Oh, look, it’s another bogus “study” from the Media Research Center! Take it away, Mike Ciandella:
Just this year alone, more than 50 people have been killed protesting the heartbreaking malpractice of Venezuela’s socialist dictatorship. According to the IMF, inflation will surpass 700% this year, while unemployment will hit 25%; shortages of necessities such as food and medicine are rampant. The socialist president has cracked down on any opposition, and used the Venezuelan Supreme Court to nullify the election of an opposition-controlled Congress.
Yet the Big Three evening newscasts have tried to pretend this crisis does not exist, offering virtually no coverage as the situation has deteriorated over the past four years. A new study by the Media Research Center found that from March 2013 (after the death of strongman Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez) through May 29, 2017, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening news shows have aired a mere 25 stories, totaling 28 minutes, 39 seconds of coverage — barely 30 seconds per month — to the rapidly worsening situation in Venezuela. In this same time period, approximately 50,000 individual news stories on other topics aired on these broadcasts (our Bias by the Minute database shows a little more than 1,000 stories per month, and the time frame looks at slightly more than 50 months).
The networks have also been reluctant to attach the “socialist” label to Venezuela’s government, and have utterly failed to criticize liberal politicians and celebrities who have praised the Chavez and Maduro regimes.
Despite calling himself a “research analyst” for the MRC, Ciandella apparently failed to do the most basic bit of analysis for this piece: whether socialism is, in fact, to blame for the crisis in Venezuela.
As we’ve pointed out before when the MRC made this argument about the increasingly dire situation in Venezuela, actual economic experts say that the fault lies more with a plunge in oil prices in an economy based on oil exports, a mismanaged economy and rampant corruption and cronyism in the Venezuelan government than with socialism in and of itself.
Ciandella offers no evidence to back up his contention that socialism is the sole cause of the Venezuelan crisis. Instead, he seems to think that because the government there called itself socialist, it must be and, thus, must be the reason it failed.
Ciandella is simply assuming that his very narrow selection of media failed to sufficiently mention “socialism” in regard to Venezuela because it’s biased. Since Ciandella failed to do his basic homework for this study, he does not consider the possibility that they did and, thus, they know that socialism is not the sole cause.
And that is how the MRC uses its kneejerk right-wing bias to botch another “study.”