Venezuela Protests: ‘Dear International Media: Step it Up!’
Dear International Editor:
Listen and understand. The game changed in Venezuela last night. What had been a slow-motion unravelling that had stretched out over many years went kinetic all of a sudden.
What we have this morning is no longer the Venezuela story you thought you understood.
In the blog Caracas Chronicles Francisco Toro reacts to the lack of media coverage about the escalating violence and the events on February 19.
Francisco shows screen captures of news sites like the BBC, The New York Times, CNN, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, and Fox News on the morning of February 20 –all missing articles on the violent events from the day before.
He concludes:
The level of disengagement on display is deeply shocking.
Venezuela’s domestic media blackout is joined by a parallel international blackout, one born not of censorship but of disinterest and inertia. It’s hard to express the sense of helplessness you get looking through these pages and finding nothing. Venezuela burns; nobody cares.
Let me put this clearly. Y’all need to step it up. The time to discard what you thought you knew about the way things work in Venezuela is now.
You can check out our special coverage page about the protests in Venezuela here.
4 comments
Oh this made me laugh very hard. I can’t open a first-world English news website these days without encountering an article about the heroic Venezulan student protesters. It hasn’t quite been as inescapable as the Ukrainian protests, but almost. Now in all seriousness, when Venezuela was run by rich people, where was the outcry in the international press about poverty in Venezuela, or about left-wing activists being tortured and disappeared by a series of right-wing governments? There was none. But now, that you have a government that has taken an explicit interest in reducing Venezulan poverty (and has had a tremendous amount of success in doing so), now we get constant outcry in the international press about how “the people” are rising up. This website is just shamefully parroting the point of view of a bunch of third-world rich kids with access to technology. Unsurprisingly, the rich kids feel that their privilege has been threatened by the socialist government (that is the job of a socialist government after all), and they want their privilege back. As a website that is interested in creating global conversation, you really should be more interested in thinking about which classes of people in poor countries get to have access to technology (and thus get to represent the country to the international community).
Well said. Exactly. They want their privilege back. Democracy? Who cares?
The Caracas Chronicles blog has been shown to be disseminating false information. It likely to be funded by the US destabilisation fund NED. See this article by the campaign for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting for details: http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/02/22/news-from-venezuela-but-where-is-it-coming-from/