Photo composition showing the logos of "independent" Venezuelan news outlets La Patilla, VPI, Efecto Cocuyo, EVTV, and El Pitazo with the USAID logo and US dollar bills in the background. Photo: CiudadCCS.
By Clodovaldo Hernández – Feb 22, 2025
The media and social media machinery is the great “normalizer” of all kinds of illegal situations, anomalies and perfidies. From a genocide to an island dedicated to celebrity pedophilia, everything can end up being something “normal,” as current daily events demonstrate.
However, sometimes, this machinery has the task of normalizing itself, of making its moral and ethical deformities, its shady dealings, and its malpractice look valid.
This is what is happening on a global scale, with the crisis of the business model of the so-called free and independent press in various countries after the suspension of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Thousands of organizations and individuals associated with the USAID, including editors, journalists, opinion leaders, and influencers have been exposed as entities supported by this arm of the US empire, which calls into question the most essential part of their very being: the independence and freedom that they proclaim as their values and principles.
In this article, let us take a look at the Venezuelan scene, where it has been proven, by information issued by USAID itself (and exposed by the fights among the opposition factions), what had previously been decried by government members, political parties, journalists, and revolutionary analysts: the media that claim to be independent are deeply dependent on funds supplied by a foreign agency.
And—just to emphasize the obvious—these are not funds from a nation that is beneficial by nature, a nation that dedicates its resources to helping the less fortunate, but from a hostile country, which since 2015 declared Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to its national security; a country whose government in practical terms declared and made war on us by imposing an economic blockade and almost a thousand unilateral coercive measures; an empire that stole a multi-billion dollar company from us and froze the foreign bank accounts of Venezuela; a state that even wanted to prevent the Venezuelan people from having access to vaccines in the midst of a pandemic.
During all these years, the media apparatus has been responsible for presenting all these aggressions and violations of the most basic international law as morally justifiable and politically legitimate. It has partially succeeded, taking advantage of the fanaticism and stupefaction of a part of the Venezuelan population, the work of those media outlets, and the imperialist cultural industry.
As for those who do not buy the story that the US does all this because it is concerned about the validity of democracy and respect for human rights, the media and social networks work to normalize interference and coercion as things that happen because the world is like that.
Is it moral and ethical?
Trying to answer this question means putting oneself in the position of throwing the first stone, which is not the case for almost anyone who has lived in this world for a while. But that same vital presence and a long career in the field of mass communications grants this author the right to express an opinion on the matter.
The first question should be transparency. Many of these media outlets and journalists have kept or attempted to keep their financial dependence on USAID (and other state and parastatal agencies of the US and other countries in the Global North) secret. This amounts to deceiving the public at its most essential level.
A key question arises here: can a media outlet be a guarantor of the truth if it attempts to conceal the origin of the funds that make its work possible?
Beyond this ontological issue, in 21st century Venezuela the ethical dilemma takes on another dimension, supported by the aforementioned fact that media interference has occurred in the context of multidimensional warfare.
The country that has paid these media outlets is a hostile power—it is necessary to repeat this. It is not as if these funds were provided by a hypothetical society of lovers of the free press who lived in some earthly paradise of democracy and freedom.
For explanatory purposes, we can draw a historical parallel with the only time in history when we had been in a conflict of this magnitude with an empire: let us imagine that in the 19th century this type of media had existed, and that in the years of the War of Independence, the Spanish Crown had financed a handful of such media to create an anti-independence narrative.
In a much more rudimentary way, this did occurred in the War of Independence and all wars in the bloody history of the world. In fact, the Venezuelan independence hero Francisco de Miranda and the Liberator Simón Bolívar understood this very well, and for this reason they adopted the precaution of fighting not only with firearms but also with the printing press. But this historical topic would involve a detour too long.
Is it politically legitimate?
Aligning oneself with a hostile power in the midst of an international political conflict is, to say the least, reprehensible behavior. But in the case of Venezuela in the last 15 years, it has even more serious aspects because during this time, political aggression has been only one part of the anti-Venezuela operations of the United States, its European allies and the Latin American oligarchies.
The role of these media, paid by USAID and other US and European agencies, in legitimizing these attacks cannot be minimized. These attacks have caused untold suffering to the general population, or as Venezuelan philosopher Miguel Ángel Pérez Pirela often describes it, to Chavistas, independents and even opposition supporters.
The media machinery subsidized by the Global North has supported everything that has been done against the Bolivarian Revolution, including assassination attempts, coups, invasions, electrical blackouts, attacks on the national currency, the plundering of CITGO, Monómeros and other Venezuelan assets abroad, foreign bank accounts and other assets, in addition to many other imperial “actions.”
This “free and independent” press has been fundamental in the creation of international media narratives such as the world’s largest migration crisis, the wave of xenophobia against Venezuelans in various countries, the terrorist narco-dictatorship, the classification of Venezuela as a threat to regional stability, political prisoners and persecuted people, the supposedly fraudulent results of the elections, and a long list of other editorial lines dictated from the office that writes the checks.
The normalization strategy
It is an uphill battle to try to justify morally, ethically or politically the partisan role that the self-proclaimed free and independent press has played in the fifth-generation war that is being waged against Venezuela.
So what remains is to normalize this way of being, to try to make it seem logical, natural, part of the pragmatic functioning of the world.
To do so, they have resorted to the argument of the childish fight: “he started it first” (it is said just like that, with all the redundancy). The editors of many of the media outlets financed by the USAID claim that they had to appeal to the money of hostile powers because the Venezuelan government (the regime, some of them keep saying), suffocated the earlier media ecosystem, that is, the set of large conventional media (newspapers, radio, and television) that overthrew Chávez, briefly, in 2002. So, to confront a media hegemony of the Venezuelan state, the new “free” press was born, with funds provided by another state.
They also use a very cunning method: presenting themselves as an alternative to conventional media, that is, as if they had been born and grown not to accelerate the “regime change” sponsored by the US, but as a response to that ecosystem in which the owners of the media were only the richest people of the country or of the regions where their companies operated.
It might be a credible argument, if not for two issues.
The first is that many of these conventional media outlets (and their owners) have re-formulated themselves to present themselves as if they were something new, and they receive stipends from USAID and other public and private agencies in the US and Europe. Thus, they are the old wine in a new bottle.
The second issue is that there is no ideological difference, and therefore no difference in the way journalism is conducted, between the old-style media and these new ones which have sprouted with US dollars. In a strict sense, this free and independent press has done the same job (dirty, let me use the adjective as a mere opinion) that the conventional hegemonic media did at the beginning of the century. The old media tried to overthrow Chávez (and they succeeded, although only for 47 hours), and the new media have tried to overthrow Nicolás Maduro, by supporting all the machinations of their true owners, the foreign financiers.
A third argument for presenting themselves as free and independent is that they were born from the initiative of “ordinary” journalists, thus crystallizing the oft-cherished utopia of the alternative press. It would be beautiful if it were true, but everything indicates that the ventures supported by foreign money have only served to reproduce the same model of the editors of yesteryear, who accumulated economic and political power and lived like celebrities, while their workers sweated hard for miserable salaries. Or, as a friend and colleague (an opposition supporter, by the way) defined it so well: “We are the same as before: millionaire media owners and poor journalists who, when they die, a hat will have to be passed around (now called crowdfunding) to bury them.”
The second part of this article will address other aspects of this broad topic, including the “business model” based on subsidies from the Global North and the possible reinvention of the media thus funded.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/SC
Clodovaldo Hernández
Venezuelan journalist and writer. He writes regularly for La IguanaTV, Supuesto Negado, and Mision Verdad.
