To address the US military operation against Venezuela and the forcible detention and abduction of President Nicolás Maduro merely as a violation of law is to obscure the core dimension of the issue. This event illustrates how hegemonic power is established, sustained and rendered “natural” and “inevitable” through the media. What is decisive here is not only the military capacity of this power, but the narrative framework through which it is presented.Each time, the Trump administration has justified the operation against Venezuela with a different rationale: drugs, migration, terrorism, regional instability, or oil. At first glance, this may appear as political inconsistency. However, from a Gramscian perspective, this variability points to a flexible and adaptive hegemonic discourse. Hegemony operates not solely through coercion but through the production of consent. The multiplicity of justifications is not a weakness; rather, it provides discursive elasticity that allows appeals to different social fears and interest groups.The media is the principal arena in which this consent is produced. Instead of interrogating the operation, mainstream media reproduced hegemonic frames. CNN and Fox News presented Maduro’s detention as a “deterrent and decisive step”, while questions regarding legal authority, violations of international law, or congressional oversight were almost entirely excluded.In the European press – The Guardian and Le Monde – the critical tone increased only partially, and the questioning largely remained confined to Trump’s “style,” leaving the structural legitimacy of the operation beyond debate. The Latin American press, by contrast, approached the event not as an individual leadership issue but as a contemporary manifestation of historical interventionism, emphasising the suspension of sovereignty.Also read: Venezuela as a Message to the WorldIn the Turkish media – through Anadolu Agency, BBC Turkish and DW Turkish – the event was largely conveyed within a Western-centred framework, while international law, peaceful resolution and diplomatic alternatives were almost entirely absent. Presenting the operation as a mere “development” without constructing a critical context systematically rendered alternative readings invisible.How this hegemonic framework was constructed not only in news texts but also at the level of headlines became particularly evident on Sunday, January 4, 2026, in the contrasting coverage of the same event by the British Sunday press and the Turkish media.Different discourses in different media ecosystemsThe US military operation against Venezuela and the forcible detention of Nicolás Maduro were presented in both media ecosystems largely through the same visual narrative: a handcuffed head of state under control. However, this shared visual did not produce a shared meaning; headline choices diverged significantly.While the photograph remained the same, its meaning was rewritten anew by each newspaper. The “perp walk” and the display of Maduro being transported in a white van revealed that the operation was constructed not as a legal act but as a symbolic display of violence. Trump adopted a language of power that humiliated its victim through medieval-style public exposure; the image evoked not justice but revenge, not law but a demonstration of force.In the British Sunday press, this divergence was most clearly visible in headline language. Daily Star framed the event as an absurd contradiction rather than a political conflict with the headline “Peace loving Trump attacks Venezuela,” ironically subverting Trump’s “peace-loving” rhetoric. By contrast, The Observer established an explicit moral legitimacy inquiry with the headline “America’s Captive,” positioning Maduro less as a leader than as a prisoner.The tabloid Sun on Sunday chose the headline “Nicked,” rendering law and diplomacy entirely invisible and presenting the event as an ordinary police arrest. Sunday Mirror, with the headline “Astonishing,” avoided a directive stance and adopted a language of shock that framed the event as extraordinary. Mail on Sunday revived militaristic spectacle with the phrase “Shock-and-awe raid,” while Sunday Times reduced the operation to a nearly routine military success through technical details and numbers. The interventionist line appeared most explicitly in Sunday Telegraph, where regime change was presented as an unfinished task that needed completion.Turning to the Turkish press, BirGün framed the U.S. action within a historical continuity with the headline “Imperialist Banditry,” while Cumhuriyet produced a moral judgment with the phrase “U.S. Bullying.” Evrensel and Sözcü acknowledged illegality through high-intensity metaphors but still rendered peaceful resolution options invisible. Hürriyet and Türkiye Gazetesi foregrounded operational speed and effectiveness, relegating the legitimacy question to a secondary position. Türkgün’s decision not to headline the event demonstrated that discursive silence itself can function as a form of power.Comparatively, we observe that the British press, through omission and irony, and the Turkish press, through metaphors and slogans, produced the same