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Venezuela, Media War | Under the Shadow, Bonus Episode 3

On Sunday, July 28th, President Nicolas Maduro won reelection there. According to the country’s national electoral council, he took 51% of votes over 44% for his rival Edmundo González Urrutia.

But the opposition called fraud, claiming that they actually won the vote. Most international media have been on board with that narrative. In fact, the United States, and several other right-wing led Latin American countries have now recognized the opposition candidate as the victory. At the same time, more than 40 other countries have recognized Maduro.

To make sense of it all, and the media spin that’s influencing this story, we speak with Alan MacLeod, a journalist and the senior staff writer at Mint Press News, with a PhD focused on media coverage of Venezuela.

Under the Shadow is an investigative narrative podcast series that walks back in time, telling the story of the past by visiting momentous places in the present.

In each episode, host Michael Fox takes us to a location where something historic happened—a landmark of revolutionary struggle or foreign intervention. Today, it might look like a random street corner, a church, a mall, a monument, or a museum. But every place he takes us was once the site of history-making events that shook countries, impacted lives, and left deep marks on the world.

Hosted by Latin America-based journalist Michael Fox.

Additional links: 

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. This is Michael Fox, host of Under The Shadow. So I’m still working on the latest episode to season one of the series on Central America. This last episode, episode 13, will focus on Panama and the legacy of the 1989 US invasion. I’ll have that to you in a couple of weeks, I promise, but in the meantime, I have a real treat for you. You can think of this as a sneak preview of season two of Under the Shadow, which will look at the long legacy of US intervention in South America. And this one is also a bridge between the regions, because today I’m going to be diving into the question of media spin and the US-backed media war in the region.

Today’s interview is really focused in the present, but I’ll also be referencing the past, Nicaragua of the 1980s and the revolving door between US officials and corporate media. But above all, the focus today is on Venezuela. Of course, Venezuela has been the big news in Latin America in recent days. On Sunday, July 28th, President Nicolas Maduro won re-election there. According to the country’s National Electoral Council, he took 51% of the votes, over 44% for his rival Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia. But the opposition immediately called fraud, claiming that they actually won the vote. Most international media have been on board with that narrative. In fact, the United States and several other right-wing Latin American countries have now recognized the opposition candidate as the victor, think Juan Guaido 2.0. At the same time, more than 40 other countries have recognized Maduro. To make sense of it all and the media spin that’s influencing this story today, I’m speaking with Alan MacLeod.

Alan MacLeod:

So I’m a journalist and the senior staff writer at MintPress News, where I also produce the podcast there as well.

Michael Fox:

He says that in his previous life, he was an academic where he looked at the intersection of Latin American politics and media studies.

Alan MacLeod:

My PhD was all about the media coverage of Venezuela, specifically in Western outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, and I was trying to look at the question of, number one, how does the media cover Venezuela, and number two, why does it cover it in such a biased and one-sided way?

Michael Fox:

He was on the ground in Venezuela observing the July presidential elections.

Alan MacLeod:

And what I found was a very interesting system, which seemed quite fluid, quite open and transparent, but that’s certainly not how the media is presenting it over here.

Michael Fox:

Here is the interview in its entirety. Alan, so yes, as I said, I’m just such a huge fan of your work and this is so great. I’m so glad you’re available and this is such an important topic. So I’ll just start by saying thank you so much.

Alan MacLeod:

Well, it’s great to be with you, Michael. It’s great to be with you and talk to you finally. I think we’ve talked before, but not for this long. Not for a long time as well.

Michael Fox:

Exactly. Okay, Alan, let’s just start off, what did you see on the ground and how long were you in Venezuela for?

Alan MacLeod:

Sure. I was there for a little less than two weeks, and I’ve just got back. It was during election season. I was invited to be an international observer, partially because I had written a lot about Venezuela, a book and many academic articles, as well as journalistic articles. And so I saw the whole process unfold, from the final days of the election, rallies from both sides, et cetera. The campaigning, to election day itself, to the aftermath of the election. On election day itself, I visited five polling stations in the Caracas area. Most of them seemed to be working very well. The election system itself is well known around the world as one of the most robust systems that they have going.

In order to vote, Venezuelans need to produce their national ID card, and then the picture on that is then checked against them from a voting official. If that passes, they then go to a fingerprint machine where they have to give their thumbprint onto a machine that should match the one that’s on the records. And if both of those things match, they’re allowed to vote on an electronic voting system which resembles a computer. Once they’ve voted on that machine, the computer spits out a paper ballot, the voter must check the paper ballot. The paper ballot’s got a barcode on it, some numbers, and the candidate. If that is correct, they then proceed to put that piece of paper in the box. Not only that, once they have voted, they also have to sign an electoral register to say they have voted, and they also have to put their thumb in an inkwell and then put their thumbprint on a piece of paper. So there are many, many checks and balances there to make sure there’s no voter fraud or any kind of impersonation going on.

At the end of the day, all the electronic results, which have been sent to head office in Caracas, are then checked against the paper ballots that are there. The paper ballots are counted in front of representatives of the community and of different political parties. Those paper ballots have to match a hundred percent to the electronic results that the CNE, the National Electoral Council has. If there is even a discrepancy of even one vote, that triggers a massive audit and all hell breaks loose. The 2013 election, which is the one I know best, apart from this 2024 election, the electronic vote was correct to a percentage of 99.98%, and that was because 22 people across Venezuela had voted on the machines but not put their paper ballot in the box.

