On August 16, the day after Venezuelans went to the polls to decide whether President Hugo Chávez would be recalled, La Prensa’s lead story, written by special correspondent Rafael Luna Noguera, appeared under the headline “Angustioso referendo” --- “Worrisome referendum” in English. The lead paragraph went “Figures from the Venezuela opposition Democratic Coordinator were indicating last night that, after more than 16 hours of continuous voting all over the country, there was a statistical tendency favorable to the Yes option, with a percentage of approximately 60%.”
As it turned out, the result that was certified by Venezuelan election authorities and verified by the Organization of American States, the Carter Center and other international observers turned out to be almost exactly the opposite of what La Prensa reported.
This was not an isolated mistake by an individual correspondent for what was once considered Panama’s newspaper of record.
Three days earlier, La Prensa ran a page 3A AP story covering the opposition’s campaign-closing rally. The Chavistas’ analogous event went largely unreported. On page 29A, they ran a New York Times story about how the independent polls that rather precisely predicted Chávez’s 58-42 percent winning margin were unreliable. On page 33A, they ran a Reuters story about how crucial a Hugo Chávez victory was for one Fidel Castro.
The day before that, La Prensa gave Luna Noguera all of page 6A for a story about how Venezuelans’ standard of living had fallen under Chávez --- based on figures taken from 2003, after the opposition’s economically devastating oil strike and business lockout but before the spike in oil prices dramatically increased Venezuela’s income.
The day before that, La Prensa dedicated the top of page 2A to a story about how supporters of the Venezuelan opposition who live here feared that there would be fraud in the recall vote count.
This reviewer has also made egregious reporting errors, and also has a point of view that sometimes improperly makes its appearance in news stories. This column is written neither for the purpose of gloating, nor to discredit a competitor. The tendency of The Panama News to correct errors that are pointed out to it and the mainstream corporate news outlets’ contrasting pretensions of infallibility --- such as the thinking behind La Prensa’s failure to publish a correction of its embarrassing August 16 lead story --- are also beside the point.
Nor is it this reviewer’s intention to leave the impression that El Panama America’s coverage of Venezuela has been less slanted than La Prensa’s. Any careful and honest examination would reveal that this is not the case, even if the folks at EPASA were at least prudent enough to wait until the vote was in before analyzing the result.
What really matters here is a prolonged smear campaign against Hugo Chávez and his supporters, one that has stripped the veneer of objectivity from many a once-reputable news organization. These same media also botched the coverage of the April 2002 coup and counter-coup, and of the later failed opposition oil strike and employers’ lockout. From La Prensa to The New York Times, from Fox News to MEDCOM, and including both AP and Reuters, the Venezuela story has been told not as it happened, but as corporate managers wish that it had happened.
Within Venezuela the slant has tilted way past the angle of repose. The major private media there are owned and managed by members of the social elite that was voted out of power with the election of Hugo Chávez, and neither that class nor those media have ever reconciled themselves to that defeat. The distortions in the former ruling group’s house of mirrors are so pronounced that earlier this year some of the Venezuelan corporate media blamed Hugo Chávez when Miss Venezuela failed to be selected as a finalist in the Miss Universe pageant --- that is, a Miss Venezuela chosen by the organization of billionaire media baron and opposition leader Gustavo Cisneros, competing in an event run by Donald Trump’s organization, allegedly losing because of some unspecified Chavista plot.
The phony polls, the incredible claims and the undisguised contempt for the impoverished Venezuelan majority have long since produced their logical consequences in the barrios of Caracas. Reporters for the media owned by Mr. Cisneros and his country club set are now afraid to go into the areas where most Venezuelans live. Public television, low-power community broadcasters and Internet publications like the English-language VHeadline have move in to fill the credibility gap created by the mainstream news organizations’ irresponsibility.
Is there a lesson to be learned in Panama?
Of course there is, but La Prensa hasn’t learned it.
Below the fold on the front page of the August 17 issue, the headline read “Hugo Chávez consolidates” and Luna Noguera’s report devoted nearly half of its column inches to opposition claims of fraud, the Bush administration’s refusal to accept the result and an isolated incident of election day violence. Nothing that Hugo Chávez or his supporters said was reported.
Over on page 49A, Luna Noguera went on in a full-page story headlined “Why Chávez won” with such gems as “[t]he new president did not delay in rapidly revising the history of his country” and “his revolution, after four years in power [sic], is far from accomplishing the objectives it had set.”
(Would it be too much to ask a La Prensa editor to pick up an almanac, notice that Chávez was first elected president of Venezuela in December of 1998, and correct the elementary school arithmetic error? Apparently so.)
What the Chavistas had to say about why they won the recall vote didn’t make it into Luna Noguera’s August 17 story. However, the Venezuelan opposition’s old unsubstantiated allegations of ties between Chávez and the Colombian guerrillas were included.
And thus continues the decline of the once-proud La Prensa.
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La Prensa blows the Venezuela story
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