Watching 60 Minutes last Sunday evening offered a peek into what we may expect from CBS’s style of dumbed down investigative journalism under new right-wing management. Mike Wallace is surely rolling in his grave.
Bari Weiss's team at 60 Minutes offered up a shallow, lopsided lead-off piece on Trump’s obvious attempts to overthrow the government of Venezuela; a puff piece on a medical fitness entrepreneur who has a 75-patient load (total), each of whom he charges several hundred thousand dollars per year; and a story on a manipulative mentalist who entertains the rich and famous with his powers to read and control people. I will focus comments here on the 60 Minutes lead story.
Problem One: Sharon Alfonsi’s story provides no historical context for understanding how we got to where we are today with relations between Venezuela’s criminal dictator and America’s criminal would-be dictator. If the 60 Minutes team had offered just a smidgen from any historical source on our own government’s repeated meddling over the past 120 years in Venezuelan politics for the benefit of American corporations, it would have been helpful to viewers. See GovFacts.org for an able synopsis. Here is just one paragraph from there that stands out:
This half-century [1908-1958] of U.S. policy was defined by stark pragmatism where oil flow served as the ultimate arbiter of American interests. Stated democracy commitments were consistently subordinated to securing energy resources and maintaining regional stability goals, even at the cost of supporting repressive regimes. This approach fostered deep, lasting Venezuelan perceptions that the United States was an ally of corrupt domestic elites and foreign corporate interests—powerful grievances that would fuel nationalist political movements for generations.
From 1958 to 1998, Venezuela enjoyed forty years of relative stability under a social democratic government whose anti-Communist stance and support for U.S. economic goals guaranteed American support.
That all came to a screeching halt in 1998 when Hugo Chavez was elected President. Chavez was able to exploit his own people’s deep resentment of growing economic inequality, political corruption, and U.S. exploitation of Venezuelan natural resources in order to consolidate power under a populist banner that Chavez, in turn, exploited to secure for himself dictatorial powers. Despite U.S. support for a coup attempt in 2002 to replace Chavez, Chavez persisted and was able to further consolidate power by presenting himself as a victim of foreign aggression and by nationalizing important industries, including oil, and by using proceeds to initiate programs like health care and education.
Chavez’s hand-picked successor in 2013, Nicolás Maduro, further tightened one-man rule of Venezuela as the economy melted down. For the people of Venezuela, the result was severe economic hardship and severe suffering due to Chavez’s human rights violations aimed to eliminate political opposition and to assure compliance.
The Obama Administration responded with a program of targeted sanctions that aimed to punish human rights violations and the elimination of democratic institutions in the country.
In 2017, the Trump Administration expanded sanctions in an attempt to crush Maduro’s rule:
Key measures included financial sanctions cutting off the Venezuelan government and its state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), from U.S. financial markets; ban on the government’s digital currency; and, most critically, sectoral sanctions blocking all U.S. dealings with PDVSA, the central bank, and gold mining sector. In August 2019, E.O. 13884 effectively blocked all Venezuelan Government property in the United States.
In addition to applying an economic chokehold, Team Trump attempted to impose regime change in 2019, an effort that solidified Maduro’s closer linkages with China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran, while raising U.S.-Venezuelan relations to a boiling point.
The other direct side effect was to create a Venezuelan crisis that resulted in the massive influx of immigrants to the United States comprised of people seeking political asylum and economic survival.
None of this historical context was reported by the 60 Minutes gloss, and Alfonsi interviewed no historians, political scientists, or economists.
Instead, Alfonsi and her bosses limited American “analysis” to Trump’s last ambassador to Venezuela, James Story, and one of Trump’s leading sycophants in the U.S. Senate, Rick Scott. On cue, these Trump yes men had nothing to say of attempts at Venezuelan regime change so as to guarantee billionaire oilmen and tech bros access to the country's valuable resources.
Most stunning of all, Alfonsi’s report offered no official or unofficial U.S. critique of Trump’s current unofficial war on Venezuela.
So this evening when the clock at 60 Minutes starts its ticking, I will be looking elsewhere to find informative stories on politics, culture, and the arts. Goodbye, Bari, and to all the real reporters remaining at CBS, goodnight, and good luck.
Finally, the article at GovFacts closes with this summation regarding foreign policy based on bullying and heedless machoism. It's is well-worth remembering:
The “maximum pressure” campaign created a profound paradox. While the policy succeeded in inflicting severe Venezuelan economy damage, it failed to achieve its primary political objective. The regime didn’t collapse; instead, Maduro consolidated power, retained military loyalty, and deepened reliance on U.S. adversaries for economic and political lifelines.
The resulting economic devastation fueled unprecedented refugee crisis, with over 7 million Venezuelans fleeing their country, creating major challenges for the U.S. and entire region. This outcome demonstrated stark limits of using unilateral economic sanctions as regime change tools and has forced U.S. policy into more complex, nuanced strategy of leveraging sanctions as bargaining chips in protracted diplomatic stalemate.
The Venezuelan case illustrates broader tensions in American foreign policy between idealistic democracy promotion and pragmatic strategic interests. From early 20th-century support for oil-friendly dictators to 21st-century sanctions aimed at democratic restoration, U.S. policy has consistently reflected immediate strategic priorities over long-term democratic values. Today’s crisis represents the culmination of nearly two centuries of complex, often contradictory engagement—a relationship shaped by oil, ideology, and the persistent challenge of balancing American interests with Latin American sovereignty. https://govfacts.org/history/a-history-of-us-policy-toward-venezuela-from-monroe-to-maduro/
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