Thread by @AlanRMacLeod

[Thread] Western media's finest propagandists are pulling out all the stops, trying to delegitimize the elections in Venezuela 🇻🇪.

In this thread, I'll dissect their tactics, line by line, using this BBC article as an example, so you can understand how they do it.

First sentence in, and they have already poisoned the well, directly asserting that Nicolas Maduro "controls" the election, and that the whole process is "carefully curated."

Second: They breathlessly repeat opposition claims of fraud, without informing readers that the opposition has claimed they have won literally every single election since 2000, have produced zero evidence for this, and have, every time, been proven to be lying.

Not telling readers this is a crime against journalism and tantamount to incitement.

This is absollutely ludicrous. There are plenty of opposition-aligned media here.

And the idea that a single person in Venezuela doesn't know that the opposition claims they won is ridiculous.

This phrase deliberately casts socialism as a dying, unpopular movement in Venezuela.

This is probably the most blatantly egregious lie media tell about Venezuela.

Maduro was able to attract a massive crowd to his final pre-election rally in Caracas. Some estimtes put the number as high as 2 million people (see the pic in the next tweet).

Maduro's supporters are as enthusiastic as they are numerous, and his final rally drew "at least five times" as many people as the opposition's final rally, according to an international election observer who spoke to me after attending both.

The kind of rally that a dying, unpopular figure with barely any supporters puts on, according to the BBC.

I took a 20-minute bus ride from my hotel to get to the front. The back of the rally reportedly stretched almost all the way back to the hotel.

"The international community", in mediaspeak is a codeword for the United States and its allies, and always has been.

Many countries -- from regional neighbors to global powers -- have already endorsed the elections.

Polls in Venezuela are notoriously bad, and many of them are directly funded and supported by the CIA, through its National Endowment for Democracy program.

These US-funded polls exist to present the government as falling, and the opposition as extremely popular, in order to:

1. Gin up support for US-backed candidates in Venezuelan elections.
2. Give media something to cite, to make it seem like the government is about to fall, so it can bolster the "elections in Venezuela are fraudulent" narrative.

Media like the BBC regularly cite polling organizations who were off by up to 60 points during the last elections. That's akin to an American pollster confidently predicting the Green Party will sweep all 50 states.

Some of these polls' methodology is laughable, and are literally based on Twitter polls (!)

Furthermore, there were plenty of polling organizations showing that Maduro was going to win comfortably -- or even by a landslide. Why does the BBC never cite those ones? We know why: because it would burst their regime change narrative.

Apparently, all this, for the BBC, is "indisputable."

So let's dispute it.

I visited five polling stations in Caracas. Only one of them featured huge queues. The other four were running smoothly. (Interestingly, the huge lines were at a polling station in a strongly pro-government area).

This part sounds extremely unlikely to me.

I, and other international obervers with me, faced zero barriers from entering any polling stations we wanted.

The reception from electoral workers ranged from amicable to polite indifference. We saw nothing out of the ordinary like this.

Interestingly, some of the polling stations were run by election officials who were openly members of the opposition.

The chief of one polling station in central Caracas told me, a foreign journalist (plus observers from Zambia, South Africa, and the United States that I was with at the time) that she was a member of the opposition, that she strongly disliked the government, and that the country was in a shambles.

Nevertheless, she said, she had complete faith in the electoral system itself.

Throughout the day, the words electoral workers we spoke to across the city used most to describe proceedings that day were "tranquilo" (calm) and "fluido" (fluid).

I walked around with a camera and a tripod all day, and no one took any notice of me or any of the other foreign media I travelled with, except to welcome us and thank us for covering the elections. This included opposition supporters, who seemed happy that we were there, and more than happy to tell us what they thought of Maduro.

Allegations? From whom? Nameless nobodies that the BBC could easily just have conjured from thin air.

I obviously haven't spoken to everyone in Venezuela to check, but media have used this canard to demonize the elections in Venezuela for over 20 years, without providing much proof.

