By Ted Snider
March 05, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - The mainstream media is full of images and stories of Venezuela’s inhumanely authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro pushing American offerings of humanitarian aid away from Venezuela’s border with Columbia.
The mainstream media serves us up our offerings of news as if each headline story was an isolated event, floating alone on an a historical sea, unmoored from the events that came before it. Severed from its causes and context, the event can be created for the public in an original, but misleading, way. Restoring the history can clarify the story and prevent its misappropriation.
In the current case of U.S. aid to Venezuela, the restoration of the picture requires at least four pieces of history being painted back into the picture.
The Bridge: Pictures Don’t Lie. People Do.
The story of Maduro’s neglect of his people and his rejection of American aid begins on the Francisco de Paula Santander bridge that connects Venezuela to Columbia.
US officials and the mainstream media cried the same complaint in unison. America had tried to deliver humanitarian aid to the people of Venezuela, and their illegitimate ruler had blocked the bridge and kept it out. But the cry and the photos of the bridge had been manipulatively severed from history. Maduro didn’t block the bridge because it was already blocked, and he couldn’t close the bridge because it had never been opened. Most of the barriers have been there for years because, after the bridge was built in 2015, it has never been opened.
And yet, that image of a stone hearted Maduro was used to cement public opinion against him. The images join a long history of pictures being presented out of historical context to mold public opinion and justify intervention.
The chorus of cries and photographs later went on to claim that Maduro’s national guard had set the aid trucks on fire. But as the event on the bridge had been severed from the history that came before it, so the picture of the burning trucks had been presented in the media severed from the pictures that came before it. As Max Blumenthal has reported, footage, photographs and video taken before the photographs of the burning trucks seem to clearly prove that the aid trucks were set alight by the masked and violent members of the opposition.
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