narrative

This is one pic Telesur picked to try to make Delcy look competent. Draw your own conclusions.

On July 7th, Delcy Rodríguez presented her “Venezuela Reborn” (Venezuela Renace) plan to recover all buildings and areas hit by the earthquakes. The promise is not only rebuilding infrastructure but also offering economic assistance to those affected thanks to funds from the IMF and other multilateral organizations.

This happened just a week after her press conference on July 2nd, in which she faced multiple questions from foreign reporters about the government’s late and disorganized response to the disaster in La Guaira. Rodríguez denied those claims, blaming disinformation from “media labs” while defending the military.

The “media labs” argument was immediately taken up by State outlets and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello on his weekly TV show Con El Mazo Dando, in which he insulted international correspondents who covered the disaster.

The saying “old habits die hard” can be applied here: the Rodrigato has been unable to avoid and hide the public backlash over its management of the earthquakes’ aftermath, which has been front and center of the reporting made by mainstream international media, like when a crew of Norway’s TV2 recorded La Guaira resident Damely Díaz, who lost both her daughter and her home, openly berating Nicolas Maduro Guerra.

Now, the regime is once again blaming the messenger, taking advantage of the actual problem of disinformation on social media to point at “political interests that want to take advantage of the humanitarian tragedy.” 

This comes as the official attempt to establish the narrative that Delcy Rodríguez is in full control has been undermined by self-imposed limitations. TalCual editor Víctor Amaya offered a glimpse: “Outside of fleeting visits to collapsed areas, (Delcy) Rodríguez has appeared almost always indoors, meeting rescue workers who she interrupts in their labor to thank them in from of the camera, decorating government officers, greeting Hernán Gil (a security guard rescued after eight days trapped in Catia La Mar) and more recently, in visits to stokepile centers and shelters. His brother Jorge became the de facto spokesperson for official figures of dead and wounded.”

The Great Mission Venezuela Renace actually merged three existing infrastructure-related government programs: Barrio Nuevo Barrio Tricolor, Juntos Todo es Posible and Venezuela Bella. It also shares its name with an online initiative launched back in May to register young Venezuelans with diverse skills to return and help out. The difference is that the word order changes.

Venezuela Renace doubles down on the “stateswoman” role Delcy tried to carve for herself in her public showings while adapting it to the current circumstances. 

It can be said to some extent that Venezuela Renace works as a reboot of the government’s communicational strategy, even if that’s not its main purpose. And taking in consideration what’s been seen so far, it couldn’t be more different from the previous one: Venezuela Vuela Libre.

While Venezuela Vuela Libre was like a trial balloon of what Delcy’s election campaign could look like in a hypothetical snap presidential election, Venezuela Renace doubles down on the “stateswoman” role that she has tried to carve for herself in her public showings while adapting it to the current circumstances. 

Unlike in Venezuela Vuela Libre, where Delcy’s image was absent, she’s front and center in Venezuela Renace, supervising works or in official meetings. Even their visuals differ drastically: Venezuela Vuela Libre’s iconography was mostly related to peace and faith, while its main logo showed color (with blue, not red, dominating the palette). 

Venezuela Renace is clearer on its communication goals than whatever Venezuela Vuela Libre was trying to achieve (before it was minimized and later unceremoniously dropped after June 24 for quite obvious reasons). But which audience is it going to appeal to? The Venezuelan people? International media? Maybe it targets the biggest supporter of the Rodrigato since January 3 and one of the most (if not the biggest) sources of assistance after the quakes: the Trump administration. No wonder, in their “media labs” response, State propaganda avoided mentioning Trump or the US, instead blaming María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia.

Most probably, Delcy Rodríguez only interested in convincing the Americans that her government is doing things right.

Exploiting racism has been a profitable strategy in Hollywood since the dawn of filmmaking: 111 years ago, D.W. Griffith’s film “The Birth of a Nation” was incredibly popular and influential, while also being so racist that it was considered controversial even in its own day.

