It probably isn't quite as bad eleswhere as Miami, given the right-wing obsession with the 'red menace' in Latin America that pervades and defines so much of the local media here, but even in the national media, there's been quite a bit of crowing about the defeat of the constitutional referendum in Venezuela, which is universally portrayed in the American media as a great victory for freedom and democracy, nonwithstanding that...

(a) the package of amendments included lowering the voting age to 16, decentralizing a lot of budget decisions to local assemblies, lowering the work day from 8 to 6 hours to give working-class people more opportunity to participate in those assemblies and making the leadership of the central bank elected rather than appointed,

(b) far from crazy and dictatorial to abolish them, term limits for the head of state are somewhat unusual in normal democracies (the U.S. didn't have Presidential term limits until post-FDR, since the Ameircan people elected him too many times for comfort, and the U.K. and most western european countriest still don't have term limits to the best of my knowledge) and, crucially...

(c) the only reason that the referendum lost (by a margin of 51% against to 49% for) is that that it had a far lower turn-out than any of the string of elections that Chavez's Bolivarian movement has easily won.

...and of course as my brother (who, for the sake of full disclosure, did some work earlier this year on a documentary for Venezuelan state TV) pointed out to me in a recent discussion on all of this, the most absurdly funny thing is the way that even supposedly "liberal" media outlets here in the States routinely refer to opposition protests in Venezuela as being a matter of a coalition "between" wealthy business interests on the other hand and college students on the other, as if these were two different groups.

Now kids, let's think about this. Venezuela is a third world country, where most of the population--even after years of what are by any remotely reasonable standards the maddeningly slow and timid reforms enacted by Chavez and his supporters--lives in what by U.S. standards is pretty extreme poverty. Who exactly do you suppose can *afford* to send their kids to college?

Anyway, this article was sent to me today by an old friend from the SPUSA. I think it puts a lot in perspective, and the first few paragraphs are worth quoting in full.

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In the case of Hugo Chavez and the Venezuelan Bolivarian Revolution, the mainstream media and politicians in the United States have elevated their game of demonizing all who oppose US foreign policy and business interests to a higher level of absurdity than usual. According to the mainstream media, the only newsworthy stories in Venezuela are one sided diatribes lifted from the discredited, opposition-owned media in Venezuela. For example, we read about Chavez shutting down opposition TV stations. We hear that Chavez is rewriting the Venezuelan Constitution so he can be President for life. Chavez is a dictator, QED.

All the badly outgunned, alternative media in the US can do is try its best to rebut the bias in the storylines defined by the mainstream media. The tiny fraction of Americans who visit the alternative media discover that Chavez has submitted a proposal to change the Venezuelan Constitution in a number of ways, one of which is to eliminate term limits on the office of President. All changes will first have to be approved by the democratically elected Venezuelan National Assembly, and then also approved in a popular referendum before they become law. Only Americans who search out the alternative media discover that Hugo Chavez was elected President by a comfortable margin in 1998, survived an opposition-sponsored recall in 2004, and most recently was re-elected in December 2006 with more than 60% of the vote. International observers certified all three elections as fair and square. George Bush, on the other hand, was selected President by a partisan Supreme Court after losing the popular vote in 2000, and won re-election only because enough black voters in Ohio were disenfranchised by a partisan Republican official to keep the Buckeye State in the Republican column in 2004. Few observers believe Bush could survive a recall election today, but of course this basic element of democratic rule is not permitted by the US Constitution. Nonetheless, the only storyline ninety-nine percent of Americans hear remains: Hugo Chavez is a dictator and George Bush is the democratically elected leader of the free world.

Similarly, only the small fraction of Americans who access the alternative media learn that RCTV was not shut down because it campaigns openly against the government -- which it has for nine years. Instead, when its license came up for renewal, its application was denied because it had violated 200 conditions of its licensing agreement -- many violations having to do with its role in helping to organize a military coup that nearly toppled the duly elected President of the country. Moreover, the station continues to broadcast on a cable network, and the opposition in Venezuela still broadcasts on more major TV channels than there are channels sympathetic to the government. In stark contrast, the alternative media in the US cannot be viewed on any major channel. Consequently the vast majority of Americans receive all their news from a mainstream media which never questions whether the US has any right to dominate other nations, but only debates the wisdom of alternative strategies for doing so, and would never dream of questioning the desirability of an economic system dominated by their corporate owners. Nevertheless the storyline most Americans hear remains: Freedom of the press is dead in totalitarian Venezuela, but alive and well in the democratic United States....

Read the rest here.