News coverage of current political strife in Venezuela serves as a fresh reminder that U.S. mainstream newspapers and broadcasters too often deliver remarkably biased “news” reports on sensitive global topics.
The extreme bias in U.S. reports about Venezuela frequently appears also in coverage of such other topics as Syria, Palestine and Russia – regardless of repeated reassurances to audiences by the relevant outlets that they are committed to professional standards of fairness, accuracy and unbiased coverage.
Clearly, that’s not the case on certain topics.
The corporate media — including the prestigious newspaper outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post — consistently portray leaders of Venezuela, Syria and Russia as bloodthirsty dictators with no semblance of popular appeal. That's despite independent evidence that they have won elections (unlike some tyrants counted as strong U.S. allies) and probably could continue to do so in fair elections, according to independent popularity polls and other evidence.
In the meantime, the U.S. and other Western media puff up opponents seeking to overthrow these governments while the "news" outlets show their support by minimizing negative coverage of opposition figures.
For example, Juan Guaidó (shown at left in the adjoining photo), the U.S.-anointed and self-declared “interim president” of Venezuela, has only a slender semblance of a constitutional right to seize power by the terms of his nation's constitution.
U.S. news reports typically describe Guaidó as head of his nation's National Assembly. But very few reporters delve deep enough to report his tiny plurarily of 26 percent in winning his seat or the enormous effort that the United States has exerted on his behalf, including via presssure on other governments and via CIA and other covert means in the tradition of the "Monroe Doctrine."
Similarly, U.S. audiences are rarely exposed to the dominance within Syrian rebels of Al Qaeda and similar radical Islamist factions associated with 9/11 attacks.
The intensely negative media coverage of Palestinians is obvious also in the mainstream media. But it falls into a different category because it is typically paired with a flip-side of fawning coverage of Israel and its leaders. Those patterns reoccur even when the result is for the media to ignore for the most part the human rights abuses involved in Israel’s keeping Gaza residents, in particular, virtually powerless in an open-air prison in horrid living conditions.
Syria, Russia, Palestine and Israel are mostly beyond the scope of this column. Instead, it provides samples of Venezuelan recent coverage. One example is the March 4 news story below filled with flattering comments about Guaidó and the reporter's scorn for President Nicolás Maduro, shown above at right. We offer also an explanation for this pattern:
- First, the mass media are inherently susceptible to use for political advocacy, even deceitful advocacy (otherwise known as “propaganda”). That was true during the first years of the United States and it remains true today, as we shall see below in more detail.
- Second, the concept of professional standards of fairness, fact-checking and rendering “news” and commentary as a civic service and
not simply as a power-grab is being undermined by a variety of economic and political trends. The factors are too numerous to mention here. But, as indicated by our near-daily running account of Media News, the factors include the economic collapse of many news outlets because of web-related competition. That competition lessens costs of production / distribution for new entrants and siphons away advertising to such powerhouse competitors as Facebook and Google.
- Finally, the so-called “marketplace of ideas” has always been more fragile than commonly understood. That's because the ultimate “marketplace” is not so much outlets selling to consumers, but a far more complex market whereby much of the revenue comes from advertisers or other power players who have agendas that are far more targeted than simply providing information in a neutral manner. These power players include those who seek natural resources and other assets via regime change, oppressive loans or war.
"While it is not possible for the media to tell the population what to think," as longtime commentator Ben Bagdikian once wrote (in a quotation that I used in my 1987 book Spiked about media self-censorship and economics), "they do tell the public what to think about."
To expand on the last point, traditional print media have typically relied on economic models whereby one-quarter or so of revenue might 
come from subscriptions and three quarters from advertising. For broadcasters, all revenue came from advertising, with lots of that income from political organizations during election years.
Social media like Facebook and related high-tech services like Google have many leaders who are intimately connected with Wall Street and the military-intelligence complex. They typically mingle at such elite gatherings as the Bilderberg and Davos conferences, took the process to its logical extreme whereby the customer does not typically pay anything and is instead the commodity whose attention and privacy being sold to purveyors of messaging.
