Sesgo abusivo de la televisión venezolana a favor del régimen de Maduro

***Estudio revela el sesgo abusivo de la televisión venezolana a favor del régimen de Maduro

Un estudio publicado en America Quarterly del Council of Americas por Javier Corrales y Franz Von Bergen, hace 48 horas, revela el gran sesgo anti-oposicionista en la televisión venezolana. En el estudio se comparan las noticias favorables y desfavorables para el gobierno y la oposición en las televisoras Globovisión, Venevisión y Venezolana de televisión, VTV.

Ver el estudio completo en: http://www.americasquarterly.org/content/venezuelas-media-isnt-smearing-opposition-its-making-them-invisible

Abajo transcribo los resultados del estudio y parte de las conclusiones a las cuales llegan los autores:

 “Coverage time

All three stations devoted far more time to government electoral campaigns than to the opposition’s (see Table 1). VTV in particular gave zero time to covering the opposition’s campaign.


Table 1: Percentage of total political news coverage time devoted to electoral campaigns

Positive sentiment

 All three stations devoted far more reporting to positive stories for the ruling party or the Maduro administration than for the opposition (see Table 2). In the case of VTV, 78 percent of its political news coverage time was devoted to positive stories about the ruling party; there were zero positive stories on the opposition.


Table 2: Percentage of total political news coverage time devoted to positive coverage of government and opposition performance

Negative sentiment 

The good news is that negative reporting on candidates and campaigns, from both sides, has been very low (see Table 3). All three TV stations kept negative reporting on campaigns to a minimum.


Table 3:  Percentage of total air time devoted to negative coverage of campaigning stories

The situation is a bit different regarding coverage of government or opposition performance, rather than electoral campaign stories (see Table 4). Here we see far more negative reporting. Globovisión and Venevisión offer critical views of government performance 10 percent and 20 percent of the time, respectively, whereas VTV offered zero negative reporting. When it comes to the ruling party, it is clear that all three stations offer far more positive coverage than negative.

The reverse is true for coverage of the opposition. The opposition holds few state offices, meaning that there is not much that TV media can do to criticize the opposition’s performance. The one area where criticisms of the opposition are made has to do with stories about “economic sabotage,” which is in line with the government’s position of blaming Venezuela’s economic crisis on economic warfare waged by the opposition. If we add the amount of time devoted to negative coverage of performance of the opposition and stories about economic sabotage, we find that all three stations offer more negative coverage of the opposition’s performance than positive.


Table 4: Percentage of total air time devoted to coverage of performance, by sentiment (positive or negative)

Conclusion

In a recent letter to Venezuela’s electoral authorities, OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro denounced, among other things, the “lack of guaranteed access to the media” offered to the opposition. Essentially, he was echoing what most media observers have long said about Venezuela: Media bias is a chronic problem during campaigns.

The pre-campaign period shows that biased reporting by Venezuela’s main TV media is getting worse. All TV media displayed obvious forms of pro-government bias. Even the independent and privately owned media (Venevisión and Globovisión) offered far more attention to the ruling party’s electoral activities and performance in office than to opposition affairs.  In all three stations, positive stories about the ruling party far outweighed negative stories. In VTV, there were simply no critical stories of the ruling party. 

Opposition candidates, in contrast, were hardly covered, and in the case of VTV were not covered not at all. Negative stories about opposition electoral activities, while not that common, outweighed positive coverage…..

In sum, a strategy of “invisibilization” of the opposition has replaced TV polarization. Today, no station seems to be providing much pro-opposition coverage. All national-level TV media, both public and private, is now pro-government. This invisibilization strategy helps explain why so far negative reporting on the opposition is also relatively low: If little in general is being said about the opposition on TV, there is also very little to criticize”.

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