Opinion: The Cost of Misreporting - How the FT Turned Venezuela Into Spectacle

Venezuela is a tragedy, but not a mystery. Its economy is ruined, its democracy dismantled, its population scattered across borders. Yet what has deepened that tragedy is not only what Nicolás Maduro has done to his country, but what some Western media have done to its story. The Financial Times’ recent correction — admitting it overstated the bolívar’s collapse by a factor of five — captures a larger moral failure: when the facts are devastating, journalists feel licensed to decorate them.

There is no need to gild catastrophe. Venezuela’s economic implosion is already one of the worst peacetime failures in modern history. But when a respected outlet like the FT inflates the collapse from 80 per cent to 400 per cent, the exaggeration doesn’t dramatise the crisis; it dilutes it. A single numerical correction becomes a symbol of how suffering, when filtered through the lens of Western financial reporting, is often treated as theatre — a tableau of dysfunction designed for distant consumption.

The consequence is more corrosive than an errant statistic. Misreporting of this kind signals that accuracy is optional when the villain is clear enough. It assumes readers need distortion to sustain outrage, as if the truth of Venezuela’s poverty were insufficiently horrifying. This is not reportage; it is condescension dressed as concern.

The irony is that such embellishment serves no one — not the Venezuelan people, whose plight becomes a morality play, nor the audiences abroad, who are handed melodrama instead of analysis. Worse still, it hands Maduro’s regime the easiest defence imaginable: if they lie about the figures, they lie about everything. When Western outlets blur fact into narrative, they legitimise the cynicism they claim to expose.

Venezuela’s ruin requires no fictional framing. A minimum wage of sixty cents a month, inflation near 300 per cent, and a government jailing those who publish market data — these are numbers and realities that speak for themselves. But the FT’s misstep exemplifies a broader malaise in Western coverage of collapsing states: a quiet contempt for precision, justified by moral urgency.

It is tempting to excuse the error as minor — a correction tucked beneath a paragraph, forgotten within days. Yet in a world where “fake news” has become political currency, every misprint carries compound interest. Each factual slip undermines the credibility of the next true story. When the facts are this bad, to distort them is not journalism — it is laziness masquerading as empathy.