This election so far, what I saw on the ground, I was traveling with other journalists. I rocked up to, as I said, five different polling stations with a camera and a tripod. I found no strife from any of the election officials. Their range of emotions went from polite indifference to welcoming, in my experience. We were not hassled or pushed around. We could film wherever we wanted. We could talk to whoever we wanted. The only thing we couldn’t do was actually film people on the voting screens themselves. So that seems like a completely reasonable thing we weren’t allowed to do. We spoke to dozens of people, opposition supporters who told us that they hated Maduro, government supporters who said that they love Maduro, government supporters that said that they didn’t like Maduro, but they were voting for him anyway because he was better than the opposition candidate.

So there’s a very wide range of people we talked to. We even, in one central Caracas voting station, talked to the lady who was in charge of the entire operation in that voting center, and she’s told us openly, to me and election observers from Zambia, South Africa and the United States who were with me at the time, she told us openly that she was a member of the opposition, that she hated the government, that she thought the economy was in shambles, and she was only doing this because she needed the money. Nevertheless, she said that the voting system, she had complete confidence in it, and we spoke to lots of election officials that day, and the two words that came up constantly were [Spanish 00:07:17], which means calm, and [Spanish 00:07:19], which could mean smooth or fluid in that process.

So ultimately, the process went very well. The main drawback I saw, and other election observers saw, was that turnout was very high and both parties told their supporters to go out and vote early. What that meant, that was that at one election station that I visited, there were very long lines where people were forced to wait multiple hours and it was very hot and sunny day. Now, I would say that that election station was actually in a very, very strongly pro-government area, and the ones that we visited in the opposition areas actually didn’t have quite as many long lines. Nevertheless, those lines dissipated long before lunchtime and by the afternoon, everything seemed to be working very well. So I and the more than 900 international observers, that I was with or that were observing the elections throughout Venezuela, have very little negative things to say about what happened. We saw a robust, a calm process that was very streamlined, and it seemed like everything went all right.

Michael Fox:

Alan, thank you so much. I want to dive into obviously the thing that everybody’s talking about, and the thing that you are so good at, and what all of your research, like you said, is on, and that’s what the media angle was on on this, right? So everything seemed, you’re on the ground, it seemed like everything went really well. How did that juxtapose from, A, what we heard from the opposition just hours later, once the results were released, and also what we’ve seen from the international reporting?

Alan MacLeod:

Yeah, sure. So as I said, everything seemed like a quite peaceful, calm, and smooth process on the ground. However, I would say that even weeks before the election, we knew that the opposition was not going to accept it. They were the only party who said they would not respect the results, whatever happened. This election was not just President Maduro versus Edmundo Gonzalez. There were actually 10 people on the ballot fighting against Maduro, and nine of them said that they would respect the results. It was only Gonzalez that said that he wouldn’t, and immediately after the election results were called, the initial results said that Maduro won with over 51% to Edmundo Gonzalez’s 44%, although those numbers have actually widened since then.

Immediately, Gonzalez and his supporters went out on the streets to vent their anger, and I saw what they did, or at least I saw the aftermath of what they did in those nights, which was to burn down cars, to block highways, to smash up pharmacies. They tried to destroy a hospital as well, and basically any visual reminder of the collectivist social democratic states that the Chavistas have been building for the last 20 years. Now, the way that the media in the west has portrayed this is, even months before the election they were describing this vote as a sham, a farce election overseen by a dictator, and that process has continued to this day, where we have big outlets calling this a troubled election, a flawed election, or just an outright sham or a disgrace. And the whole point is to heap doubt and cast aspersions against the Venezuelan electoral system, despite the fact that it is often called one of the best and most robust in the world.

The reason this is happening is because ultimately, Venezuela is a key thorn in the side of the United States government and its plans to control every part of the world. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and the United States certainly does not want the government of Venezuela using the profits from those oil reserves to fund social programs like building housing, or community education, or healthcare. The United States thinks the profits of the oil industry should be going to investors in the West.

Venezuela, of course, ultimately, is very important on the world stage as a point of multipolarity, it has entered into strategic deals with Russia, China and Iran, all three of whom are big enemies of the United States. And so ultimately, I think the bigger picture here is one of the United States trying to undermine the electoral process here and try to put their candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, and they’ve made absolutely no secret about the fact that they are supporting him and his backer, Maria Corina Machado, who is the real power broker in the opposition. They’ve made no secret that they are supporting this guy and they want him in power rather than Maduro, and that’s why we see such one-sided reporting in the US and the Western press more generally.

Michael Fox:

I think it’s so fascinating, Alan, obviously, I’m in the middle of working Under the Shadow, I’m on the last couple of episodes of this podcast. It’s all on US intervention in Latin America, and of course that’s history. Most of it has been history. The closest thing to current affairs that I’ve worked on was an episode on Honduras 2009 coup, post that. But it’s fascinating because it’s the same thing over and over again. I was shocked in the lead up to the Venezuelan elections, about the parallels between, say, Nicaragua in 1990, because you have the whole economic blockade, you have the sanctions against Venezuela, you have the impact of the sanctions that nobody’s talking about right now. That’s a whole other thing that’s just completely omitted in the press, right? But it still is, it’s shocking for me that there’s this almost disconnect of history of what the US has done historically and that this is a pattern that the US does, and then the media follows along, right? Is that something that you saw? Is that something that people were talking about?