Furthermore, there have been empirical studies of this claim. For the 2013 elections, for example -- Maduro's first electoral victory -- the US-funded anti-chavista organization, the Carter Center looked at this exact question, and did an anonymous survey of the Venezuelan population.

What they found was that less than 1% of Venezuelans report feeling pressured in any way at all to vote in a certain way. And twice as many people reported being pressured into voting for the opposition candidate than for Maduro.

(Source: pages 68 -69 of this document - cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs…)

The idea that poor people's vote can be bought for nothing more than a parcel of food is an extremely old - and, frankly, racist - canard, that goes back well over twenty years in reporting on Venezuela.

I wrote an entire academic paper on the dehumanizing way in which media dismiss working-class Venezuelans as sheep, whose loyalty can be bought with nothing more than some booze or a sandwich.

It has its roots in the days when rich Venezuelans would openly say that poor people should not be allowed to vote.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

One of the most important ways in which deceitful media can present Venezuela as a dictatorship is by providing context-less half truths.

Here is a great example.

It is true that major opposition figures like Maria Corina Machado have been banned from running.

But what is the context behind this ban?

Just a few years ago, Machado went to the Organization of American States, (for some reason, as a representative of Panama) and tried to organize a US-led invasion of Venezuela!

She has also led waves of terroristic violence that targeted schools, hospitals, universities, public housing, and any other symbol of the collectivist society the chavistas are trying to build. This violence has killed huge numbers of people and done billions of dollars of damage to the country.

She has also attempted to organize an Israeli-led invasion of Venezuela.

In any other country, she would have spent the rest of her life in prison, if not have been executed. But in Venezuela, her primary punishent is that she can't hold office for a certain time period.

Another extremely common tactic of dishonest journalists is to present facts as accusations and accusations as facts, when it suits them.

We have already seen anonymous allegations presented as pieces of hard evidence.

But here we see the fact that sanctions have destroyed the country being presented merely as an "excuse" that President Maduro uses for his misrule.

US goverment documents explicitly state that the goal of sanctions are to "bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government."

Anti-Venezuelan government academics in the US have calculated that US sanctions caused Venezuela to lose 99% of its international income.

And yet the idea that sanctions are significantly to blame for Venezuela's woes is still presented by our media as a marginal conspiracy theory.

Very often in corporate/establishment media, the most important information is in the final paragraph. And here is no exception. It explains the reason for all these lies and half truths:

Venezuela has massive oil reserves that the US wants, and is an ally of many of the US' key global enemies.

That is why there is such a big push right now to remove the rightful government from power.

Remember: before they send in the troops, they send in the journalists first.

If you liked this thread, please follow me and @MintPressNews for more, or read my most recent article on the incredible links of solidarity between Venezuela and Palestine.

mintpressnews.com/solidarity-ven…

Another extremely common tactic of dishonest journalists is to present facts as accusations and accusations as facts, when it suits them.

We have already seen anonymous allegations presented as pieces of hard evidence. But here we see the fact that sanctions have destroyed the country being presented merely as an "excuse" that President Maduro uses for his misrule.

US goverment documents explicitly state that the goal of sanctions are to "bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government."

Anti-Venezuelan government academics in the US have calculated that US sanctions caused Venezuela to lose 99% of its international income.

And yet the idea that sanctions are significantly to blame for Venezuela's woes is still presented by our media as a marginal conspiracy theory.

Very often in corporate/establishment media, the most important information is in the final paragraph.

And here is no exception. It explains the reason for all these lies and half truths: Venezuela has massive oil reserves that the US wants, and is an ally of many of the US' key global enemies.

That is why there is such a big push right now to remove the rightful government from power.

Remember: before they send in the troops, they send in the journalists first.

If you like this thread, please follow me, and check out my latest article, where I spoke to dozens of US election observers, and found that their views are quite different to those of the US government.

mintpressnews.com/venezuela-whil…