The Guardian, Colombia and Venezuela: a paired example

Medialens have produced an excellent article detailing how the media have distorted recent events in Venezuela. The refusal of the Caracas government to renew a TV station’s license was portrayed as an attack on free speech, with the active role that station – RCTV – had played in a 2002 coup attempt against the democratic government either ignored or glossed over. The Medialens article is very useful in drawing together all the key facts to refute the Western media/political consensus on the RCTV affair. Its highly recommended reading.

Moving on from RCTV and looking more broadly at Chavez's Venezuela, the recent coverage from the Guardian has, I think, been worthy of particular scrutiny; both for the nature of the coverage and the fact that its coming from the left-hand edge of the MSM.

The Guardian's correspondent in the region, Rory Carroll, appears to have as much difficulty disguising his contempt for Chavez as Dr Strangelove did controlling his right arm. A couple of Carroll’s pieces in January were positively dripping with scorn and, though he seems to have toned it down somewhat in more recent articles, a little bile still seems to manage to ooze its way out between the lines. Certainly no one can be in any doubt about Carroll's opinions on Venezuelan politics.

Here's one of Carroll’s less restrained articles from January, about as partisan a piece of reporting as you could hope to find. And here's another, where Carroll's analysis was that Chavez planned to turn Venezuela into a traditional Soviet state, backed with the claim that Chavez had come out publicly as a Communist. As I’ve mentioned here previously, I asked Carroll for a direct quote on this latter point and he suggested I'd find one in a transcript of the Presidential inauguration speech. I found the transcript. No quote. When challenged with this in a subsequent email, Carroll insisted that Chavez had called himself a communist “on television” and that “millions of Venezuelans” heard him. Yet still couldn't summon up a quote. An interesting episode.

A useful way of testing the Guardian's coverage on this subject has been provided to us in the form of Venezuela's next door neighbour, Colombia. Paired examples of this kind don't come up that often, and when they do they provide valuable subjects for research. One of these countries is backed to the hilt by our government and its allies, the other vehemently opposed. That makes events in Colombia of particular moral concern to us in the UK. So how does the Guardian's treatment of the two countries compare?

Amnesty International's recent world report can be very helpful in making this comparison. Venezuela doesn't come out with a clean bill of health. Not by any means. But the verdict on Colombia is of a completely different order of magnitude. It is damning in the extreme. Yet the Guardian's deep concern for "freedom" and the rise of "authoritarianism" applies rather more strongly to the country that AI has less concerns about. Indeed, the Guardian appears more concerned by the shutting down of a TV station that tries to overthrow a democracy in Venezuela than by the murder of trade union activists by paramilitaries linked to a Colombian military armed by the UK. The Guardian does cover Colombia, and does not pretend that Colombia has no problems. But anyone who only knew what they read about these two countries in the Guardian, and who was then presented with the AI report, would be shocked to learn that it was Colombia, not Venezuela, with the materially worse human rights record. One might well question whether it is moral values and the objective facts that are determining the balance of the Guardian’s coverage, and not the political preference for one countries government over another.

This impression is only reinforced by last week's Guardian pull-out section on Columbia, co-authored by Carroll. In a letter to the paper, Dr Andy Higginbottom, Senior lecturer in politics and human rights at Kingston University commented that

“It is a commonplace but true that there are two Colombias, the Colombia of the establishment and the Colombia of the people. Unfortunately your Inside Colombia supplement (June 8) only entered the former, reproducing their self-serving and roseate view of the situation. They know that impunity works at many levels, and one of them is the massage of international public opinion. Despite occasional qualifying phrases, the supplement gave a remarkably pro-business outlook at a time when the country's own media are at last reporting just how complicit corporations have been in violence.

For the excluded majority, the landscape has barely changed under President Álvaro Uribe, only the degree of hypocrisy. There is supposed to be demobilisation of the rightwing paramilitaries, but last Tuesday the judiciary denied human rights victims any role in investigating the hundreds of crimes committed by the AUC. Freedom of expression is claimed, yet on Friday, teacher Juan Carlos Martinez was attacked by riot police and risks losing his left eye.

If trade unionists can now organise, why is it that last Wednesday armed thugs attacked the home of union leader Ernando Melan Cardona, shooting one son dead and wounding his partner and another son? Melan works for Coltejer, part of the Antioqueño group of businesses, featured in your supplement as some of “Colombia's finest prominent players”.

Colombia may be becoming safe for investors, but not for Colombians. Perhaps you could probe this conundrum? It is important, for have no doubt British corporations are also involved.”

Looking at the supplement last week, it was certainly not clear to me whether it was part of the Guardian's news output or an advertisement sponsored or co-produced by some corporate interest or other (its articles do not appear on the Guardian website along with the paper’s news reporting). The involvement of the Guardian's regional correspondent in the authoring of a panglossian tribute to Colombia's successes - a tribute of unclear commercial/news reporting status – provides an noteworthy juxtaposition with the damning (and apparently not always fact-based) coverage of events in the country next door.

As I say, the respective treatments of the two countries by the Guardian would constitute an interesting topic for research.

Personally, I feel that events in Venezuela call for cautious optimism. After several successive election victories, Chavez's government has a huge popular mandate from the poor majority and the evidence [pdf] suggests that the economic status of those people has been improving as a result of their government's policies. Both the fact of these economic changes and their popular ownership are to be welcomed.

It remains to be seen how Venezuelan politics, and the current government, will develop in the years to come. Obsequious tributes and hero-worship are not helpful in respect of any political figure – be it Chavez or anyone else – not least when history is still in the process of unfolding. But one can only be pleased to see what the people of Venezuela have achieved for themselves in recent years.

That being the case, it is deeply disappointing that the Guardian has chosen to cover of the affairs of Venezuela and the broader region in the way that it has. For a paper that has often shown great concern and compassion on third world poverty, its reaction to the successful implementation of policies combating this very issue has been surprising in its scornfulness and occasional outright slander. One does not ask the Guardian to share ones views. But one does at least hope that its output will be characterised by basic standards of intellectual honesty and moral concern. That it is failing so profoundly in this respect is, as I've said here, quite interesting and a good potential topic for research. But it is also, beyond this, really quite depressing for anyone concerned for the deprived majority in that region - people who have suffered so grievously at the hands of the West over the past five centuries and who deserve somewhat better from us than this.

As Higgenbottom points out, the elites that have tortured the majority in Latin America for so long “know that impunity works at many levels, and one of them is the massage of international public opinion”. Its sad to see that the leading left-liberal daily in the English speaking world has chosen to take on this particularly odious task.