Source: Sputnik News
What it’s about: This English-language Sputnik article reports on embattled Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s proposal to hold early elections for the opposition-controlled National Assembly. Elections are currently scheduled to be held in 2020, but in a speech on Monday, Maduro claimed that holding early elections for the country’s only remaining truly democratically elected body would allow the country to “measure ourselves electorally.”
Why it’s misleading: Any pretense that Sputnik is a unbiased organization looking to report the facts is thrown out the window in the piece’s opening sentence: “Legitimate president of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro proposed on Monday early elections for the National Assembly.” Though the article goes on to give a relatively benign overview of the Venezuelan political crisis and the positions of various international actors, the opening sentence is enough for us to classify this piece as misleading. If the folks at Sputnik are going to continue to publish the official position of Caracas (and Moscow) without context, they should begin filing their Venezuela coverage in the Opinion section.