A Force for Democracy? Representations of the US Government in American Coverage of Venezuela

Alan Macleod

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2018.00064

Abstract

Abstract: Since the election of Hugo Chavez the United States has played a highly questionable role interfering in Venezuelan politics, funding, training and supporting attempts at coups to remove democratically elected presidents. Yet the American media (The New York Times, Washington Post and Miami Herald) have presented the US overwhelmingly positively, portraying it as a force for democracy and stability in the region, contrary to the wealth of official evidence. This content and discourse analysis study focuses on the coverage of four key events in recent Venezuelan history and concludes that the concept of “democracy” in the media is automatically applied to official US policy, whatever it happens to be. Thus, the official American ideology of its fundamental benevolence and exceptionalism is not disputed, even when circumstances clearly challenge this concept.

Highlights

The idea that the United States is different to all other nations in that it is fundamentally benevolent, that it is uninterested in empire or glory, and that it seeks only freedom and democracy for all people can be traced back to before its inception
In order to answer the question of how the press portrays the United States, a sample of 302 articles was taken from three leading titles, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Miami Herald
Across the sample period there was a very strong tendency for the official ideology of the United States to be regurgitated in the publications studied, with 164 identifications as the US as a force for democracy and 54 identifications as it being a force against it

Summary

Introduction

The idea that the United States is different to all other nations in that it is fundamentally benevolent, that it is uninterested in empire or glory, and that it seeks only freedom and democracy for all people can be traced back to before its inception. Alexis de Tocqueville popularized this American exceptionalism in academia in his two-volume Democracy in America (1835, 1840), that argued,. “The position of the Americans is quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Let us cease, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people” Huntington (1993, p. 83) writes that a world without US dominance would be a world with more violence and disorder and less democracy and economic growth

Methods

Results

Conclusion