A woman wears a headpiece with the colours of Venezuela’s flag at a march in support of Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado in Buenos Aires, Argentina on Dec 6. (Photo: Reuters)

The people of Venezuela conjure contradictory images, particularly for those living in the Global North. We’re starved and oppressed masses under a totalitarian thumb, but also arrogant and pigheaded émigrés living in golden exile from Miami to Madrid. More recently, we are hordes of criminals, the scum of the Earth, flooding into the United States. Where’s the truth? Where’s the lie?

As a Venezuelan journalist, I can’t help but think on the role of the media in making or undoing these narratives.

One of the first things I learned as a reporter is the inverted pyramid: organising a story with the most important facts on top, and descending down to the least relevant to what you’re trying to convey. While journalists can’t report every little detail, what remains and what is left out of a story is quite subjective. More often than not, journalists frame real-life actions, people, and events to form a concise, coherent story with defined protagonists and antagonists and plot beats that are easy to understand, digest, consume, and sell.

Yet I can’t stop being bewildered about how people in the media from all over the world can see the same facts and make completely different, contradictory conclusions.

Over two decades, I’ve met colleagues of every stripe and from many nations holding every imaginable opinion and hypothesis about Venezuela’s past, present, and future.

Explaining my own country to me over and over. Talking about my country in terms closer to an abstract, rhetorical idea than a real place, filled with actual individuals and complex situations. For the most part, I politely nod and try to find some common ground, but I ultimately feel very tired and hurt about how the realities of the land where I spent my first 28 years are perceived around the globe.

Not that long ago, mainstream news outlets – particularly those on the right, such as Fox News in the United States – portrayed Venezuelans as victims of the authoritarian regime started by Hugo Chávez in 1999 and made much worse since 2013 under the leadership of Nicolás Maduro.

The influx of millions of Venezuelan migrants in the last decade into Colombia, Peru, Chile, Mexico, the United States, and Spain, among other places, changed that narrative. Journalism has taught me that if something newsworthy happens in another place, readers wonder first how it will directly affect them. Now, instead of generating sympathy, Venezuelans have become a useful villain for the Trump administration and other anti-migrant governments.

Liberal media has its own agenda. Everyone follows an editorial line, after all. As tensions grow between Washington and Caracas, there has been a noticeable trend of armchair experts – some with just a strenuous connection to Venezuela – talking about the situation in the simplest of terms: Mr Maduro is bad, or maybe not that bad, but Mr Trump is surely much worse, they insist. These experts at best dismiss the Venezuelans who don’t quite align to these views as single-minded and traumatised.

When I write about Venezuela, I want to say all of this and more, but there’s no inverted pyramid wide enough to pour out all of what’s in my heart and in my mind. I’m also acutely aware that I’m just one Venezuelan out of over 30 million. Even if I am a journalist, how can I possibly claim to speak for an entire country, and a diaspora of circa 8 million and growing? Doubts are constant: Is this a fact or an opinion? What if everything I think I know is wrong? Can you reconcile seemingly contradictory perspectives about the very same situation? Am I part of the solution or the problem?

When I’m tired of carrying all this, I get a bit envious of my younger self, who was convinced that, through writing, I could contribute to building a better, more democratic Venezuela and in a more general sense, a better world. Growing up in Maracay, a mid-sized provincial capital west of Caracas, news was my window outside my hometown. My family would buy the local newspaper every day and a national newspaper on Sundays. Journalism is essentially history in the making, and it’s written simply enough that even as a kid I could follow along.

Now that I’m older and wiser, I am wary of reporting that reduces a story to something too easy to digest: A tale with a hero and a villain, and a beginning and a resolution. Yet I still try to buy a news publication every time I travel to a new country. It’s not only a souvenir that provides a snapshot of a specific time and place, but also a way to keep alive this profession, despite the headaches and heartbreaks.

A friend once described journalism as a vocation akin to priesthood. It’s a job that is often precarious and ungrateful, but deep down, for many of us, it’s also a labour of love, born out of duty and a sense of responsibility and feeling we’re helping to shape the world, bit by bit.

When I think about journalists trying to cover Venezuela, an old parable comes to mind: A group of blind people run across an elephant, each touching a different part of the animal. One grabs its trunk and thinks it’s a snake, another one feels its legs and describes them as tree trunks, and so forth.

None of them are lying, and technically they are not wrong, but by virtue of just grasping a small piece of information, they aren’t right, either.

Yet, it’s not an entirely futile endeavour. As little or unimportant as a single news story appears to be, I have come to understand that it’s a piece of the puzzle that helps us to know our present, understand our past, and build towards our future.

I’ve been surprised to find pieces I wrote many years ago cited in articles on Wikipedia or linked out to from a current piece of news. My story is out there, a small part of a never-ending thread that makes up the fabric of our reality. Zócalo Public Square.

José González Vargas is a Madrid-based journalist and college professor from Venezuela. A contributing editor for Zócalo Public Square, he has written for ‘El País’, NPR’s ‘Latino USA,’ Public Radio International, and ‘Americas Quarterly’. This was written for Zócalo Public Square.