Here is an interesting article by Kathryn Blackhurst, writing for LifeZette.com. The article reports on how the mainstream media has covered the situation in Venezuela, which has been under socialist rule for decades.
Kathryn explains:
Out of approximately 50,000 total evening news stories on ABC, CBS and NBC combined in the last four years, just 25 have covered the ongoing crisis in socialist Venezuela, according to a Media Research Center study published Tuesday.
After Venezuela’s former socialist president, Hugo Chávez, passed away in March 2013, the country has spiraled into economic disaster and civil chaos. So far in 2017, more than 50 Venezuelans have been killed during protests against current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his socialist policies. Many Venezuelans are starving due to shortages of food and other essentials. The country’s inflation rate is set to surpass 700 percent and 25 percent of Venezuelans will be unemployed.
“Yet the Big Three evening newscasts have tried to pretend this crisis does not exist, offering virtually no coverage as the situation has deteriorated over the past four years,” MRC Research Analyst Mike Ciandella wrote.
“The networks have also been reluctant to attach the ‘socialist’ label to Venezuela’s government, and have utterly failed to criticize liberal politicians and celebrities who have praised the Chávez and Maduro regimes,” Ciandella added.
Indeed, out of the 50,000 total evening news stories on the three networks, just 25 covered Venezuela, and only seven mentioned “socialism.” In addition, NBC Nightly News only broadcast 13 stories spanning 16 minutes and 54 seconds, ABC’s World News only covered 8 minutes and 34 seconds over seven stories, and CBS Evening News only offered 3 minutes and 11 seconds over five stories.
“The network evening news programs seem allergic to reporting on the ongoing crisis in Venezuela,” Ciandella told LifeZette in an email. “Even worse, the few times they have managed to cover the widespread poverty, starvation and government oppression in that country, they somehow find ways to do that without mentioning the word ‘socialism.’”
That’s why your children can go through public schools and consume mainstream media news without ever understanding what effects follow from left-wing socialist economic policies. There just isn’t anyone intelligent and honest enough in the mainstream media to give the historical context that explains what policies were tried in the past, which resulted in the effects in the present.
Economist Stephen Moore has more about the situation in Venezuela, in this Investors Business Daily article.
He writes:
Venezuela is a human rights crisis of epic proportions with mass hunger, mass poverty, despair, ghetto upon ghetto, and a mass exodus of private businesses and anyone with money. There are no rich and no evil corporations to loot anymore. The inflation rate is almost 500% as the currency is now about as valuable as Monopoly money.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Venezuela now employs 100,000 security forces — not to repel foreign threats or invaders, but to keep the government leaders like corrupt president Nicolas Maduro safe from their own citizens. Adjusted for population size, this would be the equivalent of one million Americans employed every day to stop riots in the streets. More than 40 protesters have been shot so far this year by the guardsmen.
The average pay has fallen to less than $50 — not per day, or per week, but per month. How’s that for a minimum wage? The people eat dogs if they can find them and the world was shocked by the story earlier this year of the raid on the municipal zoo to eat the animals. How bad off does a population have to be to start carving up elephant meat?
The burgeoning resistance throws molotov cocktails, rocks and even human feces at the security forces during the nonstop rioting. It’s like a scene out of an HBO movie. “I don’t fear death because this life is crap,” one protester told the WSJ.
[…]What is stunning about this story is that this is a nation that was once one of the wealthiest places in South America. Unlike places such as Subsaharan Africa where extreme poverty is the norm, there is no excuse for Venezuala’s steep fall into the abyss because this is a resource-rich nation.
Under thug Hugo Chavez the former socialist dictator, Venezuela began its relentless conquest of private wealth and it’s process of nationalizing private enterprises. Chavez was lionized by the American left and the Hollywood elite — Sean Penn and Chavez were BFFs — for his “progressive” policies.
There’s literally no difference between the views of Chavez and Maduro and mainstream Democrat economic policy in the United States. They’re just further along the road to serfdom than we are, because their population is less economically literate than we are. For now.
I’d be willing to bet that many of these starving protestors in Venezuela voted over and over again for the socialists. That’s what happens when people vote with their feelings instead of knowledge of basic economics. But where would ignorant Venezuelans have picked up a knowledge of basic economics? Come to think of it… where would ignorant American millenials, who hold entire conversations in memes, pick up a knowledge of basic economics? They certainly wouldn’t get it from public schools teachers or the mainstream media “journalists”.
