With its petroleum reserves and investment by U.S. oil companies, Venezuela once prospered. Then socialist leadership tried to take over oil and other sectors of the economy ... and now there's 25-percent unemployment, 700 percent inflation, food shortages that have led to starvation and deadly unrest that has left at least 50 political protesters dead.
But Michael Ciandella bets you didn’t know that.
Critics like Ciandella say the mainstream media outlets ignore the story because it doesn't square with their politics.
Ciandella, a research analyst for the conservative Media Research Center, studied four years' worth of network evenng newscasts. He says only 25 of the 50,000 stories were about the collapse of Venezuela – and the reports that did air have avoided the word "socialism."
Ciandella tells NewsRadio 704 KTRH that as the collapse and chaos continue and deaths escalate in Venezuela, it remains an underreported story – and the reason for that, in his view, is that the failure of socialist policies doesn’t fit a fixed liberal narrative.