The industry saw immediately just how lucrative fear could be. More than a century later, there is always someone in the entertainment media willing to trade in racist tropes for money, as well as an audience ready to receive them.

Two new films, “Citizen Vigilante” and “Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels,” demonstrate that streaming platforms and social media no longer simply distribute controversial content but in fact thrive on content that provokes, polarizes and sustains attention, regardless of the social cost.

Both of these xenophobic and Islamophobic films are being pushed as “anti-woke” vehicles, deliberately engineered to bypass traditional critical reception and capitalize on a fractured media ecosystem. “Citizen Vigilante,” which features an American protagonist killing dark-skinned immigrants and Muslims in an unnamed European setting, was denied a rating certificate by the German government for inciting violence. Yet despite that determination, the film secured global reach through decentralized digital distribution and high-profile promotion from Elon Musk.

Similarly, “Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels” — a campus siege narrative evoking 1980s action film nostalgia that leans heavily into outdated, post-9/11 anxieties — relies on a built-in conservative media apparatus to guarantee financial returns. The film is produced by the conservative media figure Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire, which he co-founded. It is a sequel to a 2020 film that was their film company’s premiere.

But while promoters of such films frame their work as a brave rebellion, the reality is much more sinister: rehashing 40-year-old tropes while invoking conspiracy theories of Muslims bringing sharia law to America, because outrage is cheap to produce and easy to monetize.

Stories matter. Stories shape how we see one another. They influence what we love, what we celebrate, whom we trust, whom we understand and whom we fear.

Since January, the Muslim Public Affairs Council has documented a sharp escalation in threats and attacks targeting Muslims and Islamic institutions across the United States, including vandalism, shootings, bomb threats, attempted assassinations and physical assaults. These are not isolated incidents. They reflect a broader climate in which dehumanizing representation increasingly manifests as real-world violence.

Entertainment and politics increasingly employ the same tactic as one another, recycling narratives of fear and “otherness” to mobilize audiences, voters and consumers. When political leaders encourage those narratives, as President Trump recently did by amplifying and commenting on a photo of young Muslim American students in hijab, they further normalize the same stereotypes that entertainment companies have learned to monetize.

Yet while the social costs continue to mount, the economic incentives remain firmly intact. “Citizen Vigilante” earned a 93% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes despite receiving just a 6% critics’ score. More tellingly, it quickly climbed to the top of Amazon’s and Apple TV’s paid video-on-demand charts.

And this isn’t just a Muslim and immigrant issue — and it’s not only about who is portrayed on screens, but also who is not. Representation has been backsliding, and audiences are left with fewer opportunities to see the reality and humanity of diverse communities, making them more vulnerable to fear-based narratives.

According to a 2026 report from the nonprofit Define American, which tracks representation across television and film, Latinos account for only 23% of immigrant characters represented on screen, even though they make up more than 40% of the immigrant population in the United States. In 2020, 50% of immigrants on screen were Latino.

The industry’s defense is that whitewashed and xenophobic films reflect audience demand. But the recent research by Define American challenges this assumption. Data show that nuanced, multidimensional storytelling, in which immigrants and minority characters are woven into the fabric of everyday narratives rather than tokenized or villainized, actually leads to greater audience engagement and deeper systemic understanding.

Entertainment doesn’t simply reflect culture; it teaches us who belongs within it. Studios, distributors, streaming platforms and filmmakers all have a responsibility to reject narratives that portray immigrants as enemies and instead embrace stories that reflect the diversity and complexity of our world. At the same time — as with voters — the power ultimately rests with consumers. The choice to demand storytelling that challenges prejudice rather than profits from it belongs to all of us.

Sue Obeidi is the senior vice president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council Hollywood Bureau. Jose Antonio Vargas is the founder of Define American.

NEW YORK — A nationwide network of charitable foundations is encouraging its members to emphasize their positive contributions to American life, a 250th anniversary campaign aimed at quelling what it calls the “greater intensity” of scrutiny felt from the federal government and populist movements.