Further complicating the media landscape, many brand name outlets known to consumers are owned by conglomerates with shifting and otherwise hard-to-discern agendas.
For example, AT&T has been reassembled in large part after once being broken up on antitrust grounds. It has recently acquired Time Warner with its array of content providers like CNN, TNT and HBO.
As 
reported by the New York Times on March 4 in AT&T Assembles a Media Team, Joining a Battle With Giants, "On Monday the company took a step closer to becoming something never before seen on the American corporate landscape — part telecommunications behemoth and part media-entertainment giant."
explanation of why he broadcast on Monday a photo of her with "crosshairs" next to her head.
to Stone — and that he was very fortunate to escape bond revocation given the overall circumstances, including the judge's expressed disbelief at some of Stone's explanations for his behavior.
Conference; Reverend James M. Lawson Jr., a close collaborator of Reverend King; and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [shown at right in his Twitter photo] and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, children of the late senator.
The joint statement -- which was co-written by Adam Walinsky (left), a speechwriter and top aide of Senator Kennedy -- declares that these “four major political murders traumatized American life in the 1960s and cast a shadow over the country for decades thereafter. John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were each in his own unique way attempting to turn the United States away from war toward disarmament and peace, away from domestic violence and division toward civil amity and justice. Their killings were together a savage, concerted assault on American democracy and the tragic consequences of these assassinations still haunt our nation.”
The Truth and Reconciliation Committee views its joint statement as the opening of a long campaign aimed at shining a light on dark national secrets. As the public transparency campaign proceeds, citizens across the country will be encouraged to add their names to the petition. The national effort seeks to confront the forces behind America’s democratic decline, a reign of secretive power that long precedes the recent rise of authoritarianism. “The organized killing of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK was a mortal attack on our democracy,” said historian James Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. “We've been walking in the valley of the dead ever since. Our campaign is all about recovering the truth embodied in the movement they led. Yes, the transforming, reconciling power of truth will indeed set us free."
Barr is shown at left in a screengrab from the hearing, with his wife at top right.
It's one of the most popular Sherlock Holmes detective stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. "Silver Blaze" describes s the apparent murder of the trainer of a successful race horse, Silver Blaze (shown in an 1892 illustration by Sidney Paget), and the horse's disappearance on the eve of an important race.
Following a judicial clerkship, meanwhile, Barr went on to serve in a number of Justice Department posts in the Reagan-Bush administration, beginning in 1981.
experience and integrity.
similar investigations. Those probes most notably involve Mueller's ongoing probe Russian influence helping enable Trump's 2016 presidential election victory, among other alleged misconduct or crime.
The case’s drama included the defendant’s tearful apologies for wrongdoing that cost him both his job and threatened his marriage because the FBI exposed how Wolfe, shown in a file photo from an appearance on C-SPAN discussing security issues, had been having an affair with a young reporter.
She said that she would sentence him purely on the charge of lying in his plea agreement, but then said that he deserved jail time in part because he had violated his position of responsibility.
The judge noted, however, that Berger and Petraeus had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, unlike Wolfe.
Washington Post, 
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2019.
WMRD 1420 AM / WLIS 1150 AM (Middletown and Old Saybrook, Connecticut), 
director of the Justice Integrity Project and the author of Presidential Puppetry, joins S.T. Patrick to discuss presidential politics of the last 40 years. What should we have known about George H.W. Bush, Bill & Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, John Kerry, John Edwards, and John McCain?
Bush and the October Surprise, the Willie Horton ad, The Election of 1992, Ross Perot's deficiencies, what Fletcher Prouty still teaches us, the legitimacy of Bob Dole's 1996 nomination, the value of Jack Kemp, Bush v Gore, The Two Johns: Kerry & Edwards, the real John McCain, and much more.