Alan MacLeod:

Well, Venezuelans inside the country often talk about [Spanish 00:13:31], the media war, and they’re specifically talking about the media fight that goes on inside Venezuela, but they’re very aware that this is happening in the international media as well. The United States has placed Venezuela under a blockade for nearly 10 years now. It started in the Obama administration. They’ve placed more than 900 sanctions on the country, and those sanctions have wrecked havoc on Venezuela. Their international income has dropped by more than 99%, and that’s largely because they are no longer able to sell oil, partially because so many countries refuse to buy it because they’re afraid that United States will place secondary sanctions on them, and also because the oil industry has collapsed, because the Venezuelan oil industry was very close to the American one, that needed American spare parts to function, and they haven’t had access to those for years and years.

So the economy was shattered, and in fact, one American United Nations official who visited Venezuela, he estimated that more than 100,000 Venezuelans were killed because of this blockade, because of the punishing economic sanctions that made it impossible to import medical equipment, and drugs, and all sorts of things. He described it as akin to a medieval siege and said the United States was probably guilty of crimes against humanity. So the sanctions are very real and Venezuelans can feel it all day. President Maduro, in a lot of his speeches, I went to a lot of his speeches and he was constantly talking about the United States and its role. He talked about a media war. He talked about a dirty war being played out on social media against the government, and he was talking about the sorts of things that were going on on platforms like Twitter, where Elon Musk himself was coming out and talking about, we need regime change against this government.

So Venezuelans, they’re certainly aware of what’s going on, at least the ones that want to be. I did talk to many opposition figures or opposition supporters, who said that actually it’s the mismanagement of the economy, which is why Venezuela was in such a bad economic state for so many years, and actually the US sanctions did not have too much of an effect. But certainly, Venezuelans are very aware of what’s going on. You brought up the example of Nicaragua in the 1980s where the US basically did the same thing, tried to blockade the country, and eventually in 1990-

Alan MacLeod:

… thing tried to blockade the country and eventually in 1990 Nicaraguans gave in and voted for the U.S. candidate. But that hasn’t happened here, and partially the reason for that is because the government has managed to start to weather the sanctions. Inflation has been camped to a very low level. Actually, the inflation right now is lower than the inflation in the United Kingdom and many European countries. Venezuela now produces more than 96% of the food it eats, employment has gone up, and the government has also been able to build more than five million social houses, which it has mostly given away for free to the neediest Venezuelans.

So ultimately, we do have a picture of a country that’s starting to get over the worst of the sanctions right now. Touch wood that will continue. And yes, certainly the economic war continues and so does the media war, but it does seem that perhaps the tea leaves are showing that perhaps the Maduro administration has managed to weather the worst of that.

Michael Fox:

Alan, you mentioned something not from this question, but you mentioned something in the last question, the very end of it, that I think is really important, and it’s this connection between the United States and the mainstream media and how those two work together. What is their relationship? Because a lot of people would say, “Oh, well, we have a free press. Elon Musk wants freedom.” And so they’ll say, “We have a free press. We don’t have propaganda.” So the United States has its own thing, and then the mainstream media, it’s just doing their own thing freely. You’re someone who has researched a ton of this. This is your focus. What’s actually at play and what is that relationship between the U.S. government line and the mainstream media that we see from so many big outlets?

Alan MacLeod:

We like to think of propaganda as something that really only happens in enemy countries like North Korea or the Soviet Union. But actually, propaganda is much more refined in democracies like ours because we’ve had decades to try to tweak it and make it absolutely perfect. We like to think that there is a clear connection or a clear distinction between the deep state and the fourth estate, that big tech and Big Brother are completely defined, and that our media are plucky underdogs that are holding powerful people to account and speaking truth to power. But the reality is that, in our system, which is a corporate dominated society, when we have corporate media, that means corporate media is state media by default. And ultimately we see very, very close connections between big media and big government.

The New York Times, for example, admitted that it sends a lot of its stories to the CIA for editing before they send them out, specifically ones to do with national security and foreign policy. When we look at who actually writes for these big media outlets, a lot of the time they’re former state officials. There’s something of a revolving door between cable news hosts and government posts. I’m thinking of people like Jen Psaki, who leaves her job in the Democratic administration and immediately gets a job on MSNBC. And similar things happen on Fox with the Republican Party as well. So there are very close links between our media and our government. And when it comes to Venezuela, everybody seems to sing from the same song sheet, and that is that Venezuela is a threat that needs to get disposed of.

That’s why we see headlines in the Washington Post, for example, that read something like, “The odds of a coup in Venezuela are going up, but sometimes coups can lead to democracy.” That sort of thing shouldn’t be possible, but that is indeed the state that we find ourselves in. And on social media, it’s actually probably even worse in some ways. A lot of my research has been based around trying to uncover the connections between the national security state and big social media companies. And what I found was, just through doing things like going on LinkedIn and looking at who is actually working in top jobs in places like Facebook and Google and Twitter, looking at who is in their content moderation departments, I found that there was a network of hundreds of former CIA, FBI, NSA or State Department officials who have been parachuted into top jobs in big social media platforms.

All of them, really, including TikTok, even though we’re supposed to believe that is a Chinese government plant, we found hundreds of these officials who have been, as I said, parachuted into top jobs in politically sensitive fields. They’re not going into sales or customer service. They’re being put into content moderation and trust and safety policies. And so these are the sorts of people who decide not only what Americans see on their social media feeds, but also people from Botswana, Bhutan, Burundi, and Britain. It doesn’t matter where you are because these social media giants, these Silicon Valley behemoths, they are really the main source of information for the entire world now. These are global companies, but they’re being influenced by the United States government, and that is a huge national security threat for Venezuela and for every other country.

