No, I am not exaggerating. Not even slightly. See for yourself:
CARACAS, Venezuela, April 3 — Many Venezuelans shrug off President Hugo Chávez’s increasingly frequent calls to create a New Man through a Socialist revolution. But a decree severely limiting alcohol sales for much of Holy Week has certainly gotten their attention.
“Don’t Mess With My Hooch!” read the main headline in Sunday’s El Nuevo País, an opposition newspaper.
That was one of the more restrained comments heard on this city’s streets after the surprise decree, which Mr. Chávez’s government says is needed to diminish fatalities from drunken driving, went into effect on Friday.
…The measure prohibits the sale of alcohol altogether along highways and busy streets until after Easter. That may sound unobjectionable, but legions of street vendors here earn money by selling cold beer to drivers advancing at a snail’s pace on traffic-congested roadways.
(“A New Decree From Chávez: Less Elbow-Bending” by Simon Romero, April 4, 2007 — emphasis added)
Can you imagine anything published in the New York Times, or any remotely respectable corporate media outlet, presenting the need of street vendors in the U.S. to make money selling booze as an arguably legitimate reason to allow them to sell it to bored drivers caught in traffic? Can you imagine the outrage that would explode if such a thing were published? But of course, that would threaten American lives…this only threatens Venezuelan lives.
Romero and the Times would no doubt claim, if asked, that they are not legitimating anything, just reporting people’s reactions, but people “reacting” the same way as these vendors within the USA or an American ally would be treated by these same journalists as lowlifes. (Instead, the Times dubs Caracas residents “resourceful” for “finding ways around the restrictions.”) Hiding behind what is purported (often with little evidence) to be either popular or expert opinion is the #1 trick corporate media use to express their (institutional, not individual) opinions while claiming to be neutrally describing. They’ve been pulling that one in a consistently right-leaning manner on domestic issues since at least the early Reagan if not the late Carter era (on world affairs, they’ve been spinning right since Truman).
Actually, the Times piece does more than treat the vendors’ plaint as arguably legitimate. The whole way the article is framed consistently presents Chavez as the problem and those objecting to him as the good guys. So, they want to sell a little booze to drivers, a small minority of whom will eventually get plastered and kill themselves somewhere further down the road. “Consecomercio, a national group of business owners, complained that the measure could lower liquor sales by 60 percent during the important vacation period,” says the Times. Isn’t Chavez’s greatest failing that he doesn’t understand the Coolidgian principle that business is business?
