paying attention or not paying attention
I see a blog post at Reason magazine asking the pertinent question of whether the Media is ignoring or down-playing the crackdown of opposition in Venezuela. I see this on the backdrop of seeing multiple above the fold newspaper headlines about opposition crackdowns in Venezuela.
The answer for the Reason blog post thus becomes… “If you think this is the most important news story out there”. And it’s a product of ideology and political posturing. I presume, for instance, if the USA were actually on a warpath against Venezuela, Reason’s blogger would find media coverage (if it were wall to wall) as part of the government’s war propaganda. But here the need is more to compare a sort of Hugo Chavezian Socialism with the Obamaist Socialist, and so the question ends up more along the lines of… ACA and “IRS Scandal”.
If we judge by page views and how it reverberates around the Internet… I suppose we’re in age of User Decisions on news priorities. After the various wacky news items get the most page views, the news item of opposition crackdowns in Venezuela gets commented on by the “Right” and the Left focuses on, say, the Gay Crackdowns in Africa.
Personally, I think the Media is not focusing in enough on the political crisis in Turkey, which features things not seen in the American political scene since the 1850s. A bloody nose! But then… what’s the political implications domestically?