I’ll quickly give you one example. The most recent elections in Nicaragua, which we were referencing a little bit earlier, a week before the election, Facebook deleted more than 90 accounts belonging to top leftist officials, government officials, or big media sites. They said that they were doing this because of inauthentic behavior, and they thought it was a bot network, but it was clear that they were putting their thumb on the scale trying to swing the election away from the leftist, anti-imperialist Sandinista party and towards the right-wing U.S.-backed candidate, Miss Chamorro, whose family has been controlling Nicaragua on and off for over a century.

When these people poured onto Twitter to record videos of themselves saying, “I am not a bot. I’m a real person. Why has Facebook purged me?” Twitter went and deleted their accounts in what some analysts called a social media double tap strike. So clearly these big social media companies have the power to try to swing elections, and we should be very cognizant of that, and we should be designing strategies to get around that, actually.

Michael Fox:

Alan, I’m so glad you brought up social media because people have actually said this. Bolsonaro, he was elected with his social media campaign. Rodrigo Chavez, who is the President of Costa Rica in the ilk of Bolsonaro or Donald Trump, he himself said. “The rules of the games have changed and that I wouldn’t have been elected if it wasn’t for social media.” So it’s absolutely influencing populations.

My question for you, why is Elon Musk so worried about, say, the Supreme Court in Brazil, or in this case, the Venezuelan elections? There was numerous tweets. If it’s not, I mean, many, but potentially even dozens of tweets that he sent out over the last few days denouncing Venezuela and Maduro in the elections. Why is he so focused?

Alan MacLeod:

Sure. So unlike a lot of billionaires, Elon Musk is really not afraid to put out any opinion he has immediately to millions of people, and as you said, he has very strong opinions about socialism in Latin America, or socialism anywhere for that matter. Let’s not forget that Elon Musk has publicly endorsed Donald Trump for President and has reportedly given him more than $40 million. In fact, he’s giving a repeat donation every month of tens of millions of dollars to Republican PACs. So this guy is clearly a deeply conservative individual, to put it mildly. And of course, those sorts of people are not going to take kindly to countries going socialist, certainly not in America’s backyard, as it’s described by so many people in the U.S. and in Washington, D.C. in particular.

So yeah, as you said, Musk has been very forthright in denouncing the Workers’ Party and socialism in general in Brazil. He has fired off so many tweets talking about Maduro being a dictator and how everybody should be supporting Maria Carina Machado, who’s not actually the opposition Presidential candidate, but everybody knows that she is the real force behind Edmundo Gonzalez, who is a very frail, very old man who can actually barely stand and has trouble reading even off a script. There’s a lot of Joe Biden similarities there, actually. Yeah, so Elon has been tweeting nonstop about Venezuela, about how basically we need a coup d’etat in that country. And of course, this really mirrors what he did in Bolivia a few years ago where it’s rumored very strongly that he was actually involved in some of the shenanigans that went on against Evo Morales and the Movement to Socialism Party, where there was a military coup, which deposed Morales and kicked the Socialists out of power for an entire year.

Now, Bolivia is an enormous source of lithium, which is one of the key products that Musk needs to get his hands on because all of his Tesla cars run on lithium batteries. And the fact that Morales was not willing to play ball and he wanted to nationalize the lithium industry got Elon Musk extremely angry. He wanted to build a big Tesla plant in Brazil and got lots of help from the Bolsonaro administration doing so. I’m sure he has very many opinions about what the oil of Venezuela should be used for. Billionaires often do. This is a classic case of enormous oligarchs really thinking that they can control Latin America. And this goes back centuries.

The entire concept of a Banana Republic revolves around this. It revolves around Americans or Europeans, but Westerners in general, thinking that they have the power to come into Latin American countries, overthrow whoever they want, and install whoever they want as dictators so that their banana business or their mining company or whatever it is can continue and profits can keep growing. And so I really see this as another example of a centuries long trend of Western billionaires thinking that they can do whatever they want in Latin America.

Michael Fox:

Alan, one of the things I really appreciate about your work is how you’re constantly critiquing the media, but doing it in a very clear way where you’re showing people online over social media and Twitter exactly how the media spin is happening in real time, which it’s so important. And just to give a really quick example, you tweeted out, I think it was yesterday, one tweet in which you showed a BBC story. And you said, and it was a whole thread that you had here, but, “Western media’s finest propagandists are pulling out all the stops trying to de-legitimize the elections in Venezuela.” And then, of course, you dissect this in the thread, but the very first picture is a screenshot of an article from the BBC in which it says, “Choreographed celebrations in Venezuela as Maduro claims win.” And then you right next to it choreographed implying their fake or artificial.

And then as Maduro claims win, claims rather than just wins, this is so important for us understanding what is actually being done. And a lot of times if you’re not a journalist, if you’re not thinking about words and the way that things are scripted or written, you’re not looking at it. You’re not analyzing those titles, you’re not analyzing the articles in that way, which is why I just so appreciate your work in that sense. Can you just talk a little bit about how often the mainstream media is using these misleading terms, disinformation, whatever that is, and how often that’s the case, and how much have you seen of that over in recent weeks in Venezuela?

