News that’s fit to print

EVERYWHERE he looks nowadays, Nicolás Maduro sees conspiracies. At least a dozen plots to assassinate him have allegedly been detected since he became Venezuela’s president in April. Mr Maduro recently expelled three American diplomats for supposedly conspiring with the opposition, business groups and unions to wage “economic war” and overthrow the government. Some plots may even be real: there are rumours of discontent in the armed forces, on which the president is lavishing time and money. But publicly, at least, the opposition media are Mr Maduro’s prime suspects. “We know exactly which newspapers are plotting a coup,” the president declared in September; and “everyone knows which are the pro-coup TV channels.”

Media conspiracies have been a staple of government propaganda since 2002, when Mr Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chávez, was briefly ousted after mass demonstrations cheered on by Venezuela’s four main television channels. That led the government to adopt a two-pronged strategy explicitly aimed at achieving “media hegemony”. It has vastly expanded the state’s media interests, from which all vestiges of dissent have been expunged; and it has gradually closed, browbeaten or infiltrated almost every independent outlet.