Last month, I wrote about Venezuela, pointing out
that little had been reported in this country about the achievements
of Hugo Chávez and the threat to his reforming government from the
usual alliance of a corrupt
local elite and the United States. When the
conspirators made their move on 12 April, the response of the
British media provided an object lesson in how censorship works in
free societies.
The BBC described Chávez as "not so much a democrat
as an autocrat", echoing the Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane,
who abused him as "a ranting demagogue". Alex Bellos, the Guardian's
South America correspondent, reported, as fact, that "pro-Chávez
snipers had killed at least 13 people" and that Chávez had requested
exile in Cuba. "Thousands of people celebrated overnight, waving
flags, blowing whistles . . ." he wrote, leaving the reader with the
clear impression that almost everybody in Venezuela was glad to see
the back of this "playground bully", as the Independent called
him.
Within 48 hours, Chávez was back in office, put
there by the mass of the people, who came out of the shanty towns in
their tens of thousands. Defying the army, their heroism was in
support of a leader whose democratic credentials are extraordinary
in the Americas, south and north. Having won two presidential
elections, the latest in 2000, by the largest majority in 40 years,
as well as a referendum and local elections, Chávez was borne back
to power by the impoverished majority whose "lot", wrote Bellos, he
had "failed to improve" and among whom "his popularity had
plummeted".
The episode was a journalistic disgrace. Most of
what Bellos and others wrote, using similar words and phrases,
turned out to be wrong. In Bellos's case, this was not surprising,
as he was reporting from the wrong country, Brazil. Chávez said he
never requested asylum in Cuba; the snipers almost certainly
included agents provocateurs; "almost every sector of society
[Chávez] antagonised" were principally members of various
oligarchies he made pay tax for the first time, including the media,
and the oil companies, whose taxes he doubled in order to raise 80
per cent of the population to a decent standard of living. His
opponents also included army officers trained at the notorious
School of the Americas in the United States.
In a few years, Chávez had begun major reforms in
favour of the indigenous poor, Venezuela's unpeople. In 49 laws
adopted by the Venezuelan Congress, he began real land reform, and
guaranteed women's rights and free healthcare and education up to
university level.
He opposed the human rights abuses of the regime in
neighbouring Colombia, encouraged and armed by Washington. He
extended a hand to the victim of an illegal 40-year American
blockade, Cuba, and sold the Cubans oil. These were his crimes, as
well as saying that bombing children in Afghanistan was terrorism.
Like Chile under Allende and Nicaragua under the Sandinistas,
precious little of this was explained to the western public. Like
the equally heroic uprising in Argentina last year, it was
misrepresented as merely more Latin American chaos.
Last week, the admirable Glasgow University Media
Group, under Greg Philo, released the results of a study which found
that, in spite of the saturation coverage of the Middle East, most
television viewers were left uninformed that the basic issue was
Israel's illegal military occupation. "The more you watch, the less
you know" - to quote Danny Schechter's description of American
television news - was the study's conclusion.
Take US secretary of state Colin Powell's "peace
mission". Regardless of America's persistent veto of United Nations
resolutions calling for Israel to withdraw from the occupied
territories, and regardless of Powell calling Ariel Sharon "my
personal friend", an American "peace mission" was the absurd news,
repeated incessantly. Similarly, when the United Nations Commission
on Human Rights last week voted 40-5 to condemn Israel for its "mass
killing", the news was not this near-unanimous expression of world
opinion, but the British government's rejection of the resolution as
"unbalanced".
Journalists are often defensive when asked why they
faithfully follow the deceptions of great power. It is not good
enough for ITN to say dismissively, in response to the Glasgow Media
Group findings, that "we are
not in the business of giving a daily history
lesson", or for the BBC to waffle about its impartiality when some
recent editions of Newsnight might have been produced by the Foreign
Office. In these dangerous times, one of the most destructive
weapons of all is pseudo-information.
John Pilger's latest book, The New Rulers of the
World, is published next
month by
Verso