Alan MacLeod:

Well, when it comes to Venezuela, it’s constant, but it’s actually on every topic everywhere. So one of the most blatant lies we hear about Venezuela that appeared in that BBC article was that Maduro still has some support among some people, but it’s flagging. But when you actually come here, I was there on a Thursday just before the elections at Maduro’s final rally, there was something of the order of 1.5 to 2 million people at that rally. And not only were they there, they were astonishingly upbeat, and they were very confident of a victory. They sang and they danced for hours and hours. The juncture between image and reality when it comes to Venezuela, it really beggars belief. And the reason media can get away with this is because most people have a very, very limited understanding of Venezuela, or frankly, of many countries.

Most Americans, I believe, still don’t have a passport and the majority of those who do are Mexican-Americans going to see their families or Americans going on spring break to places like Acapulco. And that means that our images and our understanding of the rest of the world is mediated through media. And what I mean by that is a handful of gigantic corporations basically control everything we hear, read, and see about any country including Venezuela. And so media has this incredible power to frame debates and situations by queuing us, just that prodding us to think about issues in certain ways by using words. We hear a lot about the Maduro grip on power, as if he’s holding onto it. You don’t really hear people talking about Joe Biden keeping a grip on power. We also hear words like the Maduro regime rather than the Maduro administration. Nobody would use the word the Biden regime unless perhaps they were working at OAN or Fox News and they were trying to demonize the Biden administration.

But if you were working at CNN or any of the “respectable outlets” and you handed in some copy that said the Biden regime, your editor would look at you like crazy. You would get a phone call saying, “Why are you talking like this?” But when it comes to Venezuela, that’s just part and parcel of it. And these sorts of words and the way they frame things is very important because it gets people to believe that this person is a dictator without any real information or any real knowledge about the country. Another great example of this is if you read many articles about the Venezuelan elections, you will hear immediately probably that Maduro’s face appears 13 times on the ballot as if this is just another example of how crackpot this administration is. It feeds into all this Latin American strongman, tin pot dictatorship, Banana Republic framing that we’ve seen for many decades.

Now, that is actually true that Maduro does appear 13 times on the ballot. But when you actually see the ballot, it makes complete sense why…

Alan MacLeod:

Ballot, but when you actually see the ballot, it makes complete sense why that happens. There is a huge sheet. Venezuela has dozens of political parties, and Maduro was endorsed by 13 of those. So if, for example, you want to vote for the Green Party in Venezuela, you go to the machine and click Green Maduro, or if you want to vote for the Communist party, you write Communist Maduro. But what’s not said is that his main challenger, Edmundo González, was also endorsed by multiple parties, so his face appeared, I can’t remember the exact amount, but it was something like seven or eight times on the ballot as well. And then other opposition candidates appeared multiple times on the ballot too, and that was because a number of parties had endorsed those people. So again, out of context, you can make it sound like Maduro’s face appearing 13 times on the ballot is proof of a dictatorship, but the minute you actually have some background context and knowledge about Venezuela, that immediately just seems completely normal.

And in fact, when you look at the ballot, it’s much better than the ballot that we have in many countries where you don’t have the face, you don’t have colors, you’ve just got to name and maybe a party. That helps people who are visually impaired, especially in the global south, a lot of people don’t read and write very well. Those sorts of things help working class, ordinary people vote in the way that they want to vote. So these are actually things that help democracy rather than hinder it. But these sorts of factoids that journalists can drop in to an uneducated audience that doesn’t know anything about Venezuela is a way that they can deceitfully make people see the country in any way they want. And it’s very easy to play people when they don’t have a background knowledge of the country, and that’s exactly what the media has been doing for 20 years here.

Michael Fox:

Alan, incredible. I know it’s very late your time. For those people who are listening right now, it’s like midnight Alan’s time. He just flew in from Venezuela and he’s flying to Asia tomorrow. I thank you so much, so much. I just have a couple more questions for you, and it’s incredible. It’s great talking with you. How did you get interested in Venezuela and media spin in Latin America like this?

Alan MacLeod:

Oh yeah, sure. So I guess it starts when I was quite young and I lived through the 2008 financial crash. That really got me starting to think about alternative economic systems, and one of the most important and notable at the time was Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. And it seemed quite interesting what was going on here. And I heard from a lot of people, like respectable intellectuals that something incredible was going on in Venezuela. Democracy was deepening, that the poor were being uplifted in ways that they never had been before, but then I also read news reports that said that this place was the most evil dictatorship imaginable and that this place was worse than North Korea and that we really should be doing something like invading. And so that really piqued my interest. Who should I believe? Should I believe these intellectuals that have a lot of respect for international organizations or should I believe the media?

And I guess that’s how I got interested in Venezuela, trying to get to the bottom of this, because either way, the story seemed extremely juicy. Either there was a huge conspiracy on the part of groups like UNICEF or the United Nations or the World Health Organization or academics like Noam Chomsky who were all conspiring to make a dictatorship look like a paradise, or there was an even bigger conspiracy involving almost the entire media trying to demonize a progressive project. So really, that’s what I wanted to get down to the bottom of. It just seemed like an extremely juicy story. And that’s why I’ve always looked at Venezuela through the lens of Western media because that’s how I got involved in it in the first place.

Michael Fox:

Incredible. Incredible. And talk about your academic research. I love the fact that you are a journalist now using that same academic research that you did, and now you’re using it in the day in and day out constantly to be able to see the reality with this lens that you’ve studied for so many years. So many people study one thing and they go off and do something else. I studied environmental studies,. But talk about your academic research and what did you find?

