts to remain in power by force.' Nevermind that during the elections Chavez repeatedly said, 'We will recognise the results, whatever they are,' and previously demonstrated this when, after losing a referendum vote in 2007, he publicly stated, 'I congratulate my adversaries for this victory.'

 Jon Lee Anderson, writing for The New Yorker's News Desk, erroneously declared that 'Venezuela leads Latin America in homicides.' That distinction actually ‘goes to Honduras, which leads the world in per capita homicides. But a mention of this would have been off-message, as Honduras's illegitimate post-coup regime receives $50 million a year in arms and training from the United States for its repressive security forces. And unlike in Venezuela, being an opposition activist in Honduras carries a significant chance of being disappeared or killed.

Anderson continues by predicting that, irrespective of the election's outcome, 'this will probably represent the final eclipse of the long, heady reality show that his leadership has become.' Capriles 'or someone else like him', says Anderson, can 'carry on with the task of making Venezuela a fairer and safer society'. His piece (originally titled 'The End of Chavez?', but quietly revised to 'Chavez the Survivor') concludes with a quote from a journalist who ponders the prospect of a defeat for Chavez, while also using the term 'autocrat' in reference to him - somehow, a ruler who by definition has absolute power can also be defeated in a competitive election. This is not the first time that Anderson has obscured the differences between democratically elected leaders and actual autocrats: he once lumped Haiti's ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide with the country's Duvalier dictators - in Anderson's rendering, they were all 'despots and cheats'.

 The New York Times, a day before the election, ran an op-ed with the instantly dated headline, 'How Hugo Chavez Became Irrelevant'. Its author, Francisco Toro, offers a confused attempt to separate Latin America's left into 'radical revolutionary regimes' - Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba - and a 'more moderate set of leaders': Brazil, Uruguay, and Guatemala. In Toro's account, apparently, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina, a School of the Americas-trained special forces officer once in charge of counterinsurgency operations under military dictator Efraˇn Rˇos Montt, is now one of the left-leaning Latin American leaders who do not turn 'their backs on democratic institutions'.

Toro also contends, without providing evidence, that 'behind closed doors', Brazilians 'sneer' at Chavez. While it is impossible to refute such a claim, it is worth noting the effusiveness with which, at least publicly, former Brazilian president Lula da Silva endorsed Chavez's re-election bid in July. In a video statement, da Silva said: 'Chavez, count on me. Your victory will be ours. and thanks, comrade, for everything you have done for Latin America.'

 The Times also ran a 5 October news article by William Neuman reporting that a young law student intended to vote for Chavez for fear that voting on a secret ballot for her preferred candidate, Capriles, would expose her to professional retribution. As the Center for Economic and Policy Research found, however, a quick search on Twitter showed that the law student had no qualms about publicly uploading a photo of herself kissing a poster of Capriles. (Neuman might be remembered as the author of a Times piece˙on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange which bizarrely claimed that Assange 'had refused to flush the toilet during his entire stay' at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The sentence was later erased on the Times' website with no explanation.)

 And as a final example (even though there are countless more articles to criticise), one of the most glaring acts of journalistic misconduct within the mainstream press appeared in US News & World Report. Other prominent media outlets have taken some small steps to veil their denunciations against Chavez. US News & World Report was much more brazen: it published a news, not opinion, article by Seth Cline on 1 October that put Venezuela's 'fair and free elections' in quotation marks but offered no scare-quotes in its very first sentence, which introduces the reader to 'President Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan dictator'.                             

Keane Bhatt is an activist in Washington, DC. He has worked in the United States and Latin America on a variety of campaigns related to community development and social justice. His analyses and opinions have appeared in a range of outlets, including NPR, The Nation, The St. Petersburg Times and CNN En Espa¤ol. He is the author of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) blog 'Manufacturing Contempt' (nacla.org/manufacturing-contempt), which critically analyses the US press and its portrayal of the hemisphere, and on which this article was first posted.

*Third World Resurgence No. 264/265, August/September 2012, pp 62-63