On Monday morning, Hallie Jackson ran a segment on MSNBC Live devoted to investigating the ills of Venezuela amid growing tensions in the South American country. For the entirety of the segment, neither the host nor her guest even mentioned the socialism that has bound the once prosperous nation to starvation.
If a foreign country that had decided to explicitly govern itself upon free market capitalism were to be inflamed with ceaseless riots, food shortages, and political unrest, the media would be foaming at the mouth to tar conservatism and its adherents as co-conspirators in fomenting the turmoil. When the avowedly socialist regime that overtook Venezuela implemented a $12.53 minimum wage, upheld a single-payer public health system, and resorted to the type of bread lines that Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has warmly endorsed erupts into unmitigated chaos, the media is unwilling to talk about the ideological buttress of the nation’s economic disaster, namely, socialism. Why is this?
Consider Andrew Klavan’s prophetic “First Rule of Mainstream Media Journalism”: “Whenever the prejudices and illusions of left-wingers are confirmed by an individual incident, the incident is treated as representative; when those prejudices and illusions are contradicted, the incident is considered an aberration — and treating it as representative is deemed hateful.”
We’ve seen this, of course, play out in the extrapolations about American racism made after Dylan Roof’s horrendous shooting of nine black churchgoers but the media’s comparative silence about the theological motivations of the Orlando terrorist, whose reference to Allah was censored out of the call log by then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch. But Klavan’s almost scientific postulate extends remarkably to the world of economics, in some sense- the media love to play fact-checkers when Republicans try to make arguments for the repeal of Obamacare, but they have been very cautious in their coverage of the damning study indicating the economic ill-effects of Seattle’s newly implemented minimum wage hike, even, as Forbes pointed out, to the point of outright dismissal of its results by the entire editorial board of The New York Times.
Venezuela is a case study, if not an outright rebuttal, of the proposition that people are docile in the face of government tyranny so long as that government “gives” them a certain bill of goods. Moreover, it is living proof of the regressive nature of statism- the once booming Venezuela now has a starving citizenry, 75% of which has lost an average of 19 pounds in the last year alone.
Don’t expect the media to let you know why.
