Eyes Wide Shut: The International Media Looks at Venezuela

[Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, D.C., argues that most consumers of the international media will be surprised to find that the controversy over Venezuela's oldest TV station, RCTV, is still raging. We were repeatedly informed that President Hugo Chavez "shut down" the station on May 27th. But in fact the station was never "shut down."]

Eyes Wide Shut: The International Media Looks at Venezuela

By Mark Weisbrot -  International Business Times

Monday, Aug 20, 2007

Most consumers of the international media will be surprised to find that the controversy over Venezuela's oldest TV station, RCTV, is still raging. We were repeatedly informed that President Hugo Chavez "shut down" the station on May 27th. But in fact the station was never "shut down" - since there is no censorship in Venezuela.  Rather, the Venezuelan government decided not to renew the broadcast license that granted RCTV a monopoly over a section of the publicly-owned frequencies.

This is a big distinction, although the U.S. and international press blurred it considerably. Jose Miguel Insulza, the head of the Organization of American States, noted last month that the "Venezuelan government is empowered to do what it did (non-renewal of the license)" and cited Brazilian President Lula Da Silva's statement that not renewing RCTV's broadcast license was as democratic an act as granting it. Insulza added that "democracy is very much in force in  Venezuela." These comments were not reported in the U.S. or other major media. Nor was Lula's original statement of the same argument. Nor was the statement of Lula's top foreign policy advisor, Marco Aurelio Garcia, who said "there are few countries in the world with as much freedom of the press as in  Venezuela."

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Comments

[Jon Cloke]

I was in Caracas just a couple of weeks ago doing some research, and the place is really full of police and soldiers. I understand that, post-2002-coup-attempt, there's a justifiable degree of paranoia going on there, but the stop-and-searches of cars at night plus being given a frisk by soldiers just before you got on the plane to leave really reminded me of the bad old days under some of the military juntas..

Jon Cloke