Reply #20: You are right [View All]

[Jcrowley]

but you got it all wrong.

Imagine a society where almost all private media, in accordance with the interests of the dominant class that owns and controls them, have made a conscious decision to subordinate their advertising, political "reporting" and publication of "polls" to the goal of overthrowing a democratically elected government. Venezuelans have no difficulty imagining this; the country's private media are completely devoted to the overthrow of a government that they consider insufficiently subservient to their interests.

The absence of politically pluralistic private media should not be very difficult for U.S. citizens to imagine either, since --to the extent that private U.S. media cover Venezuela-- they too are largely united in their hostility toward the Chavez government, for much the same reasons that private Venezuelan media are. The interests of the powerful demand that political debate exist only within narrow bounds. Thus, to move outside those bounds --in other words, to actually challenge powerful economic interests and to question the imperialist behavior upon which those interests depend-- is generally not considered acceptable "journalistic" behavior.

Venezuela's private media have essentially become a vast echo chamber, where debate is limited to tactical questions of how best to extinguish the threat to dominant class interests. Unfortunately, the de-pluralization of political discourse within private media tends to have highly degenerative effects on the rational faculties of those sectors of society that either belong to the economic elite or come under the mesmerizing influence of its propaganda apparatus.