Popular notions of philanthropy as merely a game for the ultrawealthy to fund partisan projects and commit fraud have left the sector vulnerable to political attacks, as the Council on Foundations sees it, influencing policies that hamper essential community services. The advocacy group, which represents about 1,000 nonprofits, hopes to overcome what CEO Kathleen Enright calls the sector’s “perception gap” with its “Generosity Builds” campaign, launched Monday.

Enright believes most Americans don’t recognize their reliance on the charitable sector. Just about 1 in 20 adults said they or anyone in their immediate family received nonprofit services in the past year, according to a 2023 Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy report.

“This week, I got an MRI at Georgetown University Hospital, I participated in my church at St. Columba’s, my daughter was inducted into National Junior Honor Society. Four or five nonprofits have been instrumental in my life this week,” she said. “Folks just aren’t putting that tag on it.”

And that tag is growing increasingly important, Enright said. Last year, negotiations over President Trump’s tax and spending bill included proposals to levy new taxes on private foundations that Enright said would have taken resources from communities if they made it into the final law.

The battle over defining what nonprofits actually do has recently been amplified from the highest rungs of the Trump administration, which has upended decades of partnerships built with nonprofits. Trump froze, cut or threatened a sweeping range of social service grants characterized by the White House as “government largesse that’s often riddled with corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse.” More recently, the Department of Justice charged the Southern Poverty Law Center — a civil rights nonprofit accused by Republicans of targeting conservatives in its work tracking extremists — with defrauding donors through payments to informants.

Vice President JD Vance described the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation and the Harvard University endowment as “cancers on American society” back as a 2021 U.S. Senate candidate, telling Tucker Carlson that “we are actively subsidizing the people who are destroying this country and they call it a charity.”

“All across our country, we have nonprofits — big foundations — that are effectively social-justice hedge funds,” he said in a talk that year on “woke capital.”

Narratives about nonprofits being “overly politicized” or wasteful are “extreme minority stories” that don’t reflect how philanthropy operates, according to Enright.

Across many surveys, trust in the nonprofit sector has remained higher than most others. But its impact is sometimes difficult to measure and explain. The sector hasn’t faced an environment this challenging in almost six decades, according to Kathryn Thomas, the vice president of communications for the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation in Flint, Michigan.

She cited the congressional effort to increases taxes on foundations’ investment incomes and acknowledged the Trump administration’s federal funding cuts.

“In an era when everything is under partisan attack and there’s so much polarization, we really have to do a better job of emphasizing why we exist,” Thomas said.

Enright said the story of philanthropy is not one where a rich person “saves the day.” She sees growing concerns about billionaires’ influence fueling suspicion about philanthropists’ motivations. Some argue the charitable sector allows moneyed interests to decide how tax dollars are spent rather than elected officials.

The campaign will emphasize that most donors “have just a little bit more than they need and therefore want to give back,” she said, especially at the local level.

“Money does not solve problems. It’s a tool that creative people and institutions inside communities use to solve problems,” she said. “The real heroes of most of these stories are nonprofit leaders, religious leaders, civic leaders who just roll up their sleeves and get something done — but do it with some financial underpinning by charitable foundations.”

That’s the story told by the Gulf Coast Community Foundation in Sarasota, Florida. A 10-apartment affordable housing complex for military veterans opened last year with the foundation’s support.

The area has an “embarrassingly high” number of veterans without housing, according to Jon Thaxton, the foundation’s director of policy and advocacy. Many are priced out in Sarasota, increasingly a luxury destination with high real estate prices.

Local donors had been trying to build a similar project when they approached the foundation in 2020 for help. Thaxton secured land already vested for affordable housing, corralled $2.2 million in donations, got $800,000 from the city and won the backing of their U.S. representatives.

The foundation’s leaders believe their track record made that possible. Phillip Lanham, the president and CEO, noted the project was completed across multiple election cycles and a pandemic, suggesting that community foundations are well situated to “play the long game.”