Alan MacLeod:

Sure. So I did my PhD about media coverage of Venezuela, and then I produced a book and five peer-reviewed academic articles on the subject of Venezuela. And what I found was, number one, I found an extraordinary slant and bias against the country and towards presenting it as a dictatorship, ignoring any progressive changes that were going on and constantly demonizing it. That was overwhelming from both conservative and liberal media and both American and British media. So that’s the first thing I found. But perhaps the more interesting story is why this was going on. And in order to explain that and understand that question, I actually talked to the majority of journalists who were producing content on Venezuela for the Western audience. That actually wasn’t very hard because there’s quite a small number of Western journalists that produce pretty much all the news you hear out of this country. Nowadays, there’s only one newspaper with a full-time correspondent in Venezuela, that’s the New York Times with Anatoly Kurmanaev.

And I interviewed Kurmanaev many years ago now, and he was completely open about what he was doing. So I have him on record saying that he describes himself as a mercenary for hire, he and his colleagues, and that he intentionally plants false or grossly exaggerated stories about Venezuela into Western media because he has an agenda. He called this tactic sexy tricks, and he gave me one example of this. He got a story published that condoms in Venezuela cost $750. Now, he accepted that this was completely nonsense, but he said that this was… This story went viral across the world and it played into this Venezuela is a ludicrous failed state, tin-pot dictatorship, hyperinflation, etc. But yeah, he said that this wasn’t the case. And indeed it wasn’t actually. When I looked into a box of condoms in Venezuela cost $8, which I actually think that’s slightly cheaper than in the US. So there was no real enormous shortage or mad pricing. But people would do that deliberately, that journalists, because they had an agenda.

And I also spoke to other journalists that said that inside their newsroom, they called themselves “The Resistance” to Chavez and now Maduro. That’s how they talk about them. Another journalist said that other people in his newsroom said that we have to, “Get rid of this guy,” Meaning Chavez. So journalists were completely open about what their position was. They were the ideological tip of the spear trying to destroy socialism in its cradle. Other journalists who were quite critical of the coverage, and once they were out started blowing the whistle, told me that they felt that they had to self-censor constantly. So one journalist who worked for the Financial Times told me that the stuff that he wrote in his book he knew would never ever get published in the Financial Times, and so he didn’t even bother pitching it after a while. He just constantly got knocked back and he stopped pitching and he just started complying. He said it was complete self-censorship. That’s what he said.

And yeah, other journalists said that they had to temper what they wrote because they knew their editors didn’t like that, and there were people who were allied to the opposition local Venezuelans that they worked with in the newsroom. So there was this extremely partisan sense in the newsroom. Western journalists overwhelmingly live in the east side of Caracas, they live in gated communities, they have armed guards, they have servants, a lot of them don’t speak Spanish, and very few of them venture into the dilapidated slums of Caracas, which are bastions of government support. And so everyone they interact with on a daily basis hates the government and loves the opposition. And so they start to imbibe that, and that’s the content they produce. And so yeah, ultimately it really is a story of Venezuela being the ground zero for journalism in the sense that it is a fantastic case study that shows that journalists job, if you work in corporate media, is not to present the truth, but it is to push the agenda of the owners and advertisers of big corporate media outlets. So that is the billionaire class.

And so truth goes out the window when you’re fighting in an information war, and Venezuela is the perfect example of that. Truth has just completely escaped, just being totally de-fenestrated when it comes to this country and propaganda reigns supreme.

Michael Fox:

Alan, I’m so glad you brought up these points because I moved to Venezuela in 2006 to report on what was happening, and particularly my focus was doing stories in the Barrios, in the poorest communities about the missions, about how people’s lives were changing, about how people were being empowered by the Bolivarian process. And to get away from this kind of top down, oh, it’s either Chavez or at the time it’s Bush. Chavez and Bush, look at that fight that’s happening. Chavez and Bush. I want to talk about people’s lives and ended up co-authoring this book, Venezuela Speaks: Interviews with Grassroots Social Movements. But I saw that firsthand what you were just mentioning because like you said, every mainstream journalist lived in eastern side of Caracas, upscale neighborhoods, and many of them would tell me that they were afraid to go into the Barrios.

They were afraid to go talk to the poorest communities, and so they would step outside their house, interview somebody in the Plaza Altamira, and then send off their story and they’re done, right? So it’s this automatic thing that would just happen in Venezuela through journalism. Alan, I want to come now to where we are right now. A couple days after the elections, the opposition has been claiming fraud, can you talk about what the opposition is claiming, how that’s been lifted by the media, and what’s your analysis? What’s your take on where things stand right now?

Alan MacLeod:

Yeah, sure. Just a couple of points before I get into that. I do have Venezuela Speaks somewhere on my shelf there. I read it a long time ago. And yeah, actually I went to both the Rich Eastern side of Caracas and the Barrios, and I actually felt that I felt safest in the Barrios, in fact. I didn’t feel that they were a dangerous place at all. I felt that it was a community of extraordinary conviviality where children played together, people of all races seemed to know each other and were very friendly with each other. It was a lovely place to be, in fact. Whereas in places like Plaza Altamira, that was the scene of some of the worst violence on the Guarimbas where so many people got killed.

So over here, the opposition has been claiming fraud. They claim that their candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, actually received more than 70% of the vote, and they basically got two sources of information for that. Number one is an American polling firm. This polling firm has got extensive links with the US government and even the CIA, so we have to take some of their results of the grain of salt, especially because why would this American polling firm have access to the voter registers and voter data. Polls in this country are probably the worst in the world. You can find a poll telling you whatever you want. You can find polls that say that the opposition will win by 30, 40, 50 points, and you’ll find the opposite where you’ll find government polls that show Maduro was ahead by vast margins as well, and everything in between. And basically you pay for what you got.

