How Venezuela Government Made Media Its Ally

How Venezuela Government Made Media Its Ally

When former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was briefly deposed in a 2002 coup, the country's press reacted with unbridled enthusiasm. The daily newspaper El Nacional welcomed the day's events with the headline "One step forward." But that wasn't particularly surprising: Never in the history of Latin America had the media played quite so prominent a role in facilitating the overthrow of a democratically elected government. Gustavo Cisneros, Venezuela's answer to Rupert Murdoch, played a direct role in planning and funding the coup. At the time of the putsch, he owned Venevisión, a private TV channel that ran biased, even manipulated, coverage to incite support for the coup.

12 years later, Venezuela's media landscape looks very different.

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