Venezuela march

["Jose G. Perez" <jgperez@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well, I spent parts of Thursday, on an off, with an eye on a monitor tuned
to the Venezuelan Globovision feed, and it was fun. It was also a reminder
that the problem with bourgeois freedom of the press isn't just that it only
works for those who own a press. Bourgeois freedom of the press is also the
freedom to lie.

>From very early on, the Globovision network carried on a tireless agitation.
One opposition governor must have been on the air for a couple of hours,
from near sunrise, exhorting people to not allow Chavista road blocks and
mobs from keeping them from joining the march. (And based on his
performance, I hope the gov. won't take it amiss if I make a suggestion:
don't quit your day job.)

But it seems there were no Chavista road blocks nor mobs anywhere to be
found. Vice President Rangel did most of the talking today for the
revolutionary side, President Chávez himself having spoken the day before,
promising that any coup attempt would be crushed.

Rangel was the other side of the coin. If people want to demomnstrate, let
them. It's a free country. No skin off my nose if you get sunburnt. And so
it was.

The "independent" and "objective" news media represented by Globovision
strove mightily to convince people a wave of bloody repression was sweeping
the nation, to little avail. Having preceded the report with a
hyperventilating anchor intro on the "unprecedented" deployment of troops,
Globovision around 7:45 am eastern switched to its reporter in front of the
Presidential Palace.

The q-and-a "live remote" with the reporter tried to set the right tone,
jackbooted thugs trampling on people's rights in the capital, but it just
didn't work. The camera would pan to the corner, where a car was stopped at
the checkpoint leading to the street in front of the building. The police or
military person seemed to burst out in laughter, and just waved the car
through.

The most this reporter could claim was that even her crew had been
questioned before being allowed to set up in front of the presidential
palace. Imagine that! Right out of Lenin's infernal Bolshevik playbook --
questioning people *claiming* to be reporters to make sure that's what they
were before letting them proceeed to set up all sorts of equipment only a
few yards from the front door of the Venezuelan equivalent of the White
House.

The tone of outrage that accompanied that complain was well worth putting up
with all the bs all day long. Oh the indignity! The outrage! Quick -- my
smelling salts, I feel faint!

That was followed some time later by what's called in the 24-hour news biz
as a "phoner". It was from some province -- I forget the name -- and the
anchor told us that there a Chavista mob had taken the only bridge out of
the provincial capital to Caracas, preventing people from coming to the
demo, and some poor unwary trucker who didn't stop for the mob had been
killed, his truck riddled with bullets. And here's so-and-so on the phone
with details.

Well the local reporter had to disabuse the hyperventilating anchor about
what happened. It wasn't a mob, it was the national guard. And there hadn't
been any attempt to stop traffic. And there hadn't been any truck shot up. A
man about a block away from the bridge had come out to look at what was
going on and there was some shooting and a stray bullet caught him. That's
what the reporter said she had heard, but she didn't say from whom.

It was an interesting story because earlier Globovision had been telling the
other version over footage of shot-up truck. Which sort of raises an
existential dilemma: how did Globovision get pictures of a truck that had
never, in fact, even existed?

And some people still have the unmitigated gall to accuse bourgeois
journalists of routinism and lack of creativity in covering stories.

Then the local reporter switched tracks. But the situation is very tense,
she said, there's been more shooting, in fact it is still going on, and
we've heard although we can't confirm it that two more people have been
killed, a woman and a small child.

Excuse me for speculating, but it seems to me that this woman local reporter
had seized on the opportunity to blow the carefully built up story about
this truck being massacred out of the water. Then someone got to her, and
had her read this cock-and-bull story about shooting going on right now.

Because the OBVIOUS thing for a reporter to lead with --they actually teach
you this in J-school, I'm told-- is the actual shooting that is going on
right now where you are, especially when the alternative is to lead with the
confrontation that did not, in fact, take place several hours earlier.

But even more to the point, I don't know if they teach you this in J-school
but it is, in fact, the *actual* thing that reporters do when shooting
breaks out around them,  they dive for cover, like the hapless innocent
bystanders in counter-cannonical westerns, who inevitably wind up getting
themselves shot in the opening moments of the final, climactic gunfight.

And, of course, if you're half smart as a journalist, you hold your
cellphone up to capture the sound of the shots being fired. But you couldn't
hear anything in the background of this call reporting, supposedly, live
from next to the bridge. If you made a cell call out of an audio booth in a
tv facility, I imagine it would sound something like this one did.

I can't imagine why.

Now, this all may seem funny, but it should be remembered that the coverage
the rest of the world sees is largely based on national reporting. Thus in
the New York Times's own account of the oppositon demonstration we read:
"The march remained peaceful. But outside Caracas, one person was killed and
others were wounded in gunfights between police officers and Chávez
supporters who tried to keep opponents from reaching the capital, Venezuelan
media reported."

The Times reporter quite fairly summarized what the Venezuelan media
reported. It just didn't happen to have that much to do with what really
happened.

This illustrates why EVERYTHING that we read in the international press
about Venezuela is suspect. And it isn't even a question that most foreign
correspondents are *consciously* lying. But when you get to a political
situation as class-polarized as Venezuela is today, things like journalistic
objecivity, impartiality, and two-sides-to-every-story go completely out the
window.

José



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