“Fake news” may have shot to prominence in 2017, courtesy of Donald Trump, but the power of the corporate media to mislead, misinform and under-inform for political purposes — usually to protects the interests of those who control the media and their powerful allies — has deeper roots.
And when deployed in Latin America, it has had serious consequences for ordinary citizens, as a look at three countries reveals.
In Brazil, privately owned news media, including O Globo, the second-largest commercial TV network in the world, supplied wall-to-wall coverage of the anti-government rallies in 2016 against President Dilma Rousseff.
International solidarity can ensure that Trump and his machine cannot prevail without a level of political and economic cost that he will not want to pay, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE
Far-right forces are rising across Latin America and the Caribbean, armed with a common agenda of anti-communism, the culture war, and neoliberal economics, writes VIJAY PRASHAD
The global left must be unwavering in it is support for Venezuela as Washington increases its aggression, and clear-eyed about the West’s cynical motives for targeting it, says CLAUDIA WEBBE
The US is desperate to stop Honduras’s process of social and democratic change, writes TIM YOUNG



