Republished from Venezuelanalysis.com
Reuters Can't Find US Critics to Question Amazon's Anti-Venezuela Propaganda
Analyst Joe Emersberger looks at Amazon's new anti-Venezuela TV series and the media complicity surrounding it.
A line from the trailer for Jack Ryan, an Amazon TV drama whose second season streams on November 1, is: "A nuclear Venezuela". You will not hear about it on the news, 'cause we'll already be dead."
The trailer implies that Venezuela is going through the "greatest humanitarian crisis in history" because it buys weapons from "the Russians." Of course. "It would fit a pattern," says the Jack Ryan character, a CIA operative played by John Krasinski, who's better known as Jim Halpert, the likeable paper salesman in The Office.
My favorite reaction to the premise of this upcoming Jack Ryan season came from US historian Gary Alexander:
No matter how cynical you might be about propagandistic American media, you are not prepared for how much watching this trailer is like snorting 100% pure John Bolton.
Common Dreams' Eoin Higgins (9/5/19) put together a nice roundup of the outrage and ridicule the trailer provoked on Twitter from independent journalists and others based in the US: Abby Martin, Adam Johnson, Alex Rubinstein, Chase Madar and Sunjeev Berry.
That's far from an exhaustive list, but Reuters "missed" all of it. The news wire published an article the next day (9/6/19) headlined, "Amazon's Jack Ryan TV Series Lambasted for Promoting Venezuela 'Invasion.'" The article stated:
Venezuelan Culture Minister Ernesto Villegas took to Twitter on Thursday evening to describe the show as: "Crass war propaganda disguised as entertainment."
Villegas was the only person quoted or cited in the piece as a critic of the trailer. Are we to believe a Maduro government official is the only person Reuters could find on Twitter who "lambasted" the premise of the show?
The Reuters article on the upcoming Jack Ryan season also said that the
action/adventure video game Mercenaries 2, released in 2008, was set in a fictionalized war-torn Venezuela. That fueled outrage among Venezuela's ruling Socialist Party, who called it an apology for US-backed violence in the region.
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