Times after Times

The New York Times continues to demonize Hugo Chávez, shading its coverage and - shall we say - choosing its terms carefully. Here are the first two paragraphs of a story to be printed in Monday's edition:

Faced with shortages of foods, building materials and other staples, President Hugo Chávez is intensifying state control of the Venezuelan economy through a new wave of takeovers of private companies and the creation of government-controlled ventures with allies like Cuba and Iran.

The moves come just months after voters rejected a referendum to give the president sweeping constitutional power over the economy and public institutions, leading to new accusations that Mr. Chávez is more interested in consolidating power than in fixing Venezuela’s problems.

So the very first sentence raises the specter or a failing economy, references "intensifying state control" through a "wave of takeovers" and rings in "allies ... Cuba and Iran," and the second implies (falsely) that this is in contradiction to the results of the constitutional referendum and gives voice to Chávez's opponents before providing a single detail about what is actually going on.

It continues in that vein, referring to "socialist-inspired changes" and intoning darkly that foreign investment - the Holy Grail of the globalization crowd - has declined before bringing up investments with Cuba and Iran a second time.

It's only after all that, in the 12th paragraph, that the article mentions an investment "potentially of greater impact" than the ones with the scary, scary bad countries: one with China, no longer a scary, scary bad country to people like the Times and therefore, it would seem, unworthy of mention higher in the story. What's more, it's only in the 14th paragraph that the story admits that the new policies "are working relatively well."

And it's only in the 21st paragraph and only after reprising "threats of expropriation," that the story manages to gulp out the single admission that

the public sector accounts for less than a third of the economy even after the latest nationalization wave. “The present government is so far mainly just reversing some of the privatization that took place in the 1990s,” [Washington-based economist Mark] Weisbrot said.

That, however, just prompted a final wave of accusations - with no response - of aspirations to unlimited power on Chávez's part. Such expressions of fear of an imminent but somehow never quite achieved Chávez dictatorship have been a consistent feature of US official attitudes toward (and US media coverage of) Chávez virtually since the day he was first elected. (I first mentioned it over four years ago.)

It's also clear that concerns about freedom and democracy are not the real driving force behind those expressions, since one thing that has been well-established over generations of human experience is that subjecting someone to continual threat and continual pressure is not the way to make them more open and trusting. It is, rather, Chávez's existence as a thorn in the US's side, his resistance to the globalized, bank-oriented, export-driven, elite-dominated, world economy so dear to the hearts of the neoliberals (in whose ranks the New York Times occupies a prominent position) that produces the steady drumbeat of opprobrium and doom-saying.

It's not necessary to approve of everything Hugo Chávez has done or will do to recognize that US officials and media both have displayed continual and deep bias against him and his government, a pattern in which the Times has been a major - and, as this article demonstrates, unrepentant - offender.