The mass media's blind spot on Trump's Venezuela escalation

The mass media’s blind spot on Trump’s Venezuela escalation
Iraq-era mistakes of blind deference by the mainstream press are back

By Sophia Tesfaye
Senior Writer
Published January 5, 2026 5:30PM (EST)


(Salon) The story the American media is missing about Venezuela right now is not really about Venezuela. It is not about the country’s strongman president Nicolás Maduro, electoral legitimacy, corruption or even oil — at least not in the way Donald Trump pretends it to be. It is about something far more unsettling. The world’s most powerful country is openly asserting the right to invade, occupy and “run” any nation it chooses, and by failing to connect the dots for the American people, the media is helping to normalize Trump’s expansionist project.

What we are watching is not simply another foreign policy crisis; it is the construction of a permission structure for imperialism, built by stenography and deference. Mainstream media coverage of Trump’s attack on Venezuela and capture of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, has not merely failed to interrogate the Pentagon’s actions, it has actively laundered them, presenting an act of war as a technocratic maneuver, a coup as a “capture” and an invasion as an “operation.” Americans have seen this pattern before, and the consequences were catastrophic.

Like George W. Bush’s regime change operation in Iraq, Trump’s removal of Maduro is premised on a transparent lie. Instead of Bush and Dick Cheney’s weapons of mass destruction, Trump has made a jumble of claims about electoral illegitimacy, corruption and “hemispheric defense” that sound like post-hoc rationalization — and that the administration didn’t care enough to conjure a logical or legal justification for an outcome decided in advance.

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The Constitution is unambiguous: Invading a foreign country and kidnapping its president and first lady is an act of war. The president does not have the unilateral authority to launch such actions without congressional approval, which Trump did not seek. That should have been the frame from the first headline to the last chyron. ......................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/01/05/the-mass-medias-blind-spot-on-trumps-venezuela-escalation/