The European and Latin American press is giving prominence to a big step in reconciliation between Colombia and Venezuela that began immediately after the replacement of Alvaro Uribe as president of Colombia. The Spanish paper El Pais (www.elpais.com) reports, among others, that a high level and apparently quite cordial meeting between the two presidents and their foreign ministers took place today, and that bilateral relations are being reestablished.
You may yet have to hear about this in the domestic press. But you are justified. This, like other inconvenient information, is news you shouldn't know about.
If the policy of the United States is to diplomatically isolate Venezuela, this development must count as an important setback, if not a miserable failure.
On the other hand, the new Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, may be conservative, but he seems to place the interests of his country much higher than his predecessor did.
But the point of fundamental interest to us isn't the politics of either Venezuela or Colombia. The point for us is that this news is being avoided, at least until an angle can be found to spin it. CNN technically reports it, but only in the world section, and with a dismissive 1-line, 5-word link in a stack of 10. After the hiding comes the spin: the narrative is that this is a crisis meeting, and exaggerates the differences between the two heads of state.
And you can bet that news of this event will continue to be delayed, hidden, underreported, spun, avoided, and ultimately swept under the rug. Not because it is about Chavez. Because it is inconvenient news, which draws attention to the failures of our policy and puts an antagonist of our policy in a positive light. Such an inconvenient piece of news should get as little attention by the masses as possible, and be misinterpreted if it does. Thus, over time, regular disinformation produces a predominantly skewed view of the world in the public, one which is often at odds with the views of the public outside our borders.
It would be a mistake to think that this is just about Chavez or about Venezuela or Latin America. This happens all the time, and it is just the latest of an endless string of similar cases (like the results of the recent elections in Poland, for example). It is about us and our right to base our opinions on timely and reliable information.
Update: I really like how one of the comments appended summed it up:
We have come to believe propaganda is a legitimate tool of governance, to the point where news orgs do it proactively.