outcome. Violence was not questioned but normalised.The central questions of peace journalism – causes, consequences, legal foundations and peaceful alternatives – were excluded from headline-level discourse in both media ecosystems, transforming the reader not into a thinking subject but into a witness observing events unfold. Visual intensity, speed and emotional excess generated a noise that suppressed critical inquiry.Also read: The US’s Magical Realism Show in VenezuelaAt this point, the question of how truth circulates in a media environment where discourse is thus closed becomes decisive. This framework – where violence is normalised, law is suspended, and the possibility of peace is excluded from the outset – creates a ground in which disinformation becomes not only possible but functional.It is necessary to briefly address counter-discourses that defend the US operation in Venezuela. Justifying approaches generally revolve around three arguments: that Nicolás Maduro’s democratic legitimacy is questionable, that the regime is associated with drug trafficking and regional instability, and that the operation was therefore “necessary” for international security. Within this framework, the use of force is presented not as a legal exception but as a moral necessity. However, this discourse suspends principles of sovereignty, proportionality and authority enshrined in international law, while systematically suppressing the question of on whose behalf and through which legitimate mechanisms the operation was conducted.Much of the media reproduced these counter-arguments rather than interrogating them, transforming the “necessary operation” narrative from a debatable thesis into an assumed premise. From a peace journalism perspective, the problem lies not in the existence of counter-discourses, but in their presentation as natural and inevitable realities without critical filtration.The normalisation of disinformationOne of the most functional tools of this hegemonic framework has been disinformation. On the morning of January 3, 2026, minutes after US President Donald Trump announced via Truth Social that US forces had captured Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, social media platforms were flooded with fabricated content.The common characteristic of these materials was their complete exclusion of legal debate while reinforcing sentiments of “decisiveness” and “power projection.”On the same day, the US-based technology magazine WIRED revealed that a significant portion of the visuals purportedly showing Maduro’s capture were AI-generated fabrications. An image circulating rapidly on TikTok, Instagram, and X – allegedly depicting Maduro being escorted between two DEA agents – was found to be entirely synthetic when analysed using Google DeepMind’s SynthID technology.Despite this, it remained online for hours and reached hundreds of thousands of users.Similarly, a video claimed to show a “US attack on Caracas” garnered millions of views on X; although it was soon revealed that the footage was old and taken out of context, the content was not removed. This illustrates that disinformation functions less by producing falsehoods than by creating an overwhelming density of information that disperses meaning and paralyses critical inquiry.What is critical here is the mainstream media’s stance toward disinformation. CNN and Fox News, rather than questioning the authenticity of the fabricated visuals, focused on the “impact” and “deterrence” of the operation, treating disinformation as a secondary detail. As a result, not only was false information disseminated, but the systematic asking of essential questions was also obstructed.From Foucault’s power-knowledge framework, what is suppressed here is not information but context. Excessive imagery, emotion and content produced a noise that paralysed critical thought. Disinformation functioned not as the opposite of truth, but as a mechanism that rendered truth unaskable.Peace journalism requires addressing conflict not solely through power relations but alongside law, responsibility and possibilities for resolution. The Venezuela operation corresponded not to a moment when peace journalism was forgotten, but to one in which it was deliberately sidelined. Rather than opening a space for debate, the media assumed a function that closed and rendered conflict unquestionable.The Venezuela operation demonstrates that the contemporary international order is dissolving not only militarily or diplomatically, but also discursively and epistemologically. When Gramscian hegemony converges with Foucauldian knowledge production, law is suspended; this suspension is presented not as an exception but as a routine technique of governance.The media becomes not a passive witness to this process but a constitutive actor determining which violations are legitimized and which are rendered invisible. The international order often dissolves not through bombs, but through information hierarchies, discursive silences, and the production of consent.The deepest destruction occurs precisely at the moment this dissolution is accepted as “natural”.Yasemin Giritli İnceoğlu is a Professor of Communication Studies.