Some of the methodology on these polls is utterly ghastly. Some of them that are getting produced are literally based on Twitter polls. And of course, if you’ve got followers, we all know that our followers are a certain political or social group, and so if you set a poll up, you can basically already guess what the result is going to be. So yes, the opposition is crying fraud. I would say that they have actually refused to accept the results of every single election here in Venezuela since 2000, except for two cases, and in both cases, they were the ones that won. In 2007, they won a narrow victory in a constitutional amendment referendum. The government at the time, led by Hugo Chávez, immediately accepted the results and went on with it. So that’s pretty interesting. Edmundo Gonzalez, as I said earlier, called on his supporters to go out on the streets and defend their victory. And what that has meant in practice has meant tens of thousands of people going out at night and setting fires to things, attacking police, burning down pharmacies, burning buildings, even we saw in one city that a hospital was set on fire.

These, as I said, are political targets. They’re not going after businesses or whatever, they’re going after very politicized targets like hospitals and schools, which are very contentious things in Venezuela because the right wing doesn’t want to pay for those. They think that the oil industry money should be going to the oil industry executives and to shareholders. And so they hate the fact that they have to walk past these things every day, especially when they’re called things like the Hugo Chávez Maternity Clinic, and they have to be reminded that they had to endure, what, 14 years of rule by this guy that they consider a horrible dictator. So that’s where the opposition is. They’re being supported by the United States and a handful of countries in Latin America, but only a couple of days after the election, dozens of countries had come out and endorsed the Maduro victory. So I’m not really sure where this is going.

The United States has already recognized Edmundo Gonzalez as the legitimate president of the country, so we might be in for Juan Guaido two-point-oh operation where the U.S is going to try and support some sort of parallel government. How long that actually lasts really remains to be seen.

Michael Fox:

I think one of the interesting things, Alan, and I’m so glad you mentioned that about the opposition actually calling fraud in every election over the last 20 years because that’s what I saw firsthand. I covered several elections in the two thousands. I was there for 2007. I remember they did not call fraud for that one when they won it. But I think one of the interesting things this time around is that the opposition says they actually have the voting rolls and that they’ve started to publish some of those online. People can actually go onto the opposition’s website and see what they themselves have voted while the National Electoral Council website is down. So it…

Michael Fox:

… while the National Electoral Council website is down. So it’s like they’re garnering support and it seems like, with the mainstream media in particular, and obviously the United States, it almost seems like they’re saying, “Look, we are more legitimate than the National Electoral Council.” That’s the game that they’re trying to play.

So I guess my question for you, how substantial is it that they’re claiming to have even more validity than the National Electoral Council and how much clout does the National Electoral Council have right now kind of in Venezuela, right? Because it’s almost like this polarization of these two worlds. We simply see that media, obviously you have the pro-government media and then the opposition media, the countries completely polarized, but it’s almost now it depends on who do you trust, right? Do you trust the opposition and their voting roles that they say are online? Or do you trust the National Electoral Council, which has now been hacked and you can’t even get on their website?

Alan MacLeod:

Yes. I’m glad you brought that up again because I was meaning to talk about the opposition in the opposition’s methodology. In that last answer, I got sidetracked talking about that CI-linked American polling organization.

Yeah, so the way the opposition’s methodology works was they sent their supporters to every polling station in the country to watch the election results and to count the ballots themselves, or at least watch the ballots being counted. And what they did was, they had representatives looking at every single table in the country, and those representatives would then send WhatsApp messages on a group chat, which had all the information about the voters and how many people voted for each candidate. And then that would be tabulated by some sort of central opposition organization in CARACAS, and then they would have their own figures to publish. As you said, this happened at exactly the same time that the CNE, the National Electoral Council, their website got hacked and was taken down.

Now, opposition supporters who were talking to me showed me how this worked, and he showed me all the results that were coming in on his phone about which states was going where and which polling stations were showing what. And the results that were being brought into on his phone seemed frankly quite ludicrous to me, if I’m quite honest. You would see things like, “Polling Station 6, Lara Province, and then a town.” And they would say things like “Votes on Table 1, Maduro, 95. Gonzalez, 1,150. Others, 33.” If these things are to believed, Gonzalez would’ve won a victory, just a gigantic victory, an absolutely crushing landslide over landslide to end all landslides.

This really doesn’t seem to tabulate with other sorts of empirical data I got. If Maduro is so hated and unpopular that the opposition is getting three or four times the votes that he got, how was he able to pull almost 2 million people onto the streets in CARACAS on a Thursday evening. CARACAS being a city with what? Four or 5 million people in its metro area. This was a gigantic show of force by the Chavistas.

A lot of polling has shown that the public is starting to get on board with the economic message. It’s clear that Venezuela is nowhere near in such a perilous situation it was in five years ago, and things are getting much better. Just looking around, all the shops are full of goods. People don’t seem to be absolutely on the verge of complete devastation as they were four or five years ago.

So frankly, I think the opposition’s methodology, it lacks quite a lot because this is based on humans reporting exactly what they saw. And if any of them get their figures wrong or are just frankly lying, then the entire process goes to pot. So the opposition’s numbers are basically based on their own supporters’ self-reporting what each voting machine spits out. And of course, we’re going to have a situation that, as I said, if any of them are not being entirely truthful, then the whole process falls apart. And even if they were being entirely truthful, why should the government or the people of Venezuela accept the numbers coming out of these opposition WhatsApp groups?

