Latin American corporate news is spun pro-US: "Nicaraguan media and regional context"

[Judi Lynn]

Nicaraguan media and regional context
Wednesday, 20 June 2007, 10:39 am
Column: Toni Solo

Americanism abroad: Nicaraguan media and regional context
by Toni Solo

The perception management of foreign politics for imperialist propaganda purposes works across countries as a self-fuelling, one-sided Moebius-strip production line. Re-selling by corporate US media of the propaganda spin retailed as "news" by television channels in Venezuela is the best known example. An unusually flagrant exposé of this degenerative international media symbiosis occurred on Fox News recently when New York councillor Charles Barron was called a "son-of-a-bitch" by Adam Housley, Fox's correspondent in Caracas, during an exchange in which Barron contradicted Housley's mendacious reporting on Venezuela.

Disinformation and outright falsehoods broadcast in countries like Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico become fake virtual news that is then broadcast as if it were real in the imperial centres of North America, Europe and the Pacific. This in turn is made to produce a re-confected virtual reality that is then retailed back as the basic premise of news analysis by international corporate news outlets to media in the original source countries. The process not only validates the original propaganda but itself tends to generate yet more fake virtual news to feed the cycle.

Self-perpetuating and vicious, thoroughly disingenuous and totally political, this cycle is probably the single most important perception management mechanism for promoting Americanism. The cycle's purpose is to subordinate the interests of all the peoples of the Americas, and beyond, to the aims of the United States' plutocrat corporate elite and their allies. This all-pervasive perception management production line is at work constantly, almost everywhere in Latin America, but is especially noticeable in countries where governments develop strategies contrary to the policies of the US government, its European and Pacific allies and their respective multinational corporations.

The aggressive politicization of corporate media outlets and their disinformation output is an established fact throughout Latin America. Freedom of speech is regularly hijacked, given a brutal working over in corporate editorial conference rooms and then thrown back out onto the airwaves and the printed page. The corporate media make-over varies from country to country. In Venezuela, corporate editorial-brutalized freedom of speech gets dressed up as a victim of State repression. In Mexico and Colombia, it appears as the endlessly harrassed public good under threat from popular movements exercising basic rights but branded as vicious terrorists. The same corporate gangsterism is at work in Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua. It both serves and feeds dominant local corporate political options. Currently, Nicaragua is an especially good example of this phenomenon.

[Judi Lynn]

1. Sorry, I just noticed I didn't add the link to this article. Yikes.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=20&ItemID=13115