As I just wrote in Telesur, for almost two decades, opponents of the Venezuelan government have made the western media their stomping ground. Since Trump’s election, many have also postured as part of the resistance to Trump as in these articles:

In Venezuela, we couldn’t stop Chávez. Don’t make the same mistakes we did.

Donald Trump is no Hugo Chávez. He’s more like Nicolás Maduro 

However, Lilian Tintori, wife of jailed opposition leader, Leopoldo Lopez, just met with Donald Trump who, shortly afterwards, demanded the release of Lopez. Trump’s administration also just “sanctioned” Venezuela’s Vice President based on drug trafficking allegations.

Prominent anti-Chavista writer, Emiliana Duarte, took to the pages of the Atlantic to do some damage control: “How a Trump Tweet Upended My Country’s Politics“

Duarte wrote “Everyone here knows that the government is criminal, and we also know reporting on it is a quick way to wind up in jail“

Does she never read Venezuela’s largest newspapers or watch any of the major private TV broadcasters in Venezuela, or, does she know that a whopper like that goes unchallenged in the western media about 99% of the time?

The answer is obvious if you are at all familiar with Venezuela’s media.

Tintori just summarized her meeting with Trump for Globovision, one of the largest private TV networks in Venezuela.  

El Universal, one of Venezuela’s largest newspapers, posted a video of a press conference she gave about her meeting with Trump. In the video, Tintori demanded “action, not only words” from the United States and in which she also demanded Venezuela’s expulsion from the OAS.

Here is a 40 minute interview Tintori gave on Globovision last year where she said her husband has been tortured in jail.

Three years before that interview, in 2013, the Christian Science Monitor reported that “Globovisión, widely considered to be the last standing television station to aggressively criticize the Chávez regime, was sold last month to a group of businessmen believed to be friendly with the government.”  

During violent anti-government protests in 2014, Tintori gave lengthy tirades against the government on the largest private broadcaster Venevision, and also on Televen, the second largest.

As I’ve explained before, the largest newspapers and TV broadcasters in Venezuela constantly give voice to the harshest critics of the government. The western media has lied repeatedly about this basic and easily verified fact.

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