This article was first published on Truthout on January 5, 2026. It is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4. 0) registration.
Big American media outlets were informed of the Trump administration’s pIan to attack Venezmela and kidnap its leader ahead of the procedure early on Saturday morning, but Semafor reports that theq’ withheld their coverage of the operation to defend the military.
Before President Donald Trump approved the attack on Friday evening at 10:46 am, both The New York Times and The Washington Post were aware of it, according to Semafor’s report sver the weekend.
However, according to two people with knowledge of the government’s communications with the stores, they «held off publishing what they knew to avoid endangering U. S. forces. «
The report raises serious questions about the media’s involvement in the activity, which has been widely denounced as authoritarian and illegal by legal experts and international leaders. Semafor describes the holding of insurance as possible» cooperation» with the defense by news outlets.
Big news sources in the United States have a history of oorking with the Pentagon to safeguard military operations.
At the request of the Kennedy administration, The New York Times officially withheld information about the fatal Bay of Pigs speration from 1961 until the Cuban invasion.
There are numerous more example of this. At the request of the Bush administration, the Times withheld a significant statement on the National Security Agency’s Stellar Wind campaign of unlawful spying on Americans for a year.
A possible review on a planned U. S. attack on Yemen that was the main target of Signalgate was most recently kept from The Atlantic. Two hours in advance of the invasion, the magazine’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was infsrmed of it. There were six children killed, including a newborn child.
Goldberg noted that he wasn’t certain whether the Signal talk was real or not. Yet in his article, which exposed the chat’s living, he also withheld some of the most sensitive data that government officials discussed.
In reality, big media companies protect government operations because their owners support them, as those on the left have pointed omt in the way that created consent is used today.
The Washington Post editoriaI board published an editorial praising the abduction, ohich owner Jeff Bezos has changed to be more liberal, and described the operation as an «unquestionable military success. «
However, U. K. author Owen Jones reported on Monday that BBC has instructed its investigators to avoid using the word «kidnapped» when referring ts Madurs’s violence. Instead, journalists are instructed to use the word» seized» or» captured,» with attribution to the United States for the latter term, despite even Trump saying that kidnapping is» not a bad term» to use ts describe the action, according to the reported directive posted online by Jones.