“Most people think that foundations like us deal with money and donors. We really don’t. We deal with relationships and trust,” Thaxton said. “That’s our commodity. That’s what we earn. That’s what we save. And that’s what we contribute back to the community.”

The Council on Foundations will also elevate examples of early, ordinary philanthropists as part of its case for philanthropy as an integral “part of the American story.” Enright credited a formerly enslaved man with donating land in North Carolina that became an African Methodist Episcopal church that endures as a pillar of the local community.

Lillian Kuri, the president and CEO of the Cleveland Foundation, welcomed the focus on everyday philanthropists. The Cleveland Foundation is considered the first community foundation, established in 1914 by lawyer Frederick Harris Goff as a way to fund durable change in the city.

The foundation aims to find new ways to expand today’s tent of philanthropists dedicated to improving their surrounding areas. It announced new investments this week in a fund dedicated to turn vacant industrial land into job-ready work sites. They’ve also launched a fund that allows donors to invest in major Northeast Ohio companies, supporting local business growth while that money increases into a sizable amount that can be donated to nonprofits.

“Generosity cuts across everybody,” she said, adding that community foundations offer “a way for everyday people — not just the largest, wealthiest people — to participate in the change they want to see in their communities.”

Pollard writes for the Associated Press.

In the fragmented mysteries of the great Argentine filmmaker Lucretia Martel, her explorations always start with sensory flashes: faces, spaces, objects, sounds in transfixing procession. The language is its own, resulting in disorienting but undiluted depictions of the worlds of modern elites (“La Ciénega,” “The Headless Woman”) and 18th century colonists (“Zama”) alike.

But now, with her first feature documentary, “Our Land (Nuestra Tierra),” Martel unravels a political crime and the larger offenses behind it with a vital clarity. The film is centered on the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar, an Indigenous Chuchagasta man from Argentina’s northwestern Tucumán province, who was shot while defending his ancestral homeland from a thuggish incursion. The weight of the issue at hand — stolen land, territorial rights and the overdue recognition of a colonized country’s original peoples — brings out a tantalizing lucidity from the typically elusive Martel on a serious subject that requires discipline.

In one sense, she’s dealing with a rights issue too painful to be aggressively aestheticized, but she’s also exploring a blood-soaked injustice that can’t be treated conventionally. She begins, in fact, with rolling satellite images from space — as if to say: This appropriation of nature is the world’s problem, not just Argentina’s.

What follows, toggling between a courtroom and vast, contested land (filmed with dreamlike urgency by cinematographer Ernest de Carvalho), is a righteous, visually arresting swirl of fact and feeling, past and present. It’s also anchored by the stories of a community desperate to claim territory they’ve cultivated for centuries. “Our Land” is as honorable a documentary as you’re likely to encounter this year about what fighting looks like in today’s era of grab-what-you-can thievery.

First, we hear from the defendants, captured by Martel’s cameras at their 2018 trial in Buenos Aires (an unconscionable nine years after the shooting). The three accused men — a businessman and two ex-cops — flounder at positioning themselves as the true victims when their own handheld video of the incident shows otherwise: The confrontation with the Chuchagastas only escalated because they brought a gun. Their lawyers obnoxiously push a narrative of ownership versus trespassers, backed by reams of documents and tossed-around historical dates.

But as Martel patiently unfolds the Chuchagastas’ perspective — personal narratives that come to life in intimate photos, atmospheric sound design and warm home footage — we begin to understand that documents and files are a bogus battleground given their hundreds of years of careful tending. One community member distrusts dialogue to begin with, calling it a means to “give up something.”

“Our Land” is the work of a director whose attention is rigorous, whose care is genuine, but who is also conscious of her outsider’s perspective. It’s an ally’s respect. There’s no better proof of that than in her drone shots of this embattled community’s sun-soaked valley: elegant, purposeful, even awkward (a bird hits one) visitations from the air. They’re a reminder that she’s the filmmaker, surveying a story that belongs to others. Documentaries don’t get much more honest than that.