Michael Fox:

Exactly. Well, there’s also no way to double check or confirm whether that’s correct or not. That the whole idea that the Venezuelan electoral system is set up so that you can double check and, “Here’s the results. And here’s this.” And it’s all these checks and balances, whereas this is just the opposition saying, “This is what we have, and this is ours.”

There was even an article, I think it was in the New York Times, that they… And you may have even have shared it was in the Washington Post or the New York Times, they said something like, “Well, according to the opposition, they’re way in the lead and they’ve essentially won. But we have no way of actually double checking those figures or confirming that those figures are correct.” Right? But this gets back into that same question of, who do you trust? If you’re in the opposition, that’s who you trust. You trust the opposition. I mean, the same question of Trump or Bolsonaro or his third of the population that says, “We trust Trump or Fox News or Breitbart or our social media. And yes, there’s a globalist cabal that’s trying to take over the world and Trump’s trying to fight it,” and that’s what you believe, right? And so this is why it’s so frustrating with Venezuela.

Alan, I’m not going to take any more of your time. Is there anything else to add? And thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been fantastic.

Alan MacLeod:

Maybe the only thing I should add is that I was part of a foreign delegation that was there. The armed opposition motorcyclists actually stopped a whole busload of foreign dignitaries from leaving Venezuela. They actually overpowered the police and forced the foreign dignitaries for the bus to reverse and go back to the hotel. And so they missed, all missed their flights. So that should be a news story that should be going wild right now, that dozens of politicians and electoral observers were, at gunpoint, forced back to their hotel, but I haven’t seen that reported anywhere in the corporate media.

Michael Fox:

Unbelievable. Alan, what do you see for the coming days, weeks, months? I know you don’t have a crystal ball, but where do you think things are headed?

Alan MacLeod:

Well, maybe history is a good teacher here. If we look at what’s happened after pretty much every electoral campaign in Venezuela, and there are a lot of them, Venezuela has more elections than pretty much any country you can think of, the opposition has tend to cry foul after all of them. There tends to be violence afterwards. It’s not clear whether that situation is going to peter out, but I would imagine that the fact that, number one, Maduro seems to have won such a large victory, it might be seven, eight, even nine points by the time the counting is completely finished and ratified. And that number two, the army and police have already came out and said, “We are fully in support of the government. The opposition needs to accept the results,” means that I don’t think any sort of opposition campaign to topple the government is really going to achieve its maximal goal. What it could do is make Venezuela ungovernable, and it might encourage the United States to place even more sanctions and take an even more aggressive lying towards Venezuela. But that remains to be seen.

Michael Fox:

Alan, does the National Electoral Council, they need to give their final report?

Alan MacLeod:

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, I believe they have the digital result instantaneously, but they also have to count every single paper ballot. And that does take quite a long time, especially because Venezuela is a very large country. There are very large parts of the nation, which are pretty much cut off from the rest of them. I mean, a huge part of Venezuela is actually gigantic jungles and forests and stuff. It’s an Amazonian country. And so it does take a while for officials to tally everything and get information out there. However, what I would say is it took the United States 30 days to formally ratify and count everything from the last election, and it’s only been a handful of days here in Venezuela. So we might give them a few more days before sending in the troops.

Michael Fox:

It’s so important, because that’s what we heard within a day. Even the United States was coming out the Carter Center, everybody else saying, “Well, we want everything. We want to see it all right now. And if you don’t, well then clearly something bad happened.”

Alan, I want to close with, what can people do when they’re watching news, they’re seeing information about Venezuela and they’re not sure what to believe? Where can people go? What can people do?

Alan MacLeod:

Well, in general, I guess the short answer is stop watching corporate media and start getting your news from more credible sources, from people who actually know the country. You should be looking at alternative media like the Real News, like our local Tribune, Venezuelanalysis, MintPress, wherever you want to look. But in the long term, I think you really have to develop critical media literacy skills, and that takes a little bit of time.

First thing I would say is you should be reading media from a wide range of sources and also a wide range of countries that will help you see biases inherent in your own country’s media that you might not be able to see otherwise, because you’ll see all sorts of different opinions, and you’ll be able to triangulate where the range of opinions is and start seeing biases on your own.

I would also say we have to start supporting and listening and reading to alternative media, media that is not controlled either by a government or by big corporations because they tend to have far fewer strains on the reporting and tend to do a much better job. And yet ultimately, I think we need to develop critical media literary skills. We always have to be constantly analyzing everything we read, asking where does it come from, who is writing it, what is their agenda, who is funding this organization. All sorts of questions like that. “Why are they saying it like this? Why are they choosing those words? What is the point of this article? What are they trying to get me to believe here?” Trying to understand all of those things. And really critically analyzing everything you read will turn you into a much more thoughtful person. And then suddenly you’ll be a human being rather than just a human doing. And I think that’s very important in this day and year.

Michael Fox:

Alan, incredible. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Alan MacLeod:

It’s been my pleasure, Michael.

Michael Fox:

That is all for this update to Under The Shadow. As always, if you like what you’re here, please check out my Patreon page, patreon.com/MFOX. There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. Under the Shadow’s a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. The theme song is by my band Monte Perdido. This is Michael Fox. Many thanks. See you next time.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.