Obama Calls Chavez a "Demagogue' - The Pot Calling the Kettle Black
Source: In May 2008, Barack Obama gave a speech in Miami where he argued that President Bush's flawed foreign policy in the Middle East had swerved our eyes off the Latin American prize, rendering the U.S. "incapable of advancing our interests in the region." He went on to say, "No wonder, then, that demagogues like Hugo Chavez have stepped into this vacuum. His predictable yet perilous mix of anti-American rhetoric, authoritarian government, and checkbook diplomacy offers the same false promise as the tried and failed ideologies of the past." A few months later at the Republican National Convention, Mitt Romney railed from the rostrum that Republicans, "will strengthen our economy and keep us from being held hostage by [Vladimir] Putin, [Hugo] Chavez and [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad. And we will never allow America to retreat in the face of evil extremism!" Such harsh assessments of Hugo Chavez—as a demagogue with a high dictator quotient, someone whose oil wealth allows him to interfere in the region and who's mentioned in the same breath as supposed proponents of "evil extremism"—have become a common feature of U.S. political banter.Bashing Hugo Chavez, it seems, has become as bi-partisan as grandiloquent campaign promises to reform Washington. But politicians will be politicians. The bigger-impact question is whether the mainstream press in the U.S. has adopted the same contemptuous mentality. As arbiters of reality, the media set the social goalposts for how we view the world and prioritize particular social issues over others.
The way the media present news veers us toward perceiving certain issues as problems, certain activists as troublemakers, certain personalities as scalawags. Mass-media scholars identify "frames," or, persistent patterns of selection and emphasis that structure not only what becomes news, but also prime us for how to think about that news. By selecting particular features of the undulating political complex and deeming these features important, the media play a critical function in the ebb and flow of socio-political power. Venezuela mavens have long suspected Chávez has been given the short end of the U.S. media stick. For instance, Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) wrote that the U.S. government has actively attempted "to demonize Chavez and de-legitimize the democratic government of Venezuela" and that "the U.S. and international media have enthusiastically embraced this agenda."
In a scholarly article I wrote—"Devil or Democrat?: Hugo Chávez and the U.S. Prestige Press"— that's forthcoming in the peer-review journal New Political Science (March 2009), I systematically test Weisbrot's hunch.
In this analysis I found that the U.S. prestige press—meaning the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post—adopted four dominant frames when reporting on Chávez: the Dictator Frame, the Castro Disciple Frame, the Declining Economy Frame, and the Meddler-in-the-Region Frame.
This study analyzed 979 articles that appeared in these publications during the ten-year time period between 1998, the year he was first elected president, and December 2007. More...