new since…

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?

It really doesn’t get any better when you read the whole article, a typical example of the undisguised bias and hostility that is the norm, indeed pretty much the exceptionless rule, in corporate media coverage of Chavez. Both the article and the caption under the photo at the top refer to Chavez as a teetotaler, as if preventing drunk driving wasn’t reason enough for the measure without some personal moralistic quirk of the leader’s. On the other hand, the reference to a scandal involving “claims that government officials illegally siphoned off millions of dollars from state infrastructure deals with Iran” is certainly shocking — fancy a country where millions of dollars could have been siphoned off from deals with Iran! Who could even live in such a country? Oh wait — Iran-Contra — scratch that.

This article seems to be part of a new twist in Corpomedia’s anti-Chavez vendetta: since they realize they can’t get rid of him, instead of being alarmist about him they’re now trying to make him seem like a left-whacked fool who’s relatively harmless as long as he isn’t allowed to get his way on anything that really matters. The use of the passive voice to attribute, without evidence, the Times‘ own dismissals of Chavez’s views to Venezuelans is deftly paired with the slur adjective “wacky” in the following editorial statement — uh, news statement: “Mr. Chávez’s sometimes wacky pronouncements on politics and the direction of what he describes as a ‘Bolivarian revolution’ are generally taken in stride.” Taken in stride by whom?

But given that he was just reelected with, what, only 63% of the vote, it sounds like a lot of people do more than take them in stride. More than likely, a hell of a lot of people actually agree with Chavez’s pronouncements. Just not the sort of people the Times would talk to.

But wait a minute…didn’t I claim, on these very pages, that our own President Reagan took unpopular positions on many issues? And wasn’t he reelected with 59% of the vote? Yes…but bear in mind that Democrats handily maintained control of the House of Representatives in that election, preventing Reagan from resuming, except within the limits of executive fiat, the “Reagan Revolution” that had been cut short by the 1982 midterm elections, when conservatives lost their governing majority. In fact, the one consistent pattern in 1984 is that practically all incumbents who ran at every level were reelected, just as the incumbent president was overwhelmingly reelected. Self-satisfied apathy was at an all-time peak in this great Suburb of ours. Republicans gained almost nothing in Congress that year; Reagan ran extremely well but was wearing no coattails.

Chavez’s supporters, on the other hand, totally dominate Venezuela’s legislature. Of course, that’s because the opposition pulled out of the legislative elections, but then, they only did that because they were going to lose so badly anyway. So no, the fact that Reagan was able to be overwhelmingly reelected without much support for his positions on issues doesn’t mean the same thing could apply to Chavez. Chavez’s electoral support, while not much broader than Reagan’s, cuts much deeper.

Now, don’t get me wrong — that doesn’t mean that 63% of the Venezuelan population agrees with everything he does. No one person can ever represent a majority’s views; in any social order, genuine public opinion is, thankfully, just too complicated, segmented, and divergent for that. A majority is formed by stitching together a patchwork of minorities, not because a majority of people have even a rough consensus. Whoever tells you otherwise is no friend of democracy — more like a fascist in democrat’s clothing. And in the last election, in particular, Chavez was popular enough to pad his margin with some “soft” support. But the evidence nonetheless suggests that Chavez has far more popular backing for his so-called Bolivarian revolution than there ever was for the much more modest set of policy shifts the corporate media glorified as the Reagan Revolution.

Big-time reporters knew better than anyone else how prone Reagan was to bizarre misstatements. However, I don’t recall anyone in Corpomedia uncorking the following:

“Mr. Reagan’s sometimes wacky pronouncements on politics and the direction of what he describes as a ‘conservative revolution’ are generally taken in stride.”

No, apt though it is, somehow I don’t think that line would have passed corporate editorial muster.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 12:25 am and is filed under Media Inc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.