Remember when SBS kicked off, and Dateline was the greatest gift to TV journalism since Four Corners? Well, delete that memory and install instead the search and sort algorithm with sufficient processing time to identify the precise moment when Drone Journalism became the norm.
Drone Journalism in Venezuela story. (Republished from the Nimbin GoodTimes)
Could it be dated from the late 1980s - that was when I phoned in to remind a junior journalist that East Timor was, according to the United Nations, not a Province of Indonesia, despite Bob Hawke and Gareth Evans’ wishes to the contrary?
- Or did it come with the funding cuts to research in the 1990s, or perhaps to the basic education of trainee journalists? But then surely self-funding through slick advertisements for Porsches, BMWs and 4WDs hooning through Kakadu and the Kimberley Ranges should have fixed all that?
In any case Dateline took the ‘Wankley’ prize for Godawful-Goebbelianism - sorry – ‘journalism’ – with its drop-in fly-out piece on Venezuela and the Chavez government. President Hugo Chavez, you may remember has steadily increased the popular vote in favour of himself and his United Venezuelan Socialist Party over 6 elections and referenda since he survived a US supported coup against him in 2002. He was returned to power after offering his retirement as the subject of a plebiscite with a 70% plus vote against his resignation. A few years later he won an election with over 60% of the popular vote in what was hailed as one of the cleanest elections in the history of Latin America.
Meanwhile his policy of ploughing Venezuela’s oil money back into social projects and the development of sustainable energy has put Venezuela in the top ten of the IMF’s list of countries with the most positive rates of economic growth, when the rest of the world’s economies were, and still are in recession.
So Australia (or at least SBS Dateline) sends a journalist - a Walkley winner (after having been planted in various ‘hot spots’ in the Pacific over the years), David O’Shea, who appeared to be blissfully unaware of any of the historical background of Venezuela (the party represented by his interviewees had brought Venezuela to a crisis point in the 1990swhen there was rioting and looting of the Supermarkets). He didn’t even seem to be aware that there were several Australian solidarity brigades in the country at the time. For any foreign correspondent it is de rigeur to ferret out a ‘local angle’ when you are in a foreign country. There were several hundred Australians in Venezuela at the time. Filming a lot of footage on a national day was a blatant attempt to portray Venezuela as a nation that under Chavez’ Presidency was developing ‘militaristic’ tendencies. A bit like filming Australia on Anzac day?
The subjects for interview were hand picked members of a fanatical opposition who, whether O’Shea knew it or not, made a now widely discredited propaganda video of Chavez’ comeback after the attempted coup of 2002 that was disseminated by Fox, CNN etc. until it fell apart under its own fictional weight. Even the quaintest hack should have had more background on his prearranged ‘subjects’.
- As one respondent to the Dateline Forum web page wrote: Aixa Lopez. Lopez is presented as an ordinary citizen/mother of an asthmatic daughter/lawyer turned activist who set up the "Association of Victims of the Blackouts" out of fear for her child’s safety. What O’Shea fails to mention is that Lopez is also a long-term, committed activist for the political right, including holding the position of Women’s Secretary in the conservative Accion Democratica (Democratic Action - AD) party.
As a matter of fact, there have been power outages in Venezuela, and Venezuela is not a land of Socialist Milk and Honey. But, there has been a drought, and believe it or not, most of Venezuela’s power grid derives from hydro-electricity (that’s ‘clean power’). The Chavez government is investing heavily in wind power and solar energy projects. It is also arming peasants near the Colombian border to protect their land from rapacious landowners who employ Colombian paramilitary mercenaries to ‘eliminate’ them and take over their lands. The Venezuelan media is 95% privately owned, and the Venezuelan government does nationalise companies that speculate in foreign currencies, hoard, and create artificial shortages to inflate prices. Others - mainly the multi-nationals, his government has bought out at market prices.
This is why Chavez wins election, after plebiscite, after referendum with 60% plus majorities.
It all makes SBS Dateline program look pretty pathetic - even shameful, if we want Australian journalism to be taken seriously.
Australian journalists, of all people should be the last to be undermining the efforts of those willing